* I recall a lot of nationalism in a book called the Bible.
* Nationalism/patriotism infatuated the Roman Republic. Citizens went to war for the greater nation. They revered “Rome” so much that military standards and symbols of Rome carried near-mystical qualities for Romans—the capture of one by the enemy was seen as a grave occasion.
It’s helpful to think of “old nationalism” akin to “love for the extended family”. Most conquering nations originated in small tribes of highly interrelated folks. Going to battle for land or to keep invaders out was thus enriching or protecting your blood line. As nations grew in size, they could keep this spirit of “family camaraderie” up if they kept travel and communication short between various parts of the nation —hence how the vaunted Roman roads and Pax Romana kept the Romans feeling “Roman” for a good long period after they’d swelled to span three continents. If everyone feels like a close neighbor who shares in your culture and beliefs, then you’d be more willing to fight for them. Diversity is not a strength for a nation; conforming to the culture is.
Romans were thus highly motivated by patriotism during their salad days. Emperors appealed to it. As did the conspirators against Caesar. As did the killers of Tarquinius Superbus.
However, as the “diversity” of the Roman empire increased, the patriotism went down. Roman policy for decades was severe enforced integration for all those who wanted to become Roman citizens—Roman citizenship was seen as a great gift, not something bestowed to any conquered person. When a tribe wanted to become Roman citizens, they were instantly broken up and moved to the 4 corners of the empire, had their military ranks stripped, and basically told they had to give up most of their old ways. This integrated them with Romans and made them feel more Roman (and thus patriotic) and less whatever tribe they had been.
Rome’s greatest troubles came from tribes that were never broken up—the Goths. Other groups, such as the Jews of Palestine, were not broken up for hundreds of years, which led to Jewish rebellion after Jewish rebellion. It was not until the Jews were forcibly expelled and dispersed from Israel/Palestine in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD that the area became peaceful for the Romans.
In short, nationalism and patriotism is as old as time.
* I would think that nationalism is simply identical with realpolitik per se. There is no other point to politics than to advance the nation’s cause. The confusion arises because the “nations” here referred to are not those entities drawn up on a map by bureaucrats who send representatives to the UN. Those things are simply grandiose administrative districts. Real nations are born and die, they coalesce and divide, like raindrops on a windshield, and are never truly the same from moment to moment. The real nation is a felt unity between people in the melee of fighting life. The history of such nations is history itself, the theater of triumph and tragedy, over which those administrative wards occasionally form a thin crust which is constantly being superceded, like pillow lava flowing under the sea—flowing and cooling, then breaking through again. And real nationalism, which is simply politics divested of its ideological fig leaves, is what occurs there at the interface between fire and sea.
* An entire civilization has become a joke because of ignoring genetics.
“widening circles of sympathy”
self
clan
tribe
nation
race
humanity
save the koala
the vegans attacking humanists for not being vegans were once
the humanists attacking racists for not being humanist were once
the racists attacking nationalists for not being racist were once
the nationalists attacking tribalists for not being nationalist were once
the tribalists attacking clanists for not being tribalist were once
the clanists attacking individuals for being selfish.
That’s one factor; the other factor as stated in the OP is being attacked which pushes people together prematurely.
On a small island like Corsica tribalism = nationalism so it can happen sooner. In France it took longer.
They’re not “imagined” communities. They are part genetic / part imagined.
Lying about them being imagined is cultural warfare.
* The word “nationalism” is used ambiguously. There’s a certain meaning that is somewhat like “solidarity with co-ethnics” which is, of course, ancient.
Then there’s is the meaning “strong belief that my ethnicity deserves its own independent nation.”
Finally there is the latter meaning generalized, “belief that ideally all ethnic groups would enjoy as much political independence as reasonably possible.”
It is the other nationalisms that begin as the Ottoman and Austrian Empires’ domination over Eastern Europe declined and the desire for German and Italian unification arose.
* Nationalism is at least as old as the written record. Leftists hate nationalism (in others at least), so they try to make it appear artificial and recent. If educated people believed that nationalism was natural and deeply rooted in human psychology, if they thought it was inborn, it would have been harder to force them to abandon it.
There are countless examples of pre-modern nationalism. The Persian Wars for example, were essentially a fight between the Greek nation and the multi-ethnic Persian Empire. Yes, some Greeks fought on the Persian side, but they were shamed for that by the other Greeks as traitors.
I recently read the first volume of Hugh Thomas’s history of the Spanish empire in the Americas. Thomas’s description of 16th-century Spanish nationalism is still fresh in my mind, so I’ll talk about it here in detail.
Most people have heard of Ferdinand and Isabella, who united Spain in the 15th century through their marriage. They were both physically and culturally Spanish. After their death their throne was inherited by their grandson, the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was physically half-Spanish and culturally Flemish. He did not speak the Spanish language when he arrived in Spain in 1516. Most of the people he knew and trusted were Flemings, so that’s whom he started appointing to important offices in Spain.
The native Spaniards resented being ruled by Flemish officials. There were numerous stories of Flemings mistreating Spaniards and taking money out of Spain. The idea of Charles using tax money that he raised in Spain to improve his other European possessions was unacceptable to many Spaniards. These feelings produced a violent revolt, which Thomas describes in detail and which is also written up in this wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Comuneros
The city councils of Spain submitted a list of formal demands to Charles. Among those were the removal of Flemish officials and their replacement with Spaniards, and a ban on the government spending Spanish tax money in Charles’s other European possessions. The Cortes (parliament) of Castile required Charles to only address it in the Spanish language.
Some of the rebels’ formal demands are listed here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_of_the_Comuneros#Proposals_to_other_cities
Charles ended up subduing the revolt with both violence and concessions.
This early 16th century conflict would seem inconceivable to those who bought the leftist line on nationalism having been invented at the time of the French Revolution. Don’t take anything on faith, at least not on politically-charged issues. Try to investigate things for yourself.
There was an increase in nationalism in Europe at the time of the French Revolution. Secularism was spreading among the elites. Christianity, like Islam, is nominally universalist, so when it started to lose force, nationalism gained at its expense. But there’s always been nationalism in Europe and other civilized parts of the world. I just described one example of it, but I could have picked many others. The increase in nationalism in the late 18th century was not from a zero level. If you think that it was, you don’t know much history.
* Say there’s two axis. A loyalty axis:
Me against my brother
My brother and me against my cousin
My brother my cousin and me against the rest of the village
My village against the other village
My manor against the my feudal lord’s enemy’s manor
My kingdom against my king’s enemy’s kingdom
And a cultural axis:
People who speak as we do vs. people who only say “bar-bar”.
People who dress as we do vs. people who don’t know how to dress properly
People who pray as we do vs. evil heathens
etc.
At some point the King became so powerful that all conflicts on the loyalty axis were concentrated at the kingdom’s level, and the very same Royal power made it so that culture became more or less uniform at the kingdom level. That is what we call a “nation”, and while the process was gradual, 200 years ago it reached it’s highest form in France, so much that all countries in Europe realized that they better become a nation or they would be destroyed by someone who did.
* The French had a way with diplomacy that was legendary. They married local and trained their ambassadors better than other nations to make up for it. Tallyrand, obviously, springs to mind. But French diplomacy also extended to doing bold, unthinkable things and getting away with it, such as allying with the Ottoman Turks right when the Turks were threatening central Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Ottoman_alliance
Also they had a profound effect upon Russia culturally. As is well known, much of War & Peace was written in French because that was the language of the upper-class Russians. The French prided themselves on spreading their culture as far as possible in order to influence others. It was their version of the CIA’s exporting American culture to the eastern bloc.
Ben Franklin very much impressed the French because his diplomatic skills were on par with theirs. He knew how to play the games. He played the noble-savage-rustic-plain-spoken simple-living character the French believed Americans were—but flirted like heck at a very high diplomatic level. Comparisons of Franklin to Bill Clinton in terms of social adeptness are probably apt, although its hard to think of a Founding Father as a sociopath.
John Adams, the dour Puritan, came to Paris to aid Franklin in the diplomacy. But Adams’s actual plain-spoken simple-living character didn’t gel well with the French; he was genuinely appalled at the French behavior/excess, and at Franklin’s flitting about from party to party without seemingly getting anything done–and Adams complained loudly about it. Franklin got Adams kicked out of his job “aiding” Franklin before Adams could ruin things.
All this is to say that the stereotype of the “sophistication” of the French is really a holdover from their diplomatic greatness.
* I think the underlying thing is the same but the scale of that thing varies so nationalism is the name for the thing at one scale and tribalism is the name for the thing at a smaller scale.
It’s the thing itself that doesn’t have a name (but it’s related to circles of sympathy).
* What was distinctive about England was that it had quite distinct borders, typically ocean. In contrast, polities on the Continent tended to be somewhat arbitrary in extent.
There were three main language groups — Romance, Germanic, and Slavic — and even leaving aside the question of their somewhat blurry borders, how do you divide each one up?
What’s now Portugal and what’s now Romania, for example, are both Romance speaking lands but they are awfully far apart and probably would not be happy being under one rule, especially in a time before rapid communications. They’re denizens won’t be able to understand each other, so it makes sense to separate them politically. But how do you divvy up all the Romance speaking lands between Lisbon and Bucharest?
Obviously, political actors fight, connive, marry, form alliances, sponsor educational and artistic efforts to build unity or difference.
But it was not clear ahead of time how it was going to turn out. It’s not a priori obvious that Paris would rule Marseille or that Madrid would rule Barcelona. (Perhaps it was clear, for historical reasons, that Rome would rule Italy, but that turned out to be a roadblock to Italian nationalism for some time due to the Pope ruling Rome.)
On the other hand, England has had pretty obvious borders for an awful long time. That doesn’t mean that London won’t try to rule more land than just England, but it is striking that the idea of England, as say the territory represented by England at the World Cup, is not very different at all from what land the King of England ruled in 1000 AD.
* The English state could project enough power to fight a Hundred Years War to control France from 1337 to 1453, with almost all the fighting done on the Continent. The English eventually lost, but it was more of an adventure for the English. The English monarchy could punch above its weight in part because of its fairly unified and secure island base. The English could manipulate alliances on the Continent, while its Continental rivals were stuck with trying to inspire the Scottish or Irish to rebel, a strategy that had a long record of failing to be decisive up through 1916.
The Wikipedia summary of the Hundred Years War is pretty good:
“The war owes its historical significance to multiple factors. By its end, feudal armies had been largely replaced by professional troops, and aristocratic dominance had yielded to a democratisation of the manpower and weapons of armies. Although primarily a dynastic conflict, the war gave impetus to ideas of French and English nationalism. The wider introduction of weapons and tactics supplanted the feudal armies where heavy cavalry had dominated. The war precipitated the creation of the first standing armies in Western Europe since the time of the Western Roman Empire, composed largely of commoners and thus helping to change their role in warfare. With respect to the belligerents, English political forces over time came to oppose the costly venture. The dissatisfaction of English nobles, resulting from the loss of their continental landholdings, became a factor leading to the civil wars known as the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487). In France, civil wars, deadly epidemics, famines, and bandit free-companies of mercenaries reduced the population drastically. Shorn of its continental possessions, England was left with the sense of being an island nation, which profoundly affected its outlook and development for more than 500 years.[1]“
English foreign policy was pretty successful after 1066. England’s famous battles — Agincourt, Waterloo, the Somme — tended to be fought in what’s now Belgium, which is a lot more fun than fighting them in Sussex.
* It’s been my impression that “nationalism” means more than one thing, just as the English word “love” means more than thing.
C.S. Lewis wrote about _The four loves_, distinguishing between eros, filia (philia?), agape, etc.
Similarly, with nationalism we have modern unification of a nation state (France post 1789) based on ethnolinguistic similarity.
Perhaps this can be a civic nationalism–the early wave post 1789–establishing a civic nation, also with linguistic unification.
There is also the post World War One “self-determination” wave driven by Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points and the dissolution of the four big old dynastic empires (Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanov, and Hohozollern Germany (sp?).
But we have the older proto-nations descrbed by Anthony Smith. Smith uses the term “ethnie” for proto-nation or older nation partly but not fully conscious of itself.
We can have the campanilismo of the Italian City States. A city state patriotism. Some of the same sentiments, but smaller and more local.
Walker Connor has written about ethnonationalism as driven by an ineffable sense of in group similarity / solidarity. He has worked to distinguish this as the “pure” nationalism, distinguishing it from the French Revolution type.
* … one does kind of wonder if a nation state can persist if the state is controlled by people who don’t think of themselves as part of the nation, members of the tribe. How long would it take to kill off the nation part of the nation state once it’s there?
* The left wants you to regard your identity as a construct, one that by its mere existence oppresses others. So you need to unburden yourself of it. And make it snappy you racisss!
What we are fighting for is no less than the will and the right to claim our own selves and to claim our own nation. For anyone tempted to think of those as mere performances, inventions, or imagination, just ask yourself why do they spend so much bile on undermining them? They are thieves who tell us our family jewels are cheap costume jewelry, cursed even, and to discard them, so the thieves can run off with the loot.
* Since the dawn of recorded history, nations of various sizes have always existed, men have always felt fond attachment to them, and they have always defended themselves against other nations. Foreign princes and their bureaucrats have never ceased to be resented.
What makes the post-Valmy world fundamentally different is the moral sense that any decent-sized nation automatically deserves its own sovereign state as an absolute matter of right. This idea, which seemed so self-evident to President Wilson and Garibaldi, did not seem obvious to anyone before the age of mass participation in Republican politics and “The Rights of Man”. Nations, pre-Valmy, had unique, historically-grounded rights expressed through their Parliaments, assemblies, and traditions. They did not have abstract Rights to the expression of the General Will of all Equal Citizens. When the King’s job, as expressed in his coronation oath, was to maintain inviolate the established laws and customs of the nation, his own national origin was of secondary importance. When sovereign states got into the business of radically transforming society from top to bottom, it became imperative that such power be wrested from foreign hands.
