The Reputation of Nations

Although nationalism is often defined as a political, social, and economic system dedicated to promoting the interests of a particular people in a definite territory, this definition fails to specify which people and to demarcate which territory.  Which comes first, political theorists seeking to convince the population of some geographic area to subscribe to the theorists’ system and to develop common interests, thereby becoming a nation; or does a certain population, possessed of a well defined culture, recruit a political theorist to draft documents announcing the existence of a nation?  Historically, both routes to nationhood have been observed: Defeated empires may be divided into nations by arbitrarily inventing borders in the hope that the included populations will find commonalities.  (One thinks of the partitioning of some of the Middle Eastern territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire.)  Alternately, rebelling colonies, identifying with a common culture, may declare their independence.  (One thinks of the American Declaration of Independence.)

      According to the doctrine of nationalism, once a nation exists, its leaders aim at gaining and maintaining sovereignty over a homeland, holding it as axiomatic that an ascendant nation should both govern itself and exert hegemony over any other territories that might fall under an implicit or explicit imperial purview.  Nationalism also promotes developing and maintaining a national identity based on factors such as culture, language, religion, politics, and, where applicable, a common ancestry.  In a book to be published before this blog post appears, Yoram Hazony has catalogued some of the successes and failures of nations.

      Some have criticized the very idea of empires and nations: In the nineteenth century, the English historian and Latinist, Sir John Robert Seeley, wrote of the British Empire, "we seem, as it were, to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind."  In the twentieth century, George Orwell thought that nationalism supports political extremism in favor of a limited societal group.  Others have thought that competing nation states lead not to a quasi-equilibrium drifting towards social progress, but to a vicious circle of violence based on the fact that national borders do not typically coincide with national cultural identities.  For example, in the twenty-first century the Myanmar government has perceived the Rohingya people as a foreign body threatening the Myanmar nation.  In addition, nationalism has been seen as a driving force for the Trump and Brexit phenomena, as well as for the resistance of Southern and Eastern Europe to the immigration policies of the European Union.

      Although some critics see nationalism as a dangerous trend, the historical successes of nationalism should be noted as well.  Western traditions of limited government and individual liberty were nurtured by the national cohesion existing within each of the nations of England, Scotland, and the Netherlands.  The original American colonies inherited a common language, a legal tradition, and a limited range of religious practices.  The eclipse of these common factors in contemporary American society (e.g., McGuffey’s Readers haven’t been prominent for quite some time) can be seen as a source of the increasingly bitter contention in American politics.

      Thus, we see that there is a necessary trade-off in political theory: Inordinate favoring of a limited societal group is bad, but some favoring of one’s own way of life is required for the national cohesion that has historically preceded eras of limited government and individual liberty.