‘Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!’ This famous toast was reputedly given at a banquet in 1816 by the US naval hero Stephen Decatur. Usually shortened (with some distortion) to ‘Our country, right or wrong!’, the phrase is still used to this day, generally without the least consideration of its full implications. The point was not lost on Mark Twain, however. By adopting it ‘with all its servility,’ he said, we ‘have thrown away the most valuable asset we had: the individual’s right to oppose both flag and country when he … believed them to be in the wrong.’
Patriotism, suggests Decatur’s toast, should blind us to the fact that something is wrong purely because it is done by, or in the name of, our country. On the face of it, this is an extraordinary, not to say immoral, view. The notions on which it is based – patriotism and, more particularly, its close cousin nationalism – have stirred such passions and incited such violence over the last two centuries that they must bear much of the responsibility for the dire conflict and strife that have scarred the world during those years. An ‘infantile sickness … the measles of the human race’, in Einstein’s opinion, nationalism was the principal cause of two world wars in the 20th century and has recently been deeply implicated in horrendous violence and grotesque ‘ethnic cleansing’ in places as far apart as Rwanda and the Balkans. It is not all negative, however. Nationalist feeling can also elicit astonishing loyalty and create deep social cohesion, for instance among oppressed minorities, and has been the mainspring of heroic sacrifice and selfless resistance to tyranny.
‘Patriotism is a lively sense of collective responsibility. Nationalism is a silly cock crowing on its own dunghill.’
Richard Aldington, English novelist and poet, 1931
The genius of a nation While patriotism may mean no more than love of one’s country and a general concern for its welfare, nationalism is more focused, usually combining patriotic feeling with some kind of active political programme. Typically, the central aim of such a programme is to win statehood, implying independence and sovereignty, for a community whose members meet certain criteria by virtue of which they constitute a ‘nation’. Once such an autonomous state has been formed, the secondary aims are to promote and perpetuate its well-being and to defend those qualities and characteristics which together form its identity and sense of nationhood. Nationalists insist that the state so formed – the nation-state – can claim the loyalties of its members above all other loyalties and that its interests have precedence over all other interests.
What, then, is a nation, and what are the attributes that constitute its identity? Most nationalists would broadly sympathize with the view expressed by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Table Talk of 1830: ‘I, for one, do not call the sod under my feet my country. But language, religion, laws, government, blood – identity in these makes men of one country.’ Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the architects of Italian unification, made essentially the same point 30 years later, when he insisted that a particular territory is only a foundation: ‘The country is the idea which rises upon that foundation; it is the sentiment of love, the sense of fellowship which binds together all the sons of that territory.’ Both authorities agree that it is not (primarily) a matter of land – although a recognized territory with strong borders will almost invariably be a necessary condition for the long-term survival of a nation-state.
The essential point about the nation cherished by the nationalist is that it always has some special character or identity that is all its own. There is, as Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested in 1844, a ‘genius of a nation which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society’. Jules Michelet, author of a vast and intensely nationalist 19th-century history of his country, famously declared that ‘France is a person’ and insisted that the nation was an organic unit, an eternal being whose essence was a distillation of its buried past – the diverse relics and traditions drawn from the ‘silences de l’histoire’. This distinctive national character is the unique and ineffable product of various historical, geographical and cultural factors: common origin and ethnicity; a single language; a shared fund of myths and memories; traditional values and customs. These are the factors, some or all of which are assumed by the nationalist to define membership of the nation.
A modern phenomenon According to the nationalist conception, then, the world is a patchwork of unique communities, each bound together by a complex web of historical, cultural and other factors.
‘Nations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains.’
Mark Twain, 1906
The difficulty with this picture is that in certain respects it is rather distant from reality. Ethnic groups have been intermingling for thousands of years, so no present-day population of any size is ethnically homogeneous; and in any case common ethnicity tends to have less to do with community bonding than factors such as shared language and religion.
The nation-state is now firmly established as the normal unit of political organization, while nationalism and national self-determination are widely accepted as legitimate political aspirations. It is indeed a central part of nationalist folklore that the cherished nation is of great antiquity, with historical and cultural roots stretching back into the immemorial past. The consensus of recent scholarship, however, is that such a picture is seriously misleading – that nation-states are in most respects modern constructions and that the idea of their continuity since antiquity is basically a product of ‘retrospective nationalism’. This is not to say that people throughout history have not always been attached to the land of their birth and to customs and traditions handed down by their ancestors. But the patterns of allegiance in the pre-modern world were essentially different. The primary loyalty was not to the state as such but to a divinely sanctioned monarch; and beneath the monarch there was a complex hierarchy of localized loyalties that were owed to feudal lords or aristocratic elites. And at the base of all other beliefs was the notion that every human belonged to an overarching religious community that aspired, ultimately, to encompass all mankind. Only when these ancient ties began to loosen, in a process that began with the turmoil of the American and French revolutions, was it possible for the forces of modernity – secularization, popular sovereignty, the concept of human rights, the scientific revolution, industrialization – to shape the nation-state and the nationalist sentiment that it inspired.
the condensed idea
The measles of the human race