The Nationalist Revival

Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization

John B. Judis

• Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780999745410
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Nationalism & Patriotism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The target reader is someone who enjoyed The Populist Explosion and wants further answers to how nativism and xenophobia has been allowed to revive. While nativism and xenophobia are dangerous, they are the more extreme response to attacks on international institutions and globalization, as well as legitimate discontent over the breakdown of the welfare state. Casual readers of the New York Times can see nationalism rise in individual countries, but this book will connect the dots and provide the big picture on how to think about and link movements around the world and over the past decades.

Why Nationalism Matters

Here are three anecdotes in search of an analysis:

When I was on tour to promote my book on populism, a member of the audience reproached me: “I don’t understand why you are criticizing free trade,” she said. “It has raised the standard of living of many people around the world.” Before I could measure my words, I replied: “I don’t give a damn about people around the world.”

Several years before that, a German friend began telling me how upset his mother had been to see people in Berlin hanging Turkish flags outside the windows of their apartments to show support for Turkey’s team in the European football championships. Though a devoted internationalist like many Germans of his generation, he agreed with his mother, but didn’t want to say so outright.

When I was in Tokyo, a prominent Japanese intellectual took me out for sushi. When I told him that I had a favorite sushi restaurant back home, he complained about how Koreans were opening up restaurants in the United States that claimed to serve Japanese food.

Many people today, whatever their considered convictions or political ideology, are nationalists in their hearts. It can come out when they are grouchy and tired, as I was on my book tour, or in response to an innocuous sporting event or the ownership of a sushi bar. But it’s there.

Nationalism provides a framework—often unacknowledged—for our politics, expressed most clearly in the question of whether a policy is in the national interest. And in special circumstances, it can rise to the level of an explicit political ideology, as it has today in the United States, Europe, and parts of Asia: “America First” for Trump, “France First” for the National Front, “Italians First” for the Italy’s League Party, and “Russia for [ethnic] Russians” for the anti-immigrant DNPI. To understand the deep attraction of these ideological challenges and to assess whether they are constructive or destructive, progressive or reactionary, you have to understand the sentiments on which they are based.

Origins of Nationalism

The German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder is credited with introducing the term “nationalism” in a work published in 1774. It didn’t become a staple of political vernacular until well into the nineteenth century. But the key ingredient of what came to be called nationalism appeared much earlier: loyalty to a group larger than oneself. It resembles the loyalty felt within a biological family. The terms by which nations are described (in English, “homeland,” “fatherland,” “motherland,” of which there are cognates like the German “Heimat” and the French “patrie”) suggest the nation is an extension of the family.

Of course, a nation is not literally a family, but nevertheless there is a strong emotional tie that asserts itself. Group solidarity was indeed initially based on the survival of kinship groups that displayed loyalty. Azar Gat, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University, and author of Nations, writes that, “as Darwin himself suggested, under conditions of intense competition, a group which was biologically endowed with greater solidarity and with individual willingness to sacrifice for the group would defeat less cohesive groups.” Gat sees a progression from these smaller kinship groups that can take the form of clans or tribes to what he calls an “ethnos”—“a population of shared kinship (real or perceived) and culture”—to a “people” that share a common understanding of their “identity history and fate”—to a “nation” in which a people become politically sovereign. He presumes that the features of loyalty, solidarity, and reciprocity that originated earlier in history are preserved in this progression and give cohesion to the larger group of the nation.

Moreover, to join, and be part of, a group is in effect to cede part of oneself. That can bolster an individual’s self-esteem. When the group succeeds, so do its members. On a trivial level, one sees this among sports fans (i.e., fanatics). When the team wins, the fans win. Citizenship in a nation can have the same uplifting effect. Identification with a nation can deflect an abiding fear of mortality. Even if the individual is mortal, the nation itself is not. In his Addresses to the German Nation, one of the seminal texts of German nationalism, Johann Gottlieb Fichte writes of the “noble-minded man”:

Life merely as such, the mere continuance of changing existence, has in any case never had any value for him; he has wished for it only as the source of what is permanent. But this permanence is promised to him only by the continuous and independent existence of his nation. In order to save his nation he must be ready even to die that it may live, and that he may live in it the only life for which he has ever wished.

Almost two centuries later, British Labour leader Neil Kinnock would express similar sentiment: “I would die for my country, but I would never let my country die for me.” In The Worm at the Core, psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski write, “People also gain a sense of symbolic immortality from feeling that they are part of a heroic cause or a nation that will endure indefinitely.” In The Psychology of Nationalism, psychologist Joshua Searle-White sums up the appeal of nationalism: “Nationalism provides us with a way…to feel moral, right, and just. It gives us a way to join with others in a heroic struggle. It gives a sense of purpose and meaning to our lives, and even to our deaths.”

Learning Nationalism

During childhood, people today acquire a fear of death and a desire for social approbation, but the question is how these become linked to nationalism. Threats from other peoples and countries can always be important—and lead to the historical development of nationalism—but in everyday life, a significant role, according to British psychologist Michael Billig, is played by what he calls “banal nationalism.” National pride and loyalty are inculcated through the routine details of living and learning. These include learning of a country’s history and heroes, filtered through a rosy prism, visiting its monuments, taking part in its celebrations and holidays, saluting its flag, singing its national anthem, and referring to the nation’s inhabitants as “we” and “us.”

For many people, the most important gateway to nationalist sentiment is through religious belief and observance. Nationalism’s promise of transcending the self dovetails with the promise of many religions of evading the fear of death. Christianity, Islam, and other world religions address the hope of escaping personal mortality and powerlessness through identification with a larger group and a higher power. In some countries like Iran and Israel, nationalism is inextricably bound up with a religion. In other countries like Turkey and India, the ruling political parties have identified the national culture with a religion.

Even professedly secular nations continue to frame their objectives, and the substance of their nationalism, in terms borrowed from their countries’ religious history. They have re-adapted religious customs, holy days, martyrs, sacred texts, and monuments. Americans say the Pledge of Allegiance at the beginning of the school day, celebrate presidents’ birthdays, and revere the Constitution. Fallen heroes like Joan of Arc and Martin Luther King, Jr., are celebrated. America’s Memorial Day and Australia’s Remembrance Day signify the transcendence of the self by the nation, as do monuments like France’s Arc de Triomphe and London’s Cenotaph.

Political scientist Anthony Smith describes the modern nation as “a sacred communion of citizens.” He writes, “Investing ‘our’ homeland with special qualities, and regarding it with reverence and awe, as the birthplace of the nation or the resting-place of its heroes and ancestors, is to continue in secular form the pre-modern practice of hallowing historic places and marking off sacred ancestral territories.” Religion, Smith concludes, “far from being squeezed out of the frame of a secularizing modernity, re-emerges within it in new guises. Its legacies are not buried and forgotten, rather they are transmuted in and by nationalism.”

Modern Nationalism

There is a heated debate among the social scientists who study nationalism about when nations and nationalism originated. Traditionalists like Azar Gat or Anthony Smith believe that you can find nations and nationalism as far back as ancient Egypt, Judah, China’s Song Dynasty, or in pre-capitalist Poland, Hungary, France, and Japan. These were nations, according to the traditionalists, that commanded the loyalty of their peoples, as best evidenced in wars. The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga made a strong case for the emergence of nationalism during the Middle Ages.

Modernists like Benedict Anderson, Eric Hobsbawm, or Ernest Gellner usually date the first nations and instances of nationalism from the French Revolution. (Liah Greenfeld puts the beginnings in Tudor England.) Modernists see the development of print literacy, capitalism, and popular sovereignty as necessary conditions of nationhood. The nation, Hobsbawm writes in Nations and Nationalism since 1780, is a “novelty.” Some of this debate is purely semantic.* But if you strip away the nomenclature, there is a way of reconciling much of what is true in both approaches.

While the traditionalists are right that there were nations and nationalist sentiment before 1789, a significant change in the nature of both takes place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The result is the elevation in importance of nationalist sentiment and the development of a comprehensive nationalist politics and ideology.

In highly stratified and dispersed feudal Europe or Japan, nationalism primarily emerged when a foreign enemy was at the gates. Early Japanese nationalism was spurred by an abortive Mongol invasion, Chinese incursions, and the appearance of Christian missionaries and Western traders. Gat describes nationalism during these wars:

In times of national emergency the elites did not hesitate to appeal to and arouse the masses’ latent national sentiments, even if their socioeconomic interests differed and the nobles’ token willingness to take up the peasants’ cause scarcely survived the time of emergency.

Outside of national emergencies, national loyalty in these countries lay dormant and was subordinated to that of family, kin, village, parish, fief, or domain. That began to change, however, with the spread of print literacy; the replacement of feudalism with capitalism; the political revolutions in England, the United States, and France; the unification of Germany and Italy; and the challenge of Western imperialism in East Asia.

Literacy created the possibility for a popular politics and a broadly accepted ideology of nationalism. In Europe and the United States, Protestantism challenged religious and social hierarchy. Capitalism undermined feudal hierarchy, and it centralized production and people in towns and cities, where they could exert their influence en masse. Political revolutions destroyed the power of the monarchy and nobility. Popular sovereignty didn’t necessarily require democracy, only the possibility of citizens massing in protest against a national administration, as they did in Europe in 1830 and 1848. Gat writes, “Two complementary processes were at work fueling the age of nationalism: mass society and popular sovereignty greatly enhanced national cohesion and the people’s stake in the nation; and by the same token they opened the door and enabled the expression of long-held popular nationalistic sentiments.”

Ernest Gellner argues that by destroying local institutions and hierarchies, industrial capitalism created a singular, direct relationship between the individual and the nation. “There is very little in the way of any effective, binding organization at any level between the individual and the total community,” Gellner writes. “The nation is now supremely important, thanks to the erosion of subgroupings and the vastly increased importance of a shared literary-dependent culture.” As a result, Gellner argues, nationalist sentiment assumed an importance that it had lacked in pre-capitalist societies.

The diminishment of these institutions has continued well past the heyday of industrial capitalism. Modern capitalism’s divorce of production from the family—as described in Eli Zaretsky’s Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life—and the challenge to the traditional family from new sexual norms weakened a key institution that allowed individuals to transcend their isolation. Science’s conflict with religion dealt another blow to an important source of group identity. The emergence of globalization in the 1970s has undermined the labor union and the locally owned factory and business and the community they sustained. Finding themselves at the mercy of currency flows, footloose multinational corporations, and migrant flows, and afflicted by anomie and a sense of powerlessness—the individual has little recourse except the nation.

Nationalism as a Framework

Nationalism provides a framework within which citizens and their governments deliberate about what to do—and justify what they have done. Citizens debate whether a policy is in the “national interest.” Even debates over globalization or free trade will usually be waged on this terrain. In January 2017, in response to attacks by Trump and his aides on “globalists,” Forbes ran a column entitled “Globalization Has Done a Lot of Great Things for Americans.”

This approach is not hardwired into people’s brains, but learned; it can also be rejected, and has been, particularly during the 1990s, the heyday of globalization. Philosopher Jürgen Habermas advocated a “post-national constellation.” Ulrich Beck urged “a politics of post-nationalism” in which “the cosmopolitan project contradicts and replaces the nation-state project.” Martha Nussbaum urged Americans to pledge allegiance to a common humanity. “They are, above all, citizens of a world of human beings, and that while they happen to be situated in the United States, they have to share this world with the citizens of other countries.”

Indeed, some policymakers and governments have championed policies like the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions on the grounds that doing so would help the planet avoid a climatological catastrophe, but in these cases, government officials can also argue that their nation would benefit. There are, however, some circumstances in which a government might adopt policies that would affect their citizens somewhat adversely in order to aid another country that is facing a natural disaster. And even when undertaking policies that they deem in the national interest, policymakers will take into account their effect on other countries, and try, especially if they are friends or allies, to limit any adverse consequence.

But in the great majority of challenges a country faces, public officials and citizens will look primarily to what they believe is in their nation’s best interests. Oxford political scientist David Miller writes, “In acknowledging a national identity, I am also acknowledging that I owe special obligations to fellow members of my nation that I do not owe to other human beings.”

Some advocates of cosmopolitanism reject this outlook on ethical grounds. In criticizing Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders for rejecting a policy of “open borders,” journalist Dylan Matthews argued that Sanders “is obligated to weigh the interests of a poor potential Nigerian immigrant equally to those of a much richer native-born American. I think if he saw an immigrant drowning in a pond, he has just as much of a duty to rescue her as he would if she were a native-born American.” Should Americans display as much concern about Bolivians or Uzbeks as they do about their own citizenry? Maybe they should do so in some ideal world, but they simply don’t. Questions about what a nation should or should not do are inevitably grounded in an existing common framework of concern.

At a similar time of global reach in the late nineteenth century, British moral philosopher Henry Sidgwick made exactly this point. The “cosmopolitan ideal,” Sidgwick wrote, is “the ideal of the future” but it now “allows too little for the national and patriotic sentiments which have in any case to be reckoned with as an actually powerful political force, and which appears to be at present indispensable to social well-being. We cannot yet hope to substitute for these sentiments in sufficient diffusion and intensity, the wider sentiment connected with the conception of our common humanity.”

Nationalism and the Modern State

In modern nations, the loyalty and solidarity expressed by the pronoun “we” underpins key institutions and practices. Nationalist sentiment underlies the public commitment to upholding the results of elections and to adhering to laws without coercion. Writes David Miller, “Where the citizens of a state are also compatriots, the mutual trust that this engenders makes it more likely that they will be able to solve collective action problems, to support redistributive principles of justice, and to practice deliberative forms of democracy.” When there isn’t such a common nationalist sentiment, either because of civil disorder or because of the existence of rival nationalisms, as in pre-Civil War America or Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, and Spain today, the country becomes difficult or impossible to govern.

Nationalist sentiment underlies the acceptance or rej...