The Word That Brings Peace, The Word That Brings War: Nationalism

Nationalism has been a feature of the world since the early 1800s. For almost 250 years nationalism as an ideology, and the word ‘nationalism’ have made an imprint on history.

Both the word and the ideology have given rise to fear, confusion, and war. But both have sometimes been used as labels for thoughts and movements which contribute to global peace. Why this confusion?

Different authors use this word in different ways. In the 19th century, we can see at least three successive versions of nationalism. In the early 1800s, it was a liberating movement to throw off the oppressive yoke of Napoleon. In the mid 1800s, it was an ethnic movement allowing people to group themselves with those who shared their cultures and languages, to ask for written constitutions, and to de-emphasize the hereditary influence of dynasties and aristocracies. By the end of that century, it had become a appeal by authoritarian governments to persuade the masses to submit.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, two additional meanings for the word ‘nationalism’ have arisen. The uglier of the two refers to a value system which requires the individual to rank the existence, power, and growth of the nation-state as the highest value; if that does become the highest value, then it follows that any other potential value — family, friends, relationship to God, art, music, science, duty, honor, etc. — is at best subordinate to the nation-state, and at worst must be sacrificed for the cause of the nation-state. It is this warlike version of nationalism that is responsible for violence, destruction, and death.

Yet, at the same time, different authors have used the same word for something salutary and beneficial. This type of benign ‘nationalism’ is a synonym for a gentle patriotism. It is a fondness for one's own nation, and an appreciation for the nation’s accomplishments. This friendly version of nationalism is actually a factor in promoting cooperative relationships between nations. It allows the individual to cherish her or his own nation, while at the same time admiring the achievements of other nations.

These two sentiments — one, warlike and aggressive; the other, peaceable and harmonious — are paradoxically known by the same word: ‘nationalism.’

There are sinister forces which will deliberately exploit this linguistic ambiguity. One need only to consider the rise of Naziism in the 1930s. The word ‘Nazi’ itself is an abbreviation for ‘National Socialism’ and stands for a movement which hijacked decent patriotism and turned it into a violent force.

The National Socialists, like the Soviet Socialists, played on the vocabulary of patriotism and nationalism, as historian Jill Lepore writes:

Confusing nationalism with patriotism is not always innocent. Louis Snyder, a City College of New York professor who witnessed the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1920s, once explained why, in a book called The Meaning of Nationalism. Nationalists, he observed, “have a vested interest in maintaining a vagueness of language as a cloak for their aims.” Because it’s difficult to convince people to pursue a course of aggression, violence, and domination, requiring sacrifices made in the name of the nation, nationalists pretend their aims are instead protection and unity and that their motivation is patriotism. This is a lie. Patriotism is animated by love, nationalism by hatred. To confuse the one for the other is to pretend that hate is love and fear is courage.

It might seem pedantic to examine the definitions of words. Those accustomed to the rough-and-tumble rhetoric of popular politics might call it “hairsplitting” to analyze terminology at this microscopic level.

Why bother?

Danger lies in a lack of analysis. The example above shows how the National Socialists played on the ambiguity of words, and counted on readers and listeners not thinking too carefully about definitions, as they unleashed one of the most deadly and destructive wars in history.

There are two types of nationalism. One type of nationalism is a necessary precondition for peace — for harmony in the community of nation-states who must first respect themselves if they are to respect each other. Jill Lepore identifies this as “patriotism” in the quote above.

The other type of nationalism leads to war.

It’s worth the effort to sort them out.

A Cartesian Paradox: Descartes and Piety

With only slight exaggeration, Renee Descartes can be said both to have started modern philosophy and to have founded one of the major approaches within modern philosophy. Allowing that this is a slight overstatement, it is nonetheless true that historians of philosophy give Descartes an importance which is attributed to few other philosophers.

In his work, Descartes is a sincere and motivated theist. God plays a role in Cartesian metaphysics. Descartes also contended that the soul is immortal. He considered himself to be a faithful Christian and a devout Roman Catholic. He took pains to show that his philosophy could be harmonized with the teachings and philosophy of the Roman Catholic church.

Yet the church of his day found fault with Descartes. Some scholars accused him of deism, while others asserted that by deducing foundational truths rationally, he had made God contingent upon reason.

Not only the Roman Catholic church, but rather also other Christians as well, objected to various aspects of Cartesian thought. Diatribes against Descartes became a staple in folk piety and popular religion. The following passage from Mike Breen is an example:

We have become so acculturated in our Cartesian, Western world that we believe knowing about something and knowing something are the same thing. What we have managed to do is teach people about God. Teach them about prayer. Teach them about mission. The point isn’t that they would just know about it but to know it.

The irony is, of course, that Descartes seems to have understood himself as a sincere Christian, and seems to have thought that he had found a way simultaneously to serve the church, to serve the faith, and to serve theology. What was the disconnect? Why wasn’t Descartes enthusiastically embraced by his church and by his fellow Christians?

To be sure, there were some Christians who did eagerly espouse Cartesian thought. A number of philosophers, theologians, and other scholars saw Cartesian philosophy as thoroughly compatible with conventional Christian faith, and these thinkers adopted Cartesian philosophy.

But Cartesianism never quite established itself in the mainstream of popular Christianity.

The reason for Cartesianism’s lack of acceptance is found, not necessarily in what Cartesianism is, but rather in how it was and is perceived.

The image of Cartesian thought in the public may be more of a caricature and less of an accurate reading of Descartes and his texts. The concerns of folk piety saw Cartesianism as lacking, or at least de-emphasizing, the personhood and agency of God. The Cartesian God was seen as something of an abstract principle, a bundle of logical axioms and mathematical equations, and an impersonal force.

Descartes did not seem to meet the need for a God with emotions, desires, memories, intentions, and other aspects of personhood. While Cartesianism certainly included God’s actions, it seemed to omit the centrality of God’s volitional action.

How accurately did the popular imagination grasp Descartes? While his philosophical writings don’t emphasize God’s personhood and agency, they also do not exclude it. It would be possible to subscribe to Cartesian metaphysics and at the same time endorse a theology which featured a fully personal God.

In his writings, Descartes seems to concentrate on God’s existence and God’s role in the metaphysical principles of the universe. What were his own private thoughts or beliefs on the matter? Did Descartes conceive of God as having personhood and agency, and simply omit to mention this in his texts?

Distinguishing Between Peaceful Nationalism and Malignant Nationalism

The word ‘nationalism’ is both provocative and confusing. The term is ambiguous because it is used in different ways — even contradictory ways.

On the one hand, ‘nationalism’ can refer to a sentiment which is not only peaceful and salutary, but which is necessary to promote friendly relations between the world’s nations. This beneficial and healthy form of nationalism is often called ‘patriotism’ and the two could be construed as synonymous.

The dangerous form of nationalism is a value system: it asserts that the growth, power, and existence of the nation-state is the ultimate value. The potential harm that lies in this use of the word ‘nationalism’ is that, if it is considered to be the ultimate value, then any other competing value — the types of things which people normally value — can be sacrificed for the sake of this one supreme principle: family, friends, religious faith, duty, honor, art, science, music, etc.

The wholesome form of nationalism is simply a patriotism which encourages the individual to appreciate her or his own nation, to value its achievements, and to be fond of its people, while at the same time being able to appreciate other nations and have a fondness for them.

This amiable form of nationalism promotes peaceful relations between nations, and is even necessary for harmonious relations between nations, because it is impossible for an individual to appreciate, and have a fondness for, another nation if she or he does not appreciate and treasure her or his own nation.

Another way to express the distinction between these two uses of the word ‘nationalism’ is that, in the context of the nation-state, one emphasizes the nation, i.e., the people who share an identity based on a common language, culture, religion, or history, while the other emphasizes the state, i.e., a territory and a government with its political, economic, and military power.

To further explore the confusing use of this word, historian Jill Lepore notes that its use has varied over the centuries.

Sometimes people confuse nationalism with patriotism. There’s nothing wrong and all kinds of things right with loving the place where you live and the people you live with and wanting that place and those people to thrive, so it’s easy to confuse nationalism and patriotism, especially because they once meant more or less the same thing. But by the early decades of the twentieth century, with the rise of fascism in Europe, nationalism had come to mean something different from patriotism, something fierce, something violent: less a love for you own country than a hatred of other countries and their people and a hatred of people within your own country who don’t belong to an ethnic, racial, or religious majority. Immigration policy is a topic for political debate; reasonable people disagree. But hating immigrants, as if they were lesser humans, is a form of nationalism that has nothing to do with patriotism. Trade policy is a topic for political debate; reasonable people disagree. But hating globalists, as if they were fiends, is a form of nationalism that has nothing to do with patriotism.

Thus, the word ‘nationalism’ used by the nations of central and eastern Europe who rose to defend themselves against Napoleon’s invasions is different than ‘nationalism’ used by the anti-monarchical, anti-dynastic, anti-imperial, anti-aristocratic, and anti-royal leaders who were demanding written constitutions, and the formation of nation-states, in the immediate post-Napoleonic era.

Once those nation-states were established in response to the demands made during the immediate post-Napoleonic era, their leaders used ‘nationalism’ in yet another sense.

All three of these saw ‘nationalism’ as something desirable, but all three meant something slightly different by that word.

A healthy affection for one’s own nation provides the best foundation for a peaceful appreciation of the achievements and cultures of other nations. Nationalism as a wholesome form of patriotism is the basis for world peace. Nationalism as hegemony lays the foundation for war.

When There Is No Nationalism: The Habsburg Ideology in Central Europe

The Habsburg Monarchy, which for much of its existence was formally a subset of the Holy Roman Empire, was a collection of lands in central Europe. It lasted from 1273 to 1918, but was significantly redesigned at several different times during those years.

Historians also refer to the Habsburg Monarchy as the ‘Habsburg Empire,’ but by any name it was truly ‘cosmopolitan’ in several senses of the word.

During the first few decades of the twenty-first century, some political leaders have called for an end to nationalism and patriotism. Leaving aside the difficulty of securing a precise definition for ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism,’ how would the world look without those two concepts?

The answer might be found in an examination of the Habsburg dynasty, which is arguably non- or pre-nationalistic, and non- or pre-patriotic.

If patriotism and nationalism have something to do with one’s enthusiasm about, and allegiance to, a country or land or nation, then, by contrast, the ideology in the Habsburg territories was an enthusiasm for, and an allegiance to, a dynasty.

Although Austria and Bohemia were parts of the Habsburg Empire, the residents of those lands did not identify themselves as Austrians or Bohemians, but rather as subjects of the Habsburgs. While these, and other, territories within the Habsburg Empire retained their languages and other aspects of their cultures, they did so not in a nationalistic or patriotic sense, as historian A.J.P. Taylor writes:

Francis I, told of an Austrian patriot, answered impatiently: “But is he a patriot for me?” The Emperor was needlessly meticulous. Austria was an Imperial organisation, not a country; and to be Austrian was to be free of national feeling — not to possess a nationality. From the battle of the White Mountain until the time of Maria Theresa “Austria” was embodied in the territorial aristocracy, the “Magnates.” These, even when German, thought of themselves as Austrians, not as Germans, just as the Prussian nobility regarded themselves solely as Prussians. In Bohemia, home of the greatest estates, they were especially divorced from local feeling; for these great lords were purely Habsburg creations in the period of the Thirty Years’ War.

The psychology of the Habsburg Empire was partially shaped by lingering attitudes from feudalism. Although the Habsburgs had, by the later years of their reign, a modern industrial economy, they still in some ways considered themselves as lords, and expected that their subjects would consider them that way, too.

Dynastic feudalism may be the alternative to nationalism.

There are parallels between the Habsburgs and some other situations, e.g., the British monarchs. Prior to the advent of modern political nationalism, an English soldier most likely thought of himself as serving ‘his majesty’ instead of serving the nation.

There is some parallel, too, between the Habsburgs and the English rule in Ireland, as A.J.P. Taylor notes:

Even the Hungarian magnates, Esterhazys, Karolyis, Andrassys, had little traditional background: their greatness, too, rested on Habsburg grants, made when Hungary was recovered from the Turks and Rakoczi’s rebellion was subdued. A native nobility existed only in Galicia and in Italy: the Polish magnates did not owe their greatness to the Habsburgs and never forgot that they were Poles — though they denied this name to their peasants; the Italian nobles were cosmopolitan, but Italy was their world. Apart from Galicia and Italy, the Austrian Empire was a vast collection of Irelands, except that — unlike the Irish landlords, who had at any rate a home of origin in England — the Austrian nobility had no home other than the Imperial court.

The conception and self-conception of the Habsburg Empire may have relevance for exploring the etiology of the First World War: many history textbooks have pointed to ‘nationalism’ - however defined - as one of the factors which led to the war.

If the Habsburg Empire was devoid of nationalism, then there is less likelihood that nationalism was a cause of World War One. If both the subjects and the rulers in the Habsburg Monarchy did not harbor nationalism in their conceptual frameworks of the world, then it is improbable that nationalism fueled the start of World War One.