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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 547
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WCL 547 February 2007
The curse of nationalism
The Marseillaise, I find, still has power to raise the prickles on the back of my neck, long after the days when I regretted that Britain had no comparable inspiring national anthem. So stirring a song exactly mirrors the strengths and weaknesses of nationalism, the twin to patriotism. Written and first sung during the threat to that revolution begun in 1789, it helped to transform the fortunes of the French revolutionaries. But it went on to inspire the soldiers who conquered Europe and created the Napoleonic empire.
A sentiment that could overcome tribal divisions and the lawlessness of feudalism, nationalism had its justification in the creation of states that offered citizens reforming government. Often these superintended the transition to modern improved societies. Perhaps in a few places in Africa they still offer such opportunities. Unfortunately it is too late. The world is united in so many ways that, willy-nilly, societies trying to take the path of nationalism will find it now beset with so many perils that they will not succeed in any permanence.
We have passed the days when nationalism was anything other than a curse - the first stage on the road to empire and to the necessary belief either in superiority or at least separation from other nations. We live in a time when nationalism still has all its old poison without the redeeming features of opening to new beginnings. We must learn how to abandon the curse of nationalism or we shall never unite to save the world from the coming disaster of climate change.
The wisest man I ever knew appeared to retain some core nationalism, despite his being, as philosophic by nature, "a spectator of all time and existence". But having been born into Victorian England, a soldier in the first World War and a civil servant and Home Guard during the second, it was less surprising. Nationalism is almost bred in the bone in our societies of the last two centuries and even when unrecognized, it affects our every judgment and opinion.
Not that nationalism is by any means the only particularism that divides humanity. But it is a peculiar curse because it is nationalism that guides and motivates the rulers of our nation-states. And whatever other organizations exist to unite or divide people, it is the nation-states that are equipped with weapons, the means of war, and until very recently, justification for use of those weapons "in the national interest".
Capitalism, communism, Islam, Christianity and a slew of other ideologies claim allegiance or are accused of dominating the world. But it is the nation-states that continue to call out the troops, either singly or in alliances. And it is nationalism that they nurture in order to keep their citizens ready to obey and to follow the dictates of national governments. It was not Islam that began the war in Iraq, nor the attack by Iraq upon Iran that led to the longest "legal" war since 1945. Only the blind acceptance of the almost universal nationalisms can hide the fact that it is nationalism that is still at the root of the worst and most long-lasting conflicts in the modern world.
And, of course, at a time when our scientists are uniting to warn that the human race has very little time to fend off the looming climate change that will render some, or all, of the globe uninhabitable, we are engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These are led by two nation-states equipped to fight modern wars who see their opponents as the chief threat to humanity. What greater delusion can nationalism achieve?
John Roberts
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