Nationalism

views updated

NATIONALISM

In defining the word nationalism, at least five senses can be identified: (1) a sentiment of loyalty to a nation (a variety of patriotism); (2) a propensity, as applied to policies, to consider exclusively the interests of one's own nation, especially in cases where these compete with the interests of other nations; (3) an attitude that attaches high importance to the distinctive characteristics of a nation and, therefore, (4) a doctrine that maintains that national culture should be preserved; and (5) a political and an anthropological theory that asserts that humankind is naturally divided into nations, that there are determinate criteria for identifying a nation and for recognizing its members, that each nation is entitled to an independent government of its own, that states are legitimate only if constituted in accordance with this principle, and that the world would be rightly organized, politically speaking, only if every nation formed a single state and every state consisted exclusively of the whole of one nation.

Nature and Criteria of Nationality

Nationalist doctrines and theories of the kinds referred to in (4) and (5) date from the end of the eighteenth century. Attachment to one's nation and the belief that, for instance, all Englishmen constitute an English nation are, no doubt, much older. Men have always had this kind of attachment to an in-group—whether tribe, city, or nation—and a corresponding awareness of (and perhaps hostility toward) nonmembers as foreigners. But what characterizes nations, distinguishing them from groups of other kinds?

the nation defined by the state

A nation, wrote the French revolutionary ideologist the Abbé Sieyès in 1789, is "a union of individuals governed by one law, and represented by the same law-giving assembly." Thus conceived, a nation's unity and identity derive from political organization, and the state would thus be logically prior to the nation. This view was consistent with the individualist or atomistic interpretation of group phenomena of which John Locke was a typical exponent and which was characteristic of much of the social theorizing of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Writers like Denis Diderot and Marquis de Condorcet considered that individuals must be taken to concur in the setting up of a political order because (or insofar as) it is in their interests, several and collective. A public interest, thus created, is the ground of a duty to preserve and defend the order, and the state, as the subject of this interest, becomes a proper object of loyalty. Those sharing in such a common interest would constitute one people, or nation. This view of nationality is supported by the way in which, in ordinary speech, citizenship and nationality are interchangeable in many contexts. (This was once true of legal usage, too; however, many states now distinguish the rights and duties of a citizen from those of a national.) If, however, we do distinguish nationality from citizenship in ordinary speech, it is principally by narrowing citizenship to matters of political and legal status, whereas to determine nationality we take into account criteria like place of birth, parentage, language, and cultural tradition.

the nation defined by language and culture

The conception of nationality as language and culture became articulate, as an element in nationalist ideology, at the end of the eighteenth century, mainly through the work of German writers such as Johann Gottfried Herder, Novalis, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Whereas for the French revolutionaries a nation was a group of individuals subject to a single political order, for the Germans nations were distinguished from one another by God and nature. Each had its peculiar character closely related to its common language. Since language is the vehicle of a tradition, preserving and transmitting sentiments, symbols, emotional associations, and myths, to share a native language is to share a common culture. "Every language," wrote Schleiermacher, "is a particular mode of thought, and what is cogitated in one language can never be repeated in the same way in another." This concept of nationality tended to be associated with a metaphysical doctrine that saw every nation as the expression of a spirit or idea, which in turn expressed a particular aspect of the divine image. The diversity of nations was a reflection of the diversity of reality, and each nation made its necessary contribution to the progress of humankind. Its members therefore had a moral duty to preserve and foster it. Thus, in reacting against the Francophile cosmopolitanism of the Aufklärung (German Enlightenment), the German cultural nationalist nevertheless continued to see the nations against the backcloth of humanity, each with a role to play in what, in the end, was a drama of humankind.

As these writers saw it, a nation's existence did not depend on its members' choice or recognition; or, rather, because it formed their consciousness, they could hardly choose not to be members. If the German nation was a natural fact, it was because men reared in a German tradition would be essentially different from Englishmen or Frenchmen. Thus, a German who tried to ape the French inhibited the expression of his own nature and made do with what for him were artificial second bests.

the nation defined by common heritage

The conception of nationality as language and culture was challenged by Ernest Renan in the famous lecture Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? of 1882. It is a mistake, says Renan, to confuse nations with ethnographic and linguistic groups. Common racial origin, language, or religion, common economic interests, or the facts of geography are not sufficient to constitute a nation. There are nations like the Swiss, who do not share such characteristics, and there are linguistic groups like the English-speaking peoples, who do but who do not form a single nation. According to Renan, what constitutes a nation is the possession, first, of a common history, particularly of sufferings—of a store, that is, of common memories that are a source of common sympathy and pride. But it is important that some things be forgotten, too, for until old wounds have healed, the sense of sharing a common heroic tradition will be lacking. Thus, the second condition of nationality is a will to live together and to keep the common heritage alive. "To have done great things together, and the will to do more, these are the essential conditions for a people. … The existence of a nation is … a daily plebiscite."

Granted the importance of personal identification with a common tradition in the life of a nation, the metaphor of common memories does little, perhaps, to elucidate what gives a national tradition its unity and continuity. In the sense in which memory is important for individual self-knowledge and identity, individuals cannot remember what happened before they were born. Nor need their heroic ancestors stand in any generative relation to them. It is only in a figurative sense that a Frenchman could claim Joan of Arc for an ancestor. It is only because he is already a participant in a national tradition that he knows whom to call ancestor. Different situations call out different loyalties, and the ancestors a man acknowledges may differ accordingly. An American Jew of German descent might identify himself now with Thomas Jefferson, now with Judas Maccabaeus, now with Frederick the Great. Again, although men may share memories simply by having been present at the same event, to share a common history is not just to know the same historical facts; it is to identify with the same historic symbols, feel vicarious pride in the same achievements, and feel indignation at the same affronts. A Frenchman may know as much about Frederick as about Joan; it is because Joan is his and Frederick theirs that he is a Frenchman. A nation exists, then, where there is a group of individuals, attached in this way to a common body of symbols, who recognize one another as fellow members sharing similar attitudes to these symbols and who, because of this, feel a loyalty and concern for one another that they would not extend to outsiders. Linguistic, religious, or physiognomic features may have a part in determining who is so recognized, and the importance of any one of them may be different in different situations.

the nation defined by territory

A characteristic of nationality distinguishing it from most other kinds of group attachment is its relation to territory. For a group to have no special territorial affinity would not prevent one from calling it a sect, a family, or a social class. The idea of a homeland, however, seems essential to the idea of a nation. The true cosmopolitan has no place where he belongs. This illumines the close conceptual relation between nation and state, for a state is also territorially based and will admit nonmembers only on its own terms.

Where an area has a history of conflict among religious, linguistic, or racial groups each concentrated in a particular territory, the members of each will be conscious of themselves as a separate group with a history of supremacy or suffering associated with that territory; the characteristics that significantly differentiate the group from those around it will come to be thought of as those of people who belong to that territory, even when they are also found outside it. Any such group excluded from political power may be expected to aspire to independence and to want to settle in its own territory the terms on which power and prestige are enjoyed. There is, then, a wide range of features by which a national group might identify itself and its members. Which of them becomes the focus of nationality in any given case will depend on how the group has come to self-consciousness; that feature will very often correspond to the criterion by which it has been singled out as an object of oppression. Its homeland will be the territory in which the group so defined now predominates or predominated in some earlier period to which its common recollections go back.

the nation defined by common aim

However, because nationalism is so often a form of protest, the concept of the nation to which it is tied may depend as much on the definition of the out-group against which it is aimed as on the positive delineation of the in-group. In the twentieth century African and Asian nationalisms, for instance, relied heavily on the repudiation of white colonialism and on an aspiration to count as the white man's equal. However, on its own this cannot be enough to constitute a nation, for though the same sentiments are found throughout Black Africa, only a few Africans see themselves as a single nation aspiring to unity in a single state. Nationalism, in fact, can exist before the nation, as the aspiration of a European-trained elite aiming at native independence in a territory defined by an imperial power for administrative convenience, not by any native tradition or symbolic attachment. Having transformed a colony into a state, nationalists in countries such as Ghana must then create a nation. That states can be as important in making nations as nations can be in making states is borne out by the success of the United States. The failure of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to create a nation was the cause of its disintegration.

Nature Self-Determinition

The twin sources of modern nationalist doctrine are the French conception of popular sovereignty and German romantic anthropological nationalism. In eighteenth-century political theory the attribution of sovereignty to the people instead of the monarch gave the people the right to determine its own mode of government. This implied no threat to the existing order of states and gave rise to no irredentisms in France and England, where the territorial boundaries of the self-conscious nation corresponded more or less with the established frontiers of the state and where the state itself was already a national symbol. In Germany and Italy, however, nationality spilled across frontiers. If the people, being sovereign, might choose the political order it wished and if "the people" was defined by nationality irrespective of existing states, then a national will to unity and independence was self-justifying even though it dismembered existing states, upset dynastic legitimacy, and sanctioned the invasion of one sovereign state by another in the interest of national liberation. The Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini put the case in extreme terms, professing the belief that the political unity and independence of every nation within its natural boundaries was ordained by God. A characteristically more moderate view was stated by J. S. Mill in Representative Government (1861):

Where the sentiment of nationality exists in any force, there is a prima facie case for uniting all the members of the nationality under the same government, and a government to themselves apart. This is merely saying that the question of government ought to be decided by the governed. One hardly knows what any division of the human race would be free to do if not to determine with which of the various collective bodies of human beings they would choose to associate themselves.

There are very great difficulties, however, in the notion of a right to self-determination, whether individual or collective. The idea of a state as an organization exercising authority over everyone within its boundaries is not compatible with the idea of conceding to each man a right to choose whether to give it his allegiance. Of course, everyone may have a right to some influence on how and by whom he will be governed. But this amounts to a right to participate in certain constitutional decision procedures that take the political framework for granted, not to a right to take or leave it as one likes. Nor is a collective right any easier. On the practical level no amount of fragmentation or partition could put every individual in an area like the Balkans into the right state.

A more fundamental problem, however, is to decide what constitutes a national group for the purpose of self-determination. In the name of national unity Ghanaian nationalists deny self-determination to the Ashanti as the Congolese denied it to Katanga. If Germans claim that all German-speaking people, as members of the German nation, ought to be included in Germany, would the principle of national self-determination leave so-called Germans abroad any choice in the matter? And if they demurred, would it be as Germans or as non-Germans? If as Germans, would this be compatible with the self-determination of the whole German people? Clearly, if nationality is to be judged by objective criteria like language, the principle of national self-determination would support irredentist expansion policies irrespective of the wishes of the subgroup concerned since the nation's will would presumably be more authoritatively expressed by the greater part than by the lesser. But if nationality is judged by subjective criteria, like a will to live under one government, repudiation by the subgroup would appear to be ground enough for saying that it was not part of the same nation after all. But a dissentient minority within that subgroup could then equally well claim a separate national identity and so on. If one accepts subjective criteria for group self-determination, there is no reason for stopping short of individual self-determination.

The objective criteria, though often difficult to apply in actual cases, do provide clear principles for the proper constitution of states. However, they can claim no support from the individualist doctrine that political obligation must rest on consent. This principle has played its part in the history of nationalist doctrine. Immanuel Kant maintained that the principle of moral freedom and autonomy implied that men, as self-legislating members of the kingdom of ends, must impose political obligation upon themselves and that authority must derive from and be subject to the general will as expressed in law. Nationalists like the German political economist Adam Müller transformed the argument, however, by identifying the individual with the nation, insisting that the individual's permanent will was more truly expressed in the Volksgeist, or national spirit, than in any particular individual preference. Thus, the general will, which for Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Kant reconciled individual moral autonomy with political authority and obligation, became a way of denying the relevance of personal choice when it ran counter to the national spirit.

Early nineteenth-century nationalism was nevertheless liberal and humane in intention. Fichte and Mazzini would have argued that unless a nation was united in an independent sovereign state, its members, unable to command the respect of others as equals, would be lacking in dignity and self-respect. Much of the persuasive charm of nationalism in Africa and Asia has a similar source. Men of color repudiating white superiority feel that for their own self-respect they must be ruled by men of their own color and kind with whom they can identify and who will be received on equal footing by the leaders of other sovereign states.

However, the moral uncertainty out of which nationalism is born and which is perhaps its main justification, readily turns, once unity and independence has been won, into an aggressive assertiveness and national egoism, akin to what in France Charles Maurras called "integral nationalism," "the exclusive pursuit of national policies, the absolute maintenance of national integrity, and the steady increase of national power." The nation-state is no longer set in the context of a larger humanity; it is its own sufficient justification. Nationalism in this key is frankly irrationalist, delighting in the symbolic rhetoric of "blood and soil." Enormously important as it is for the historian and sociologist, it would be absurd to treat it as if it invited serious rational criticism.

Bibliography

historical studies

Hayes, Carlton J. H. Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism. Chicago, 1948.

Kohn, Hans. The Idea of Nationalism. New York: Macmillan, 1945. History of nationality and nationalism before 1789.

Kohn, Hans. Nationalism: Its Meaning and History. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1955. Introductory study with readings and selected bibliography.

general studies

Hertz, Frederick. Nationality in History and Politics. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1944. Sociological and historical study of nationalist ideology.

Shafer, Boyd C. Nationalism—Myth and Reality. London: V. Gollancz, 1955. Has twenty-page bibliography.

Snyder, Louis L. The Meaning of Nationalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954.

classic expositions

Fichte, J. G. Reden an die deutsche Nation. Berlin, 1808. Translated by R. F. Jones and G. H. Turnbull as Addresses to the German Nation. Chicago: Open Court, 1922.

Maurras, Charles. Enquête sur la monarchie. Paris: A. Fayard, 1924. Originally published in 1900.

Mazzini, Giuseppe. Doveri dell'uomo. London, 1860. Translated by Ella Noyes as "The Duties of Man," in The Duties of Man and Other Essays, by Joseph Mazzini, edited by Ernest Rhys. London and New York, 1907.

Reiss, H. S., ed. The Political Thought of the German Romantics, 1793–1815. Oxford: Blackwell, 1955. Contains readings from Fichte, Novalis, Adam Müller, Schleiermacher, and Friedrich Karl von Savigny; also has selected bibliographies.

Renan, Ernest. Qu'est-ce qu'une Nation? In Oeuvres complètes de Ernest Renan, Vol. I, edited by Henriette Psichari. Paris, 1947. Originally published in 1882.

critical studies

Acton, John Emerich Edward. "Nationality." In Essays on Freedom and Power by Lord Acton, edited by Gertrude Himmelfarb. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1948. For criticism of Mazzini.

Cobban, Alfred. National Self-Determination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948.

Kedourie, Elie. Nationalism. London: Hutchinson, 1960; 2nd rev. ed., London and New York, 1961. Has notes for further reading; examines metaphysical foundations of nationalism and its influence on Europe and the Middle East.

Kohn, Hans. Prophets and Peoples. New York, 1957. Studies of J. S. Mill, Jules Michelet, Mazzini, Heinrich von Treitschke, Fëdor Dostoevsky.

Stanley I. Benn (1967)

Encyclopedia of Philosophy