Nationalism: No Longer a Dirty Word, But Complicated as Ever

“If it is possible to have symbols and narratives that bind an imagined community of 300 million people or of one billion, it should be equally possible to imagine a community of seven billion and to construct a coherent narrative around it and create appropriate symbolisms.”

Nationalism is rapidly losing its taboo status. Poisoned by the wars of the 19th century and up to the First and Second World Wars, it became a kind of dirty word for the latter half of the 20th century and even the first decade of the 21st. Now the latest elections for the European Parliament saw the nationalist bloc of parties increase its size, while the traditional moderate parties on both the Left and the Right saw losses across the board. This is particularly noteworthy coming from Europe, the continent that has undoubtedly lost the largest number of lives due to nationalistic conflicts. But it is certainly not limited to Europe. Right-wing populists drawing heavily on nationalist sentiments have had a string of electoral successes around the world. Perhaps the most notable is Donald Trump, who, himself probably nothing more than an empty receptacle of ideology, rode a wave of nationalistic fervor sponsored by the likes of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller into the White House. Elsewhere, Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines have both similarly used combinations of popular anti-establishment anger coupled with appeals to national pride.

That is, it is entirely possible that some nations are defined ethically, others linguistically, and others yet by ideology. The Japanese may be an example of the first, the Italians of the second, and Americans of the third.

At the same time, efforts have been made by intellectuals and public figures to give nationalism a kind of cleaner foundation to make it more appealing to a broader audience. To its supporters, these efforts are probably something like an attempt to bring nationalism back to its “true” purpose of binding people together with a shared sense of identity. For its detractors, however, it is more likely a thinly veiled attempt at whitewashing. I certainly fall in the latter category, and I make no secret of the fact that my fundamental gripes with nationalism are ethical in origin. But here I want to put ethics aside and make a purely pragmatic case against it. So, if I am successful, the argument should work whether one supports it as a matter of principle or not. My main contention is that in order for nationalism to work as a political model or ideology, it depends on what I will call national realism. What I mean by this is that there are certain groups of people that we can objectively identify as a nation. For this to be true, there does not even need to be a single defining criterion. That is, it is entirely possible that some nations are defined ethically, others linguistically, and others yet by ideology. The Japanese may be an example of the first, the Italians of the second, and Americans of the third. These are only meant for illustrative purposes and not meant to be taken as theoretical models, as there is a myriad of complicating factors, such as ethnicities defined by language. What I will try to show is that no matter how many or how few criteria for defining nations one might use, national realism ultimately fails. Now, this does not mean that nation states are useless or that we should move to abolish them as quickly as possible. It only implies that nationalism cannot be anything other than a transition phase in history. It is also an ultimately unstable and unsustainable one that has to be replaced with something else.

Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, provided one of the most articulate explanations of the rise of nationalism. His account makes it clear that, while national narratives claim millenarian and quasi-natural histories, nationalism—and what I called national realism—are a very modern phenomenon and a rather artificial one at that. The idea of nations and national consciousness did not really develop until the 19th century, and even then, the factors that gave modern nations their demarcations are rather arbitrary in the sense that slightly different historical developments would have yielded different results. In many cases, administrative territories prefigured what eventually came to be seen as obvious national units. One such example is the transition from feudalism to absolutism. Anderson contrasts the feudal nobleman who, on taking the title, travels to the capital to swear loyalty to the monarch and returns to his own fiefdom, with the absolutist bureaucrat who has no fixed home and may serve anywhere across the realm in accordance with his talent. Concretely, one might imagine the succession of Dukes of Burgundy traveling to Paris upon accession to their peerage to swear fealty to the King of France and then returning to Burgundy to tend to their own affairs. This paints a very localist picture when contrasted with a commoner bureaucrat rising through the ranks of French administration, likely moving all over France in the hopes of eventually landing a post in Paris. The latter, when sufficiently multiplied, begins to create a class of people who begin to see the Kingdom of France as a single coherent entity, rather than the more abstract concept of the feudal lords, more devoted to their own estates. Processes like this, coupled with the elevation of particular vernaculars to official administrative languages, mostly out of convenience through the 19th century, begin to finally form the modern nations.