We don’t want to fight

But, by Jingo, if we do,

We’ve got the ships,

We’ve got the men,

We’ve got the money, too

– “MACDERMOTT’S WAR SONG” SUNG AT THE LONDON PAVILION 1878

Negative nationalism reached a hillock of intellectual clarity in 1878 during yet another one of those Russian-Turkish crises that London tried to mediate to its open benefit. This popular music-hall song fixed the concept of jingoism as the expression of a certain nationalist asser­tion—brash, self-interested, indifferent to or ignorant of the interests of others, politically helpful at home and often, at some unconscious level, an expression of fear. In other countries there were other words. The United States had its spread-eagleism- a ten-thousand-mile wingspan of influence from Manila to Puerto Rico.

Insecurity, poverty, ambition are three of the roots of this destructive nationalism. Its expression is often dependent on ethnic loyalty, an appropriation of God to one’s side, a certain pride in ignorance, and a conviction that you have been permanently wounded—that is, an active mythology of having been irreparably wronged. On key subjects, igno­rance is often encouraged. Sometimes this is more a pretence than a reality. Such willful ignorance allows highly sophisticated societies to remain fixated on specific wounds. At its worst this can become psychotic cynicism. Giambattista Vico, the great Italian philosopher, was denouncing this in the eighteenth century just before the modern nationalist movement got off the ground: “Where ever the human mind is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of ail things…. Rumor grows in its Course… The unknown is always magnified…. [W]henever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they Judge them by k0iat is familiar and at hand.”‘

What is closest at hand will most likely be family or race. Speaker after speaker at the 2004 Republican Convention in the United States invoked the family because, they said, family comes first and is the measure of a society. Of course, family is central to human life and to our emotional life in all its complexity. But family as the measure or structure of society is a mafia argument or an argument of the extreme right, for whom there are only two possible choices: either the sacred family or the sacred nation. In either case, loyalty is measured according to how successfully it represents a closed situation. Thus the democratic and humanist ideas of civilization, society and community, which are all dependent on our ability to imagine the other — the one who is not close—are expelled to the margins.

Such nationalism of proximity is dependent on fear. The psycho­analyst Erich Fromm once put its existence down to incapacity to recover from the loss of our lire modern social structures. And so we embraced “a new idolatry of blood and soil.”) This is nationalism as a Culture of belonging, rather than nationalism as a civilization of culture. Thus, ignorance becomes a protection from the fear within us. Ignorance, often presented with the charm of innocence, becomes a state of sanctity. Erasmus warned against this almost before it existed: “lack of Culture is not holiness, nor cleverness impiety:” And of course, this is nationalism in which “nationality becomes a synonym of “ethnicity.” Finally, it is nationalism as belief; as religion.

After 1945 such misuse of thephenomenon was supposed to wither away in the absence of a vine. Over the next quarter-century there was a gradual move toward a civic model of nationalism. At least inside the democracies nationalism as an expression of the public good grew and left the negative sort to superficial expressions of enthusiasm and emotion. Sports, public celebrations, more innocent effusions of belong­ing replaced what might have been negative. Then came the Globalist period, and the concept of nationalism was swept right out of sight. To mention it in Canada was to be simplistic, protectionist and out of step with the inevitable times. In Europe it belonged to an unhappy past. What mattered was a specialist concentration on the economic, administrative and political reorganization of Europe. For sixty years there was literally no discussion of European culture, of citizenship, of how this large variety of Europeans was actually going to live together. In the United States, while the nationalism was palpable, the discourse was economic.

Then, as if from nowhere, it began to re-emerge. Perhaps because there had been such denial of the positive possibilities of nationalism such a denial of society as a humanist project — what now came out into the light was largely negative. It was closely linked to the old demons fear, ethnicity, cultural alienation and misappropriated religion. Looking at this from the American perspective, Richard Rorty believes that it 1, the “distrust of humanism, with its retreat from practice to theory that produce the sort of failure of nerve which leads people to abandon secularism for a belief in sin Whether his analysis is right or wrong, can be generalized or not, lie is certainly right about sin. The rising negative nationalism has been filled with all the old shibboleths of belief, loyalty, fear and guilt.

Excerpted from ‘The collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the world’ Page 246 -248.