Patriotism is a virtue, but nationalism can become a vice, as Dr George Stanciu has pointed out in his essay: The Virtues of Patriotism, the Vices of Nationalism.
From Crisis
By Darrick Taylor, PhD
Nationalism is all the rage on the political Right these days, but the foundations of that nationalism are debated. What does the Church have to contribute in this debate?
Nationalism is all the rage these days, at least on the political Right. For many on the Right, this has become their default position, opposed to the globalism of the Left. Fault lines persist, however. Some see nationalism as primarily based upon ethnicity and shared culture; others promote a “civic” nationalism which downplays these and promotes equality of individual citizens. Globally, nationalism has also become the major rival, philosophically speaking, to the internationalism of Western liberals, from Poland, Hungary, Russia, and Ukraine to India and China.
What I would like to do in this series of articles is discuss the resurgence of nationalism in the world in relation to the Catholic Church by looking at the historical genesis of modern nationalism, how the Church reacted to it and taught about it, and what the Church’s stance toward this resurgence should be. For the sake of convenience, I divide it into four parts. In the first installment, I am going to look at the emergence of modern nationalism and its history up to the present.
What is Nationalism?
Scholars endlessly dispute the nature of nationalism: whether it is a purely modern phenomenon or if some version of it existed before the late-18th century. This need not concern us here because all agree there is a version of it that is peculiarly modern, bound up with modern notions of popular sovereignty and democracy, that goes beyond mere patriotism or love of country. It is this form of nationalism that historically has been a challenge for the Church and which concerns us here.
The definition of nationalism I am going to propose here comes via Andreas Wimmer, a professor of political philosophy, who says that nationalism has two tenets.
Members of the nation, understood as a group of equal citizens with a shared history and future political destiny, should rule the state, and second, that they should do so in the interests of the nation. Nationalism is thus opposed to foreign rule by members of other nations, as in colonial empires and many dynastic kingdoms, as well as to rulers who disregard the perspectives and needs of the majority.
I should say up front that this essay is mostly about Western European democracies. The experience of large-scale Western European nation-states like Britain, France, Germany, and the United States is paradigmatic of nationalism, which I take as a benchmark. There are many variations of nationalism that do not fit the experience of the major Western powers over the past two centuries, but these remain the most historically significant.
Revolutionary Origins
When the Estates General decided to meet as one body and proclaimed themselves a “national assembly” in 1789, they made history. This, and not the fall of the Bastille or other acts of revolutionary violence, was the French Revolution: the claim that a unified body of equal citizens called the “nation” was sovereign in France, not King Louis XVI, and that the assembly spoke in its name. This claim required much bloodshed to become a reality, but the revolutionaries did just that.
Doing this involved more than overthrowing the ancien régime in France, as the revolutionaries quickly discovered. As it gradually dawned on the powers of Europe—including the Vatican—that national sovereignty was subversive of their authority, which rested on much different notions—virtually all of them declared war on the revolutionary government. But the French republic defeated them all.
How did they do this? Nationalism provides an answer. The ideal of the nation is that all are equal within the nation, but this excludes the peoples of other nations. Attacked on all sides, the revolutionaries issued the levée en masse, the first national draft, and fielded an army of 800,000 to defend the nation.
But it wasn’t just numbers that carried the day. These troops were green and inexperienced, but they made up for it with enthusiasm. These troops fought as free citizens of a nation and not for a distant monarch. Nationalism as defined by the revolutionaries gave ordinary French people a stake in their society they had not had before.
This explains the fierce loyalty of many to the Revolution, despite its bloodiness—or because of it. As Wimmer notes, nation-states tend to fight wars at a higher rate than other types of polity. This is because modern nations define membership in the nation as one of equality. To admit that foreigners could hold the same rights and privileges as natural born citizens would devalue this membership.
This is why, during the Terror, the French Jacobins sought to slaughter not only aristocrats but also foreigners. They both undermined the hard-won citizenship based on equal membership in the nation, and the radicals despised both equally.
The revolutionaries fell out, however, over how much involvement ordinary citizens should have. The Jacobins wanted a true democracy, but the Terror convinced more moderate bourgeois revolutionaries their involvement had gone too far, and a reaction set in. This is what led to Napoleon’s dictatorship. Nationalism became the preserve of middle-class elites, who had the education to run a modern industrializing society and who feared the power of the masses.
The coalition powers defeated Napoleon and restored the Bourbons in 1815, but the genie was out of the bottle. The Concert of Europe contained nationalist revolutions in the 1820s and ’30s (Spain, Greece, Belgium, France, and Poland), but the revolutions of 1848-1849 nearly overwhelmed these restored monarchies. These revolutions were beaten back, but nationalism could no longer be contained.
Nationalism & the Masses
Meanwhile, fear of the masses fed the growth of the electorate in Britain. The Great Reform Act of 1832 expanded the franchise to the middle classes but not much further.
In the United States, Jacksonian populism led to an expansion of the franchise at the state level. Industrialization was sweeping away social structures and eroding regional cultures that had existed for centuries, and the politics of nationalism changed as leaders across the Western world in the second half of the 19th century recognized a need to involve the masses in public life—or at least placate them.
This led to the great nation-building campaigns of the late 19th century. National leaders understood industrialization was creating class tensions and that their nations were still divided by regional differences. They undertook a campaign to create a national culture. The building of railroads, compulsory universal education, national conscription, and expansion of the electorate were essential to this process.
Again, France is the paradigmatic case. In his study Peasants into Frenchmen, the historian Eugen Weber showed how the Third Republic (1870-1940) introduced universal education and imposed the Parisian dialect of French as the national language, while bringing enlightenment to a largely rural, peasant population many educated Frenchmen thought of as savages. Literacy was still low in many places in France in the last quarter of the century. And as late as 1870, many still spoke regional dialects—Breton, Flemish, Basque, and even German.
Similar processes took place in other Western countries. In some, such cultural homogenization was necessary following wars of unification, as in Germany (1871) and Italy (1861-70). In the United States, Reconstruction (1865-1877) was the work of Republicans who wanted to integrate the South into a national economy, seeing in its economic and cultural distinctiveness the cause of the Civil War. Across Europe, nations passed laws mandating some level of compulsory education for the entire population to overcome such differences—or, in the case of the United States, to overcome ethnic differences created by mass immigration.
Nationalist leaders of that era understood they could not keep the lower classes out of the political process, but they also knew they could not sustain self-government unless there was an elevated level of social trust among citizens, and this required a great deal of cultural homogeneity. Of course, such ideas also went hand in hand with a kind of cultural chauvinism which characterized much nationalist thinking in the 19th century and now.
The homogenization of national cultures meant that “minorities” (the term did not become current till the 1960s) became highly suspect. Jews in France became the subject of conspiracy theories on the Right, as evidenced by the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906), while in Germany, fear of a Catholic fifth column fueled the Kulturkampf (1871-1878). Imposing a national language on non-native speakers could become a spur to nationalist sentiments among such minorities, who often came to identify with their “homeland” rather than the nation-state in which they lived.
Nationalism’s power to mobilize populations derives from its ability to unify a population on equal political and social terms. But this, in turn, meant defining the nation much more against other nations, as membership in the nation had to be exclusive or else it would lose its value as a mobilizing force. This probably explains why nation-states fight more wars than other types of polity, and this tendency helped fuel nationalism’s eclipse in the 20th century as an ideology.
The Return of Nationalism?
The two World Wars (1914-1918, 1939-1945) were partly the result of nationalist rivalry, as is well-known. The devastation caused by World War I and the Great Depression brought dictatorships to power, partially fueled by nationalist fervor. The destruction caused by the First World War, along with extreme forms of nationalism, fueled some of the worst atrocities of the period, such as the Armenian Genocide (1915) and the Holocaust (1941-1945).
This and the fact that the universal ideologies of the two great powers to emerge from WWII were explicitly internationalist, meant that in the minds of many Western nations, nationalism came to be seen as a relic, something to be overcome. The creation of international bodies like the United Nations, NATO, the IMF, and the European Union were all meant partially to overcome nationalism, to move beyond its violent past. The future seemed to be about communism versus capitalism, authoritarianism versus democracy, and not nation versus nation.
That is how many leaders, East and West, saw it. But the reality is that nationalism never went anywhere, something the late political scientist Samuel Huntington noted in the 1990s. On the contrary, the ideological war between the United States and the Soviet Union led both countries to often view what were nationalist conflicts in ideological terms.
For the United States, this meant misreading the intentions of Ho Chi Minh and his forces in Vietnam, or the Soviet Union’s mistaking various uprisings against its rule in Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1979) as being primarily about the rejection of communism. In fact, if you were paying attention, nationalism remained a very potent ideology all throughout the Cold War in places such as the Middle East. It also played a role in bringing down the Soviet Union in places like Poland, but of course the Western allies interpreted this as a victory of liberal democracy rather than nationalist sentiments.
The reasons for this are complex. But the ideological dominance of the United States and its progressive vision for the world played a significant role in this erasure of nationalism from public consciousness. The Western powers, and especially the United States, saw their victory in the Cold War as validating the universal nature of capitalism and liberal democracy.
There is no better example of this optimism than George H.W. Bush’s 1990 address to the U.N. General Assembly, on the eve of the First Iraq War. In that speech, he claimed that the revolutions of 1989 had proved a “fundamental truth,” namely that the peoples of the world all desired “much the same thing.” What they wanted, Bush said, was “not the power of nations, but the power of individuals.”
That speech is arguably more famous as the elder Bush’s “open borders” speech, in which he decried the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait as a “dark relic from a dark time” and touted “a world of open borders, open trade…and open minds.” Nationalistic aggrandizement would perish before the wave of globalization, which seemed to dominate the world in the 1990s. Just as industrialization provided the impetus for nation-states to replace feudal estates and regional loyalties, so would globalization replace the national loyalties.
More pertinent to our discussion was the rise of China. The United States accorded the People’s Republic of China most favored trading status in the early 2000s, on the assumption that the Chinese wanted “much the same thing” as people everywhere. The PRC saw this as an opportunity for national aggrandizement; and no country has been as aggressive in seeking its own national interest and rejecting the “international order”—which it rightly sees as a Western creation—as China has.
The Iraq War—and all the other efforts of the United States at “democracy promotion”—have, in turn, propelled nations to seek their own interests; and nationalist parties or leaders have emerged in several countries, most notably Russia, India, and Hungary. But the Great Recession of 2008 and, above all, the issue of immigration have helped return the issue of nationalism to Western liberal democracies, where its leaders thought they had banished it.
Beginning with Brexit in 2014 and the election of Donald Trump, voters in many countries have turned against mass immigration, which Western elites have seen as both socially progressive and necessary to a global economy. The reason is not hard to fathom. Mass immigration, done to extremes, undermines the implicit social contract that undergirds almost all modern polities: that its rulers will govern in the interest and name of “the nation” at the expense of other nations.
Western elites are horrified by this for economic reasons. In their mind, nationalism has already been proven to be a dangerous failure. In economics, putting national interests first harms the global economy which they believed essential for peace.
But perhaps even more important are the moral and ideological reasons nationalism horrifies Western, liberal elites. In social and cultural terms, valorizing one’s nation over others goes against almost a century of propaganda which claims that the difference between liberal democracy and authoritarian regimes is that they do not persecute but include “the Other.” From WWII against Nazi racialism to Cold War propaganda against totalitarianism to the War on Terror’s promotion of religious liberty and democracy in opposition to Islamic theocracy, this is a staple of a liberalism which now defines itself against nationalist aspirations.
Fearing the consequences of the extreme forms of nationalism, Western leaders in the past decade appear to be trying to dissolve any sense of national sentiment that could possibly lead to the kind of atrocities that happened in the 20th century. They have adopted iconoclastic attitudes toward their own country’s history and traditions aimed seemingly at dissolving the national cultures and the sense of national solidarity that came with it, which their 19th-century predecessors worked so hard to build.
Thus, Western nation-states find themselves at a crossroads. Two hundred and fifty years after the French cast off a society comprised of a hierarchy of “estates” for one of basic (though not total) equality, the leaders of Western liberal democracy appear to be endangering the social compact that underlies much of what we think of as modern society. This explains the nationalist reaction to their policies.
It is uncertain how this resurgence will play out, to say the least. Nationalism today retains the same explosive characteristics that have made it, as the historian George Mosse put it, “the most powerful ideology of modern times.” In the next part of my essay, I will take a look at how the Catholic Church has responded to modern nationalism since 1789, including what it has taught concerning this most powerful of ideas.
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