Notes on Nationalism

“You know, they have a word—it sort of became old-fashioned—it’s called, ‘a nationalist.’ And I say, ‘Really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, OK? I’m a nationalist.”  - Donald Trump (Oct 2018 rally in Texas)

A. The difference between a nation and a state

1. A State is a sovereign political structure, a political community governed by shared laws.

A Nation is a unified social group, a people with common origins, 

2. A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry. When nation-states arose out of city-states and kingdoms and empires, they explained themselves by telling stories about their origins—stories meant to suggest that everyone in, say, “the French nation” had common ancestors, when they of course did not. 

3. While many states are nations in some sense, there are many nations which are not fully sovereign states. As an example, the Native American Iroquois constitute a nation but not a state, since they do not possess the requisite political authority over their internal or external affairs.  

B. Nationalism

4. the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity

the actions that the members of a nation take when seeking to achieve (or sustain) self-determination.

But what determines the character of a nation (common origin, ethnicity, language, religion, cultural ties)? 

How is national identity determined and who gets left out of the story?

What makes people into a “We the People”?

When is the assertion of national self-determination a valid moral call (solidarity with oppressed national groups) and when is it an immoral call for the repression of ethnic minorities?   

C. The difference between civic/liberal nationalism and ethnic/reactionary nationalism

 5. “civic” nationalism: all citizens, regardless of their cultural background, count as members of the nation, 

“ethnic” nationalism: ancestry and language determine national identity.

D. Guiseppe Mazzini as the founder of Liberal Nationalism

6. National self-determination (freedom from foreign control) as an enlightenment value next to freedom and equality. The nation as an enlightenment alternative to other other doctrines of state legitimacy, such as  theocracy, the state should be ruled in the name of God (e.g. The Vatican or the caliphate of the Islamic State or ISIS); or dynastic kingdoms, in which the state is owned and ruled by a family, as in Saudi Arabia.  

E. Adolf Hitler & Benito Mussolini as champions of ethnic nationalism: fascism

7. The German Nation as constituted by its Aryan ancestry; the “Volksgemeinschaft” - the ‘people’s community’ to be ruled by an elite blood-order; promotes nationalism based on race and ethnicity

Opposed to classical liberalism which puts the individuals first, fascist nationalism puts the state first. Fascism as totalitarian - the state “interprets, develops and potentiates the whole life of a people” (Mussolini)

Opposed to Marxist socialism since it denies human equality, denies Marx’s materialistic view of history as class struggle, denies cosmopolitanism, denies the withering away of the state.

Opposed to democracy, which assumes human equality, government by consent and majority rule; “The great mass of workers… has no understanding of any kind of ideals and we will never be able to count on winning over the workers to any considerable degree. We want an elite of the new master class who will not be motivated by any morality of pity, but who will realise clearly that they are entitled to rule because of their superior race.” (Hitler)

Opposed to Internationalism/cosmopolitanism, rather promotes nationalism based on race and ethnicity (Aryanism or white supremacy)

8. Strategies: Anti-immigration and racial purity laws, e.g. Nuremberg Laws (1935) make Jews second-class citizens (denial of voting rights), criminalizes marriage between Jews and “Aryans” and calls for harsh punishment modeled on US Jim Crow laws (poll taxes and literacy tests) racist immigration policy; Use of state violence (military, secret police, intelligence agencies) to repress dissent and keep the working class and other undesirables in a state of forced disunity, dispersion and helplessness; The Nazi SS or “Schutzstaffel” (literally ‘protection squadron’) - major paramilitary organization under Hitler for policing in general and reinforcing racial policy in particular; responsible for the genocidal killing of 5.5 to 6 millions Jews and other victims.

F. American Nationalism

9. When the United States declared its independence, in 1776, it became a state, but what made it a nation? The fiction that its people shared a common ancestry was absurd on its face; they came from all over, and, after having waged a war against Great Britain, just about the last thing they wanted to celebrate was their Britishness; The American Civil War as a struggle over two competing ideas of the nation-state. This struggle has never ended; The North won the war. But the battle between liberal and illiberal nationalism rages on, especially during the debates over the 14th and 15th Amendments, which marked a second founding of the United States on terms set by liberal ideas about the rights of citizens and the powers of nation-states—namely, birthright citizenship, equal rights, universal (male) suffrage, and legal protections for noncitizens.

G. New Right Ethnic Nationalism in the US

10. Christian heterosexual whites as endangered, the traditional nuclear family is in peril, “Western civilization” is in decline, whites need to reassert themselves; “White genocide is underway and those responsible are Jews, Muslims, leftists, and non-whites.” Multiculturalism as racist: “‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ do not ultimately enrich white lives, but rather tend to make white societies poorer, more dangerous, and finally unlivable for whites.” - George Shaw, an editor at a leading new right publishing house

Daniel Friberg’s right wing manifesto, The Real Right Returns: A Handbook for the True defends the “relatively homogenous ethnic composition of the European nations” against “uncontrolled immigration,” “sexual liberalism,” equality, feminism, mass immigration, post-colonialism, anti-racism, and LGBT interests.

H. Fredrick Douglass on a Liberal view of American Nationalism (1869)

“A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family, is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.”

I. Tension between nationalism and neoliberal globalism

Nationalism as the right of states to intervene in the market in order to defend their citizens and control the malignant effects of hyperglobalism: bringing jobs back home, supporting domestic production, limiting immigration, and raising tariffs. Such policies collide with liberal beliefs in the primacy of free trade and the free movement of people.  

J. Israel, Zionism and the Palestinian Question

Israel and Zionism versus Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality. BDS upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity. Are critiques of Zionism, e.g. the BDS Movement, a form of anti-semistism?