Nationalism

[John Henry]

First off, I am not a nationalist. I'm very much an internationalist, simply because the concept of nation seems empty to me. I'm sure not all nationalists are flag-waving shaven-headed thugs and I would like to understand the thinking behind nationalism.

It seems to me that it falls into two strains - personal and abstract.

The first is the seemingly irrational belief some people hold that they come from the best nation on Earth. They can't all be right. What is the objective, quantifiable property by which the relative value of two nations can be measured?

The second is of slightly more interest and seems to be characterised by the belief that each nation should concern itself exclusively with its own affairs and place itself ahead of every other nation.

I'm interested to hear the arguments for and against these ideologies (even if they aren't your own beliefs) and any thoughts you have on the subject.

[SLM3]

I think it's important you not confuse a nation with a state as nations often transend borders.

I think it's more correct to state that you're an idealist, as opposed to a realist.

We live in a realist system in which there is no higher authority in the world than the state. That is, no world government. Therefore the system is anarchical which requires realpolitik, the norm that defines relations between states today. Atleast this is the thinking of the common realist. Idealists do have a significant role in the world today, however, as we lean more and more towards NGO's and IGO's.

In promoting one's interests over anothers, a sense of nationalism within the confines of the state is important.


SLM3

[apeman]

The first is the seemingly irrational belief some people hold that they come from the best nation on Earth. They can't all be right. What is the objective, quantifiable property by which the relative value of two nations can be measured?

i think it's rather that they think they're better than neighbouring nations, due to historical conflicts they've ended up having "issues" with various outside groups... a nation is often only defined when threatened by external peoples ...

[ARTelevision]

Well stated, SLM3.

[cosmoknight]

Under many definitions, nationalism does not necessarily imply that one nation is better than another, simply that nations are better off when they are permitted to govern themselves, following their own political, economic, and cultural interests independently

If defined as above then I would be considered a Nationalist. Being Conservative I still harbor no illusions that either side is not at least in some form corrupted at running my government. Scaling to a international level only increases the corruption and dilutes my voice in fighting it.

[Charlatan]

I am extremely wary of those who express extreme patriotism... I've felt for some time that an emotional attachment to one's state or nation is not a good thing.

A state is a relatively abstract, shifting thing. To love (or I suppose hate) your nation seems to put you in a position where your expectations will be tumultuous at best... emotions are messy and easily twisted or hurt for lack of a better definition.

I believe that one should have a strong but reasoned investment in your nation. A relationship that is committed to the process of good and responsible govenance. A recognition that there are many common goals that all citizens in your nation share and that all citizens should work together to make their nation a better place for everyone in it.

[roachboy]

this is a long post--my apologies--it happens that this category and its fate is one that crosses my political and professional interests, and so i thought i would just write out an outline of what i have come up with....i should say that my work involves the history of france, and so when i think about these things, i tend to default to doing so through the lens of the french political spectrum. also that what follows is supercompressed.....

nationalism....is a strange outgrowth of the 19th century, a particular ideological sense of identity, of what b. anderson calls horizontal soldarity---not the same as the state, which is the instutional framework (bureaucratic, legal, etc.) of governance---though obviously state actions shape significant boundaries within which nationalism can operate--things like managing an educational system that standardizes a linguistic community---language being one of the markers around which this sense of identity can be fashioned (the list is of interconnections is long.....) nationalism has ***not**always existed--it is a specific historical phenomenon that people confuse with something permanent.

i cannot think of much good that nationalism has enabled during its sorry history--the colonial period from the 1870s onward (not all holding of colonies for all of time--nationalism in its recent history has been backwritten endlessly, has have many many elements of the capitalist-inspired world in which we now function, for better or worse); two world wars, the cold war in all its variants, above and below board, 1948 to the contras etc., the iraq war is a particularly interesting and problematic theatre of nationalism---maybe i'll get back to thiat if i do not rattle on too long....such positive things as have been carried out seem to me to have been possible entirely without this ideology....

like apeman said, nationalism works best for its proponents when there is an enemy or rival---it is used to shore up the boundaries of a collective, but is not the only way of doing so. as such, it seems tht nationalism operates as a mechanism to enable not seeing, for the reduction of complexity, etc.

nationalism seems to include logics that work against democratic processes--it seems to encourage situations where the body politic comes to understand itself as condensed into the figure of a Leader as a function of the desire for unity that underpins it---it seems to pose problems with the real acceptance of mulitplicity, given that the unit "nation" implies a single essence that somehow or another is bigger than the sum of its component parts. the nation seems a space for people to imagine stability, as over against the constant instability generated by the dominant economic system.

there was a period--quite long, when the nation-state was the horizon for thinking about economic organization-- from the rise of relaly large-scale capitalism through the 1870s or so, and that started to break down during the 1970s--you can see reagan in particular and the particular kind of nationalism he espoused as in part a reaction against the effects of this process of transnationalization of economic activity, a kind of reassertion of nationalism unhinged from the various synchronous patterns of acitivity that had previously held the nation-state and economic and social power together----

by the time you get to the end of the clinton period, however, things became much clearer--the idea of the nation-state as the control center for economic units under capitalism was becoming increasingly a problem---you can see what is implicit in spaces like the eu for traditional nationalist political parties, for example--the construction of the eu has resulted in the collapse of conventional conservative ideology--not the parties, but of the nation as basis for articulating political positions---the gaullists and udf in france, for example, have no particular ideological position from which to argue any more, and spend their time engaged in tactical quarrels with the socialists....

meanwhile out there on the right you have the front national, whose politics is entirely reactive, based on an attempt to maintain a notion of the french "nation", defining it in quasi-fascist terms (in a technical sense, almost like junger defined it in "storm of steel"), on exclusive lines (france is french-language only, christian only--it is not an inclusive space that includes communities of muslims, for example)--le pen has a certain appeal, but the interest of his position is mostly in that it is a salvage operation centered on the idea of the nation as relevant in the context of globalizing capitalism, in the context of multilateral spaces like the eu, etc.

i sometimes wish that americans had a more comparative frame of reference for thinking about thier own politics---it seems like both parties here spin about in a political space that is not too far from that of the front national. but that might be a luxury(if you like) afforded the states for very particular reasons.

the collapse of old-school nationalism--slow, gradual, unequal (you could not say for example that nationalism is irrelevant in the euro 2004 tournament, or in the way governments argue within the context of the eu--but nonetheless you find that the ideology is crumbling in other sectors)--is a real problem for the political right, which has constructed itself around the category.

i think that you can understand the iraq war as a kind of theater that pits neo-cons---reagan period nationalists---against multilateral/transnational political arrangements embodied in the un (this war as a rerun of the first one)..... it can be seen as an attempt to change the direction of multilateralism endorsed by clinton (whose crime in this case was to be insufficiently nationalist in his actions, from the right viewpoint) and to position the u.s. as a kind of super-transnational nation-state, and thereby to defend american conservative notions of nationalism against the problems that could be posed for it by the evolution of capitalism.

the problem is that the gradual collapse of nationalism as a framework is not just the implosion of a word--it carries real psychological consequences, given that for better or worse comminutuies have long internalized it as a basic element in stabilizing themselves as such and in relation to the world. i think this is important to consider. the result of the increasing irrelevance of the category will probably not be any liberation from the idea in the shorter run, but rather a profound vertigo. reactions against its implosion are like reactions against any severe cognitive dissonance. which is one reason why i think that it is so difficult to have debates about the matter without people freaking out.

sorry to go on so long about this stuff, but i find it really quite interesting.

so to the points at the outset of the thread:
1. nationalism is increasingly obsolete, it seems.
2. isolationism is not an option.

[roachboy]

well, i certainly seem to have killed this thread....

[wonderwench]

I think you are making too strong a link between nationalism and isolationism.

The system by which a nation functions must be based upon a set of fundamental values. I disagree that all nations are equally good. This type of moral relativism ignores an important purpose of a "nation": the well-being of its members. In this context, I am using the definition of nation which encompasses a formal country/government. If one compares the welfare of the average citizen of nations across the world, there is a large disparity. Clearly, some nations are more successful (better) than others.

It does not necessarily follow that a nation must act narrowly in its own iterests any more than it follows that responsible, self-sufficient person does not care about the welfare of his fellow human being. In both cases, Nash's Equilibrium Theory is a good model. When we act in ways which maximize the benefit to our community (including ourselves), we are acting in way which, in the long run, is the most personally beneficial.

[roachboy]

i dont think nations have a substance---the nation is a signifier only--no essence, no defining features as such---within any given nation-state, the various political positions try to bundle associations with that signifier, but it is always a bundling that hold as natural only for the people involved in that position.

look at this as elaborating a set of arguments--a political organization (broadly undersood) elaborates a series of arguments about how its members (who does this depends upon the structure of the organization, its history, the way it mobilizes adjacent cultural institutions, etc.) think concerning how the world/nation-state is and/or should be--people who agree with those arguments internalize the elements and logic, and see the world in terms of those elements and logics.

since the nation-state is a function of capitalism, it makes no sense to not look at the history of its production in specific terms.

this view is sometimes a problem for folk--it is kind of like how a believer reacts to someone who does a sociology of their belief system.

that aristotle outlined a ideal-type for thinking about the good city in the politics and that features of that ideal type appear knit into contemporary versions of nationalist ideology does not mean that the category of the nation-state has existed since aristotle--rahter, it means that when the people who were articulating various political positions across the period of the development of the nation-state in its modern form, they looked to aristotle to help them think about what they were doing.