The Psychology of Nations / A Contribution to the Philosophy of History

by G. E. Partridge

The roots of this pride and honor process we can find in the impulses which lead groups to demonstrate power and prowess to one another, and in the original feeling of reality which is accompanied by the belief on the part of the group that its own ways are normal and right. We might mention as significant the widespread belief on the part of very primitive peoples that they alone are real people, or are the superior people of the world. The Lapps, Sumner (70) says, regard themselves as "men" as distinguished from all other peoples, a form of self-consciousness which lingers in all such antitheses as Jew and Gentile, Greek and barbarian, and the like. This basic idea of difference in reality is not confined to a few peoples, but there is a tendency for every group to divide the world into two parties: selves and outsiders, and this feeling of difference readily develops into the moods in which there is a mystic sense on the part of a people of being the chosen people, and into those specific theories of superiority that run through the history of most if not of all nations. It belongs to the psychology of Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Chinese, Japanese, and also to Americans as well as Germans; and we learn that Russian books and newspapers sometimes discuss the civilizing mission of Russia.

That the motives of display and pride have been peculiarly active in Germany in the last few decades has been maintained by many writers. German writers are inclined to believe that the motive for the "attack upon Germany" was jealousy on the part of her enemies, that Germany was supreme in everything and other countries could tolerate this no longer. Germany has talked about her virtues, her rank, her coming place in the world. Bergson says that Germany's energy comes from pride. Some see the source of this alleged conceit of Germany and her excessive self-consciousness in Germany's hard experiences—the recent slavery, Germany's position as the battle ground of Europe, her late arrival among the great nations. Germany still lacks, they say, the quiet assurance that an old culture gives. Some call Germany morbid and quarrelsome. Again we hear the pride of Germany called an adolescent phenomenon, and they say that Germany is fighting not for principle but to see who is superior. Bosanquet (91) thinks that the lack of political liberty in Germany has had the effect of producing self-consciousness, and a morbid interest in small distinctions of title and rank, and that it is thwarted national ambition that has expressed itself in such writers as Treitschke and Bernhardi. Bourdon (67) thinks Germany is jealous of the culture and the glory and the political and literary prestige of France. Collier (68) says that Germany is forever looking into a mirror rather than out the open window and even sees herself a little out of focus. The seriousness of the Germans, others think, is an indication that Germany takes herself too seriously.

But national vanity, we see, is certainly not confined to Germany. The Germans at least think France is highly self-conscious, always thinking of her dignity, glory, prestige and of revenge. Wundt (85) feels much the same about the English. He says they always want to be first in everything, and to dominate the earth. We know that the Confederacy of the United States, at the outbreak of the Civil War, appealed to the world on the ground that it had reached the most noble civilization the world had ever seen. The Japanese (73), we have heard, believe that they are of divine descent, and that they are supreme in manliness, loyalty and virtue. Every nation presumably has somewhere in the back of its mind a belief in its own supremacy in something, and has a sense of being or having something that makes it unique in the world.

We can now see in part how the idea of national honor arises out of the pride of nations. Certain fundamental feelings issue in the form of claims of superiority or supremacy, which may be either vague and unclear or very definite and self-conscious. This claim to superiority is precisely what we mean by national vanity. With this consciousness there goes a knowledge that these claims are in general not recognized by other nations, or that the prestige which the recognition of this superiority presupposes is at least insecure. Since, of course, these claims to supremacy cannot all be valid, there must be a great amount of inferiority parading in the world as superiority, many fictitious and presumably half-hearted assumptions that must not only be defended against outsiders, but must also be internally fortified. The pride and the conceit must be justified by the creation of a fictitious past, and of an impossible future. The motive of these falsifications on the part of race consciousness is clear. A nation is defending its claim to superiority by first establishing the claim in its own mind. These claims being really unfounded must be placed beyond criticism. They must be given a religious form. But also external forms and relations of an artificial nature must be established. Nations always hide behind barriers of formality. They make displays to one another. In this way the feeling and the appearance of superiority are kept up. Everything external to the group and not participating in its illusion of supremacy must be kept external to it. The belief which the nation itself assumes in regard to its virtue must be demanded from all outsiders with whom the nation has relations of any kind. At least the forms of the recognition of the claim must be insisted upon. This is the principle of national honor. It is a defense of certain ideal or fictitious values in which nations insist that others should recognize these claims and values. National honor is an artifice for defending a claim to superiority and concealing an actual inferiority, and it relates to values which, in general, do not exist. Its work is concerned with the maintenance of prestige.

These ideal values and the integrity of the appearance of supremacy, are sustained by the assumption of the forms of empire or the imperialistic attitude. Empire is indeed what is dramatized in the forms which nations assume, and this dramatization of imperial form is the background of all the ideas of honor. The maintenance of the integrity of the imperial form, as an ideal realization of the supremacy a nation assumes, becomes more important than even the securing of material possessions, for the imperial form is the very reality and existence of the nation. It is at bottom merely the assertion that its own mores are supreme and entitled to be universal. To admit that this is not so would be to become to some extent unreal, and to lose something essential to a sense of personality. Therefore, there can be thus far no intimate relations among nations. They must present to one another symbolic representations of themselves. It is their flag, the symbol of their place in the world and of their military prowess and courage; their ambassadors, the representatives of their dignity and the symbol of their pretended friendliness; their display of royal forms, which is the sign of their prestige and their imperial nature, about which they are most sensitive. Offenses to these symbols of what a nation assumes itself to be and demands that others should think it, tend to be mortal offenses, because they invade the sphere of what nations hold to be their reality. So the relations of nations to one another must, as we say, always be formal. Nations can allow no intimacy. Why they cannot one can readily see, for it is not difficult to detect the fear, the jealousy, and the inferiority motive behind all this assumption and display. Treitschke shows us what national honor may mean when it is carried out into a philosophy of state. Here is the idea of national self-consciousness at its greatest height. The state must not tolerate equals, or at least it must reduce the number of equals as much as possible. The state must be absolutely independent. The state, furthermore, cannot have too keen a sense of its dignity and position. A state must declare war if its flag is insulted, however slight the circumstances may be.

National honor, its codes and standards and its justification and vindication by combat, present so many resemblances to the practice of dueling and the idea of personal honor once so generally held by the upper class, and still existent where the military spirit prevails, that we ought to study the dueling code with reference to the psychology of war. There are psychological features that appear to be identical. The idea of personal honor is associated with a feeling of superiority that must be defended. Any offense or affront to the individual was a mortal offense. The superiority in question was first of all superiority of ancestry; it was this that constituted the value of the individual and set the standards that he must maintain. This superiority was to be judged not so much by conduct as by an assertion of it represented by certain external forms. The individual by his manners declared himself a gentleman, and laid claim to forms and considerations that must not be omitted in relations with him. The virtues he defended so rigorously did not exist as a rule in calculable or practical form, since they did nothing objective. They might be ornamental or purely fictitious. They existed in the form of claims, and the values assigned to them were arbitrary. The man declared himself possessed of superiority, and was ready uniformly to prove this claim by acts purporting to indicate willingness to die.

This code and belief belonged to a day when relations among individuals were simple and, so to speak, external. They were relations that were readily codified and made invariable, since they had no essential practical content or function. Manners were significant as substitutes for friendly relations, since the system was lacking in moral and social sentiments. Manners were a means of fitting together individuals who really belonged to no functioning whole, except when, for example, they might be united in military exploits. Everything was unitary and independent of everything else in this society.

Now this code and this philosophy of life have declined precisely to the extent that the conception of ideal human life has changed, from that of something ornamental and personal to that of something useful and moral. Life has become organized, and relations have become more practical, so that the values of conduct may now be estimated, and one no longer may maintain a claim to virtue based upon forms expressing intangible or subjective or unreal virtues. The virtues of a man in a democratic society are, indeed, more or less obvious and open. Pride of family, an ornamental mode of life, and a scorn of death are no longer necessary and sufficient guarantees of worth. Evidence of value is both possible and required; before value is admitted it must be shown. Self-defense in a legal and moral society are in the main superfluous, and the values of individuals are so changed that to justify them by the duel would seem out of place. Its service being to defend artificial or arbitrary claims to distinction, it ceases or it falls into disuse when the individual's reality and value come to depend upon his functional place in society. It would be highly illogical to put to test social values by a process that appears to have nothing but anti-social elements in it.

That nations exhibit the same type of relation toward one another that we find in dueling and its code seems to be clear, although we must always avoid pressing any analogy between individual and nation too far. A claim to superiority that is deep and irrational, and which appears on the surface as sensitiveness in regard to honor and vanity, keeps nations always in defensive attitudes, quite apart from the actual fear of aggression. This superficiality or at least externality of relations is the source of actual conflict. The forms employed to maintain these relations are obviously ornamental, are elaborations of the forms of courtesy among individuals, are little dramas of friendship, so to speak, little plays representing friendliness, while the diplomatic motives are simply to obtain everything possible, each nation for itself, without war, and to maintain prestige. These relations are substitutes for social feelings that do not exist. Generally speaking, nations are never friends. They never really share in anything. They are all highly conscious of their own prestige and dignity, and they always communicate with one another in a formal way. In it all, we see the signs of emotions and habits that extend far back to the beginnings of social life and indeed into animal life. The display which takes the form of social relations among nations, represented well by uniformed diplomats, is so plainly archaic and its real meaning so obvious that we can hardly fail to understand what it is all about. That the attitude is really defensive, and the purpose to keep up appearances before strangers, so to speak, can hardly be doubted.

The fact that these questions of national honor are in some respects detached from the main realities of political relations, and are, indeed, fictitious and exist in the region of the imagination, that they pertain to the conventional and ornamental sides of national life, might be supposed to indicate that they could easily be done away with, and all these fertile causes of war be eliminated. That must not be assumed. Vanity has deep roots. The ornamental in life symbolizes the real. It is the point of entrance to the deepest motives. Conventional and archaic forms do not die out, just because we discover that they are irrational and harmful, and the causes they serve seem to us to be unreal. This kind of unreality in the consciousness of nations is in fact the ideal for which nations live. Nations play at being great, and fight to defend their prestige—but this play, as we know, is oftentimes terribly real.