Nationalism is totally taboo---a prohibited, triggering word and a vile concept.
There's ample history to support that point of view. The Nazi version---National Socialism, the twisted belief in an Aryan race and the conflating of race with nation---caused a world war and the Holocaust. That extreme perversion of nationalism, however, is but one chapter in a long book, that's been written and edited since at least 1649, when the first nation state was created, in England during its civil war.
Today, if you say something positive about nationalism, you're canceled, and accused of being anti-immigration--- or one better, you're an anti-immigration racist. There's a relationship between immigration and nationalism, but they're separate ideas. It's muddled thinking and historical ignorance to view them as interchangeable.
What follows are some thoughts about nationalism, with a few comments about immigration. Nationalism, properly understood, is quite compatible with (legal) immigration. The greatest nation on Earth (at least for the next few weeks) owes a not insignificant share of its greatness to the contributions that immigrants have made over centuries to American life. Nationalism, in my terms, and xenophobia have nothing in common.
Benign, non-aggressive nationalism---the variety I'm interested in---- requires that some restrictions be placed on outsiders who wish to join the nation. This nation is not a club with a fixed number of members, but there's an application process to join if you're not born here. You become an American citizen by meeting the requirements of time spent here with good behavior and a job; by answering a history quiz; by having a basic command of spoken and written English; and by swearing your allegiance. Here’s a full list of the requirements.
Whether you're a new legal immigrant, or a long-standing citizen, have little to do with whether you’re a member of the American nation. A nation is formed by the spirit of its people. And by spirit, I follow the OED's definition of "those qualities regarded as forming the definitive elements in the character of a person." A nation is but a gathering together of people with certain characteristics, certain dispositions, hopes, aspirations and beliefs. While the sources of character formation are many and include, crucially, your lived experiences--- those trials and tribulations in the old vernacular that made men, men-----character is more than just a narrative of those experiences. It's also a buried and largely unconscious record of your beliefs and attitudes; of the traditions and customs you've followed, and the ones you haven't.
In the post-War years, European governments created supra-national structures (the Common Market, and later the European Union) as insurance against the resurgence of violent, lethal nationalism on that continent. We now have nearly eighty-years of experience with the European experiment and can ask how effective has that insurance policy been? In other words, is there evidence in our world today that nationalism is dispensable or unnecessary?
The Common Market--- the European Economic Commission (EC) ---was created in 1957. Its original members were West Germany, Italy, France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands. In 1973, England and Greece joined----in 1986, Spain and Portugal, and in 1990 East Germany. It mostly functioned as an economic policy-making entity, engaged with such matters as eliminating tariffs between member states, and formulating a common agricultural and foreign trade policy. In 2009, the EC was replaced by the European Union (EU), which added a common currency (the Euro), and significantly loosened restrictions on personal mobility within the EU zone. Twenty-seven European countries today are members of the EU.
Eliminating tariffs is good economic policy so long as the countries involved are all playing by the same rules, which was more or less the case in Europe when the EC regulated things. The EU, thirty years later, had different ambitions and soon new problems arose. Its concept of a workable common currency was impossible to achieve, given the wide gap between, say, German and Italian ideas of fiscal discipline. The open borders feature of the EU became another problem, as it de-stabilized many Europeans' sense of their nation. As Isaiah Berlin wrote in 1991: "If there is anything I’m certain about, after living for so long [1909-1997], it is that people must sooner or later rebel against uniformity and attempts at global solutions of any sort."( emphasis supplied)
That nationalism has re-appeared in our time in violent forms is undeniable. The ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, leading to the mass slaughter of the Bosnian population was a stark reminder that nationalism fueled by violence remains a risk. Russia's two wars against Chechnya from 1994-2000, its purported annexation of the Crimea in 2014, and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine are further examples of aggressive nationalism. One of the more depressing lessons from a study of Russian history is that its version of aggressive nationalism has been brewing there since the end of the 18th century.
Berlin claimed that non-aggressive nationalism was first articulated as an idea by the eighteenth-century German writer Johann Gottfried Herder. "Herder virtually invented the idea of belonging. He believed that just as people need to eat and drink, to have security and freedom of movement, so too they need to belong to a group. Deprived of this, they felt cut off, lonely, diminished, unhappy.... To be human meant to be able to feel at home somewhere, with your own kind. Each group, according to Herder, has its own Nationalgeist , a set of customs and a lifestyle, a way of perceiving and behaving that is of value solely because it is its own. The whole of cultural life is shaped from within the particular stream of tradition that comes of collective historical experience shared only by members of the group. Thus one could not, for example, fully understand the great Scandinavian sagas unless one had oneself experienced (as he did on his voyage to England) the struggles of rough, doughty sailors against a great tempest in the North Sea. Herder’s idea of the nation was deeply non-aggressive. All he wanted was cultural self-determination. He denied the superiority of one people over another...He believed in a variety of national cultures, all of which could, in his view, peacefully coexist. Each culture was equal in value and deserved its place in the sun. Herder rejected the Enlightenment idea that man in every country, at every time, has [or should have] identical values. The plurality of cultures [read nations] is irreducible. Herder portrayed humanity as a dazzling mosaic of peoples, each motivated by its own particular values and views, but each acknowledging the prospect of peaceful coexistence. For him, the group was defined not by blood or race but instead by a shared language and history."
Why is the idea of a nation, in this non-aggressive sense, essential to the proper functioning of any state?
There's an ancient tradition of thinkers (Aristotle, Augustine, being two of the most important contributors) who described a series of connections—linked circles I'd say—beginning with the family, extending to the village and then to the state. The links were affinities, intangible bonds, common values and shared beliefs. The state would thrive not because the adults living in it had a vote---few had any such right----but because of these affinities. Without those bonds, traditions and beliefs linking person to person, a regime could only survive by violence, or the threat of violence against its people.
As Berlin put it: "People can’t develop unless they belong to a culture. Even if they rebel against it and transform it entirely, they still belong to a stream of tradition. New streams can be created-----in the West, by Christianity, or Luther, or the Renaissance, or the Romantic movement, but in the end they derive from a single river, an underlying central tradition, which, sometimes in radically altered forms, survives. But if the streams dried up, as, for instance, where men and women are not products of a culture, where they don’t have kith and kin and feel closer to some people than to others, where there is no native language-----that would lead to a tremendous desiccation of everything that is human."
Pause on that: a tremendous desiccation of everything that is human."
A recent article in Foreign Affairs said this about Berlin's ideas: “The desire to belong to a community or to some kind of unit, which … has been national in the last 400 years is a basic human need or desire. This, for Berlin, was less an argument than an acknowledgment—it is, quite simply, how we are built. The need for community is the common grain running through the crooked timber that constitutes humankind.
Some may claim that this idea of a benign nationalism is fine in theory but has rarely been realized in practice.
Look at Switzerland, where a recent OECD study reported that with regard to "the public sphere, there is a strong sense of community. Ninety-four percent of Swiss people believe that they know someone they could rely on in time of need. People will say that Switzerland, a country of eight million people, nearly all of whom are white, well-off and well-educated is a unicorn in a world with nearly two hundred other nations, few of which resemble Switzerland. Therefore, the Swiss don't count.
Now that the Swiss have been cancelled, let's look at another relatively small nation, with a population only somewhat larger than Switzerland's---Israel.
Israel is a (flawed) example of how democracy and nationalism can co-exist. Ashkenazi Jews from central Europe, the old guard and the original settlers, are now less than half the country's population. The Sephardim and Maghrebi Jews from other lands are now in the majority in Israel. This mix has made politics chaotic there for decades now.
In my view, the settler's zeal to reclaim all of Judea and Samaria is abhorrent behavior that shares many of the characteristics of the worst aggressive nationalisms. Yet, as we've seen in the past two months, nationalism in Israel today is not simply the ultra-nationalism of those settlers.
Israelis, from wherever they came from, or however they last voted, are, pardon me, Hebrew Nationalists. Their nationalism is no mere thought exercise setting forth the spirit of the people of Israel in ineffable terms reminiscent of Herder’s description of two hundred years ago. Hebrew Nationalism today is the coming together of a people with a shared set of beliefs and affinities but more than that a fear that the survival of our nation is at stake.
(Some brief words now on the deranged counterclaim some may raise. Israelis are no better than the Nazis; their nationalist agenda aims to exterminate the Palestinian people. The IDF just yesterday went into the Jenin camps and slaughtered 1,400 Palestinian women, children very old folks, and kidnapped to a tunnel under Tel Aviv another two hundred and thirty of them. This all happened. You haven't seen the movie yet, but it will soon be released).
Nations collapse when armies invade, but they can also wither at less dramatic rates when their people no longer share what Herder and Berlin called these affinities of the spirit.
How, one can reasonably ask, is America the land of the free if free speech here has been muzzled and attacked in the ways it has so glaringly been on the campuses of what used to be called, 'our most distinguished colleges and universities?' What nation can escape terminal darkness if its people willfully and repeatedly confuse ideology with history, and believe that demagogues are capable leaders? One need look no further than to these campuses to see the withering of the American nation.
As Tocqueville pointed out nearly two hundred years ago, an educated population is foundational to a flourishing democracy. "It cannot be doubted that, in the United States, the instruction of the people powerfully contributes to the support of a democratic republic; and such must always be the case, I believe, where instruction which awakens the understanding is not separated from moral education which amends the heart."
We are very today far removed from that idea of instruction, let alone any instruction which awakens. In fact, the very idea of instruction about anything is now suspect in what is now absurdly called higher education. Instruction and instructors have now been cancelled. Classes have also now been cancelled.
Instruction, to complete the slogan.....is an activity promulgated by the privileged, white, exploitative class to dominate and control oppressed and marginalized persons....
To what extent is America today, a nation with a shared culture, Berlin's essential requirement for a benign nation?
Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal published a poll about changes in values held by Americans, now and in comparison with 1998. "Some 38% of respondents said patriotism was very important to them, and 39% said religion was very important. That was down sharply from when the Journal first asked the question in 1998, when 70% deemed patriotism to be very important, and 62% said so of religion.... The share of Americans who say that having children, involvement in their community and hard work are very important values has also fallen. Tolerance for others, deemed very important by 80% of Americans as recently as four years ago, has fallen to 58% since then.... Aside from money, all age groups, including seniors, attached far less importance to these priorities and values than when pollsters asked about them in 1998 and 2019. But younger Americans in particular place low importance on these values, many of which were central to the lives of their parents.... Some 23% of adults under age 30 said in the new survey that patriotism was very important to them personally, compared with 59% of seniors ages 65 or older. Some 31% of younger respondents said that religion was very important to them, compared with 55% among seniors. Only 23% of adults under age 30 said that having children was very important.”
That last data point is perhaps the most telling of all. The death of our nation won't likely come about because we've become an intolerant, unpatriotic, non-believing bunch of lazy, entitled, materialistic people. No, without a steady supply of children, we'll eventually just shrink and then disappear.
Berlin offered some hopeful thoughts. "I do not wish to abandon the belief that a world which is a reasonably peaceful coat of many colours, each portion of which develops its own distinct cultural identity and is tolerant of others, is not a utopian dream... Unless there is a minimum of shared values that can preserve the peace, no decent societies can survive...Let us hope, one day, that a large minimum of common values will be accepted. Otherwise, we are bound to go under."
Isaiah Berlin made it to the age of eighty-eight, and he said he’d lived through most of the worst century ever made by man; even worse, he claimed, than the time of the Huns. Berlin, for me, is the essential political and ethical thinker of our times. You can read him in small doses, as most of his great writings are essays you can get through in half-an-hour. Remarkably, like Conrad and Nabokov, whose native languages were also Slavic, Berlin, born in Russia, became a master stylist of the English language. Reading him is thus an education and a delight. You could start here.
Berlin thought that nationalism and liberalism could co-exist. Nationalism, he believed, need not be malignant or violent. It has been so any number of times, but it has also shown its benevolent side. North America and Europe have not (yet) erupted into diabolical, nationalist states. And, at the same time, Berlin insists, liberalism should not look askance at the need of people to be recognized as members of something greater than the individual. If that recognition is prevented, resentment will fester, and demagogues will emerge with their perverted claims. I will spare you the list of our demagogues. They are all too well-known.