There are those who deny that patriotism really has anything objective to feed upon. It is hard, they say, to find anything that the flag stands for or to which one addresses his choral chant when he sings, “My Country! ’tis of thee.” They ask what one’s country can mean to him. When one speaks of country, is he not thinking of that spot of earth which he calls home, those activities and institutions which he has seen working in his own community, or perhaps only the map? A country as big as the United States, for example, can hardly be said to be appreciated by the mind of a single man. Most of the country no one has ever even seen. The “collective mind” is shown to be a fiction. A people does not form a “person,” but remains only a group of individuals. And the corollary seems to be that the only ground on which to posit a nation has been taken away. The state is said to be unreal and artificial. Peoples may be the product of history; a state can be made in a day. Ponsonby looks upon a nation as such a construction: “A nation is not in its composition primarily a geographical nor a racial, but a political unit. ... It must be able to uphold its independent political sovereignty.”[166] Without the necessity for a common defense, that is, there would be no nation. Charles Kingsley remarked in the preface to one of his books that while there can be loyalty to a king or a queen, there cannot be loyalty to one’s country.[167] And so it is that a “country” is an abstraction. For the ordinary patriot at least there really is no such thing. The country is not an individual, and there is no individuality in it for the citizen to rest his patriotism upon. Patriotism is thus left up in the air.
Now one is not driven to the extreme view of the nation as a “person” in order to answer the criticisms suggested in the foregoing. That the state is a “person” is a well-known theory. It is held by those impressed by the philosophy of Hegel. It is reflected everywhere in the terms they use. They talk constantly of such things as a “collective mind” and a “general will.” But the state is not personal in the sense in which human beings are personal. We expect a person to have a body, a brain, and a nervous system. A state or nation has none such. But a thing does not have to be a person in order to be an individual. Not all individuals are personal. All individuals have inner unity. The nation has such unity, and it is this which the philosophers feel whose theory has just been described. They are the “unity philosophers.” And they feel a unity in a state which they seek to describe in terms of personality. We all feel the unity. For instance, we assume a continuity as existent in a country. Even a democratic country must through successive administrations employ the same policy abroad. Only we do not feel it necessary to describe the unity in terms of personality. The conception of organization will serve to explain the unity we find in the nation. What the organization is like is further to appear.
An indication that a great people forms a unit is the fact that it is a growth. The ties that bind the nation together are, in a larger sphere, very much like those that bind together the family and the tribe. The ties of kinship were likely the first that bound together associations of men. Perhaps what first appeared was an undifferentiated horde. But at least the family must have been the first of any close associations of men. The great majority of students are united on this point. McDougall says: “Primitive human society was probably a comparatively small group of near blood relatives.”[168] Green says, “Every form of right first appeared within societies founded on kinship, these being naturally the societies within which the constraining conception of a common well being is first operative.”[169] Sumner’s words reflect his view: “The kin tie, which had been the primitive mode of association and coherence in groups, began to break down in the sixth century, B. C., in Greece. It was superseded by the social tie of a common religious faith and ritual. The Pythagorean and Orphic sects developed this tie.”[170] The religious bond succeeded the kin tie in this case. The well-knit state or polis seems to have come even later. At any rate, civil units come later than kin units, and grow out of them. The Eskimos now have no civil organization outside of the family. But it is only in backward areas that no larger unit than that of the family has arisen. A process of integration has been working, and it is a process which has resulted in nations. Spencer speaks on this point, “... In the earliest stage of civilization, when the repulsive force is strong and the aggressive force weak, only small communities are possible; a modification of character causes these tribes, and satrapies, and gentes and feudal lordships, and clans, to coalesce into nations.”[171] Friction and growing interests between families would in some cases draw them together into a tribe; the same process would draw tribes into a nation. The conception that holds these societies together is that of a common well-being. But the conception first arose in a natural group, the family, and was gradually extended through the tribe and up to the nation. Green points out that while force has been used in the formation of states, “it has only formed states as it has operated in and through a pre-existing medium of political, or tribal, or family rights.”[172] A people is a natural product of natural forces. It at least is not an artificial creation.
Now a nation is formed when a people is organized under an institution, a state. What of the state? Is it an artificial creation? It is charged that states come to be ends in themselves, cut themselves off from the people, and cause wars over artificial values.
Some philosophers, those who uphold the high sovereignty of the state, in capital letters, really identify the state with the nation. If this view be accepted the whole case of the critics of the state as artificial is, of course, at once disposed of. But the state is not identical with the nation. A state may embrace several nations. The British empire is such a super-national state. The state is an institutional organization. And yet there is good ground upon which to maintain that the state is not an artificial creation. As a people is a growth so also is the state. It is true, as is sometimes asserted, that states can be made in a day and that there can be artificial states, that is, states not resting upon a homogeneous people, but it is not true that the state was made in a day. As a people, the raw material of a nation, grew out of the family and tribe units, so the state which is the institution of a people, grew out of the political institutions of the family and the tribe. The first institutions of men, as for instance that of the family, were probably the result of natural unreflective coöperation. They resulted almost as do the effects of a natural law. The actions which gave rise to them were in a way like the tropisms of primitive organisms. “Genuinely primitive association must have been blind, without forethought of advantage to those participating.”[173] Upon these unreflective associations states grew, also without forethought on the whole, although some reflection no doubt entered into the process. Spencer says, “Men did not deliberately establish political arrangements, but grew into them unconsciously—probably had no conception of an associated condition until they found themselves in it.”[174] Men did not go about it deliberately to form a state as represented in the contract theory of Hobbes, but waked up to find they were in a state which had grown out of their actions in pursuance of satisfaction for their needs. The state did not precede man’s political character, but arose out of it. Men recognized common rights and duties, and the state arose in their efforts to safeguard and give expression to them. Thus Green says, “The state, or the sovereign as a characteristic institution of the state, does not create rights, but gives fuller reality to rights already existing. It secures and extends the exercise of powers, which men, influenced in dealing with each other by an idea of common good, had recognized in each other as capable of direction to that common good, and had already in a certain measure secured to each other in consequence of that recognition.”[175]
The maturity of nations has come in the modern period. Likewise patriotism, in the strong degree in which we know it, is comparatively modern. The United States, Germany, Italy are modern states. Tribal loyalty was once the strongest bond. But the tribe settled down to and came to rule a definite extent of territory. Localized tribes formed small units of government. The government was not the representative of the will of the whole people, but expressed the will of the man or small group of men strong enough to possess the seat of authority. Gradually government became more representative. In time small states arose. There were such city-states as Athens. These small states did not organize all the people of the same race as those under their jurisdiction. And when they were enlarged by conquest, they were representative of only a comparatively small group near the seat of government. All conquests were ruled from the outside and from the height of superior power. This power became capable of tremendous extension. The city of Rome became ruler of a large empire. Then ensued the mediæval period in which the notion of catholicity was dominant, and in whose political thinking the all-inclusive and sovereign empire was the ideal. The period of nationalism had not yet come. The empires of Rome and of Charlemagne were not nations. Their strength depended not upon the spirit of the whole, but upon the existence of a strong force at the center. The fact should be noted that the dialectic toward nationalism has not been in a simple straight line. Sometimes there have been cases of dissolution on the part of large and strong integrations of government. But on the whole there is a pretty clear movement toward larger and larger governmental integrations, and these integrations have in the main been forced to follow the building up of peoples. The mediæval empires fell. The papacy became distrusted as a corrupt and tyrannical foreign power. The bloody chaos of feudalism became unbearable. The Crusades acquainted men with others who were like or unlike themselves. The Renaissance heightened the emotions of men, and prepared the soil for nationalistic passion. Peoples became welded together, and at the beginning of the modern period nations emerged which took up into themselves the feudalistic establishments and city-states which had flourished during the Middle Ages. These nations met the needs of men, and persisted. They entrenched themselves, and gathered force. Thus they came to the beginning of the nineteenth century when the spirit of nationalism was fanned into a consuming flame by the wars of Napoleon, and when again the nationalistic passion was ministered to by the romantic movement which aroused once more the emotional side of human nature. The crowning height of the process has been reached at the present time when the Great War has made nationalistic loyalty the ruling passion of mankind.
A state, then, is the outgrowth of the life of a people. The people is a growth, and the state is an institution which has grown along with the people. Therefore it would seem as if there were good indications for calling each of them real.
What makes a nation? The elements of a nation show both objective reality and inner unity. There are, roughly, three things which enter into the makeup of a country. The first of these is a people with a common language, customs, traditions, history, and land with its associations. Sometimes religion has been an element. In the case of cultured peoples, literature has also been such. “The dawn of English nationality coincided with the dawn of a truly English literature.”[176] We have already seen how such a people grows. It is a natural group; it is based on instinctive association and the stress of the struggle for existence. The instincts of patriotism are themselves instrumental in forming the objective basis of patriotism. They make for the solidarity of a people. This people doesn’t have to belong to one race, for it may be made up of a fusion of races. There may be a diversity of classes and interests within the nation. It does not have to be absolutely homogeneous, for only a very small group indeed could be such. Similars do not constitute a nation. A country is a qualitative individual. A unity can be obtained in diverse elements. The things that have been named seem to be sufficient to weld together such a unity, a people. A people is an objective reality, and one of the bases of a nation.
The second element is an organization, an institution, in other words, a state. The Poles have a common language, customs, traditions, and land, but they have no government of their own, and do not form a nation. A nation comes into being when a state is formed by a people. The state, if a true one, grows out of the life of the people, and is to the people what the body is to the soul. The state and the people form a unity. Moreover, the institution is just as real as the people and their desires, and with the people forms the objective basis of a nation.
The third element is that of a common consciousness. This is built upon and implied in the conditions already named. A people and a state are both external and internal facts. The raw material of which they are formed is external and objective. But that raw material does not come to its full meaning until there is added to it a consciousness in which it is taken up in unity. There would really be no unified people and no state, as the expression of united political life, in spite of the external elements which are necessary to the being of people and state, unless there existed in the individuals’ minds a common consciousness or consciousness of community. The very existence of a common language testifies to the existence of a common consciousness, as do common customs, traditions, history, literature, and ideals. A land even is something which a people possesses, and which furnishes a common bond between the individuals of the group. There was a time when the land was literally a common possession, in the sense that there was no private property, but ownership is not the only way in which a people can have a common interest in the land; there may be many associations besides that of common ownership connected with it. Esthetic appreciation is one of them. Affection for the scenes of childhood is another. Esenwein, in describing the art of Gogol, the Russian author, uses the following phrases: “Rarely do power and delicacy unite in a stylist as they do in Gogol. For the one [power], we may find an origin in his love for the sun-steeped and snow-blown plains of his native Cossack country....”[177] What gifted writers have felt other more common folk have felt also.