THE FUTURE OF PATRIOTISM
Patriotism is a retreat to what seems secure and protecting.
There is another way of looking at this matter which will appeal to those who are speculating upon the future of mankind. Any one who thinks about the possibility of a world state is stopped to-day by the fact that there is no world patriotism to support it. How are we to transfer allegiance from the national to the international State?
The answer depends upon an analysis of nationality. I have described it as a retreat to the authority and flavor of our earliest associations, as a defensive-offensive reaction to what seems to us secure. Our loyalty turns to what we associate with our protection and our ambitions. The reason we are not loyal to mankind in general or to The Hague or to internationalism is that these conceptions are cold and abstract beside the warmth of the country and place where we were born. Impressed by the fear of Russian invasion, the internationalism of German socialists vanished. Internationalism offered no protection. The German army did. To be a German was to be part of a tangible group with power; to be a citizen of the world was to be homeless everywhere.
Patriotism cries to-day for expansion.
And yet we find Canadians and Australians and New Zealanders fighting and dying for a thing called the British Empire, a vague, formless organization of one-quarter of the human race. What is it that has produced this super-national patriotism? Nothing less, it seems to me, than a realization that the protection and growth of the Dominions is bound up with the strength of the Empire. Home is the place where you are safe; loyalty reaches back to the source of your security. That is why danger has welded the British Empire instead of disintegrating it.
Imagine the Empire shattered, its navy gone, and the Dominions left to fetch for themselves. What would Canada and Australia do? They would, it seems to me, develop a great loyalty to the United States. They would not face the world alone. They would have to find some larger political organization in which they could feel secure.
In other words, loyalty overflows the national State because in the world to-day the national State is no longer a sufficient protection. People have got to a point in their development where isolation terrifies them. They want to be members of a stronger group. In Europe they turned to a system of alliances because no nation dared to stand alone. We have turned in this country in part to an understanding with Great Britain, in part to the Latin-American States. All of which proves that patriotism is not a fixed quantity, that it is not attached to the map as it was drawn when we were at school, and that it is not only capable of expansion, but is crying for it.
Fear has almost always played a large part in welding States together. The fear of England was a great argument for federal union under our Constitution; the sense of weakness in the presence of unfriendly neighbors undoubtedly helped to break down the separatism of the little German principalities. Just as the appearance of an enemy tends to blot out political differences within a nation, so it will often unite a number of nations. The rise of Germany had that effect on the Great Powers of Europe; the fear of her created a league almost coextensive with western civilization. It covered up the feud between France and England which comes down through the centuries; it jolted together an understanding with Russia, the great bogy of liberals.
It is not pleasant to think of fear as one of the most powerful forces that unify mankind. It would be more gratifying to think that cooperation was always spontaneous and free. But the facts will not justify this belief. The inner impulse to compose differences seems often to work most actively when there is pressure from without. Forced by danger to cooperate, men seem to discover the advantages of cooperation. The Germans are daily discovering good qualities in the Turks; the British are seeing deeper into the souls of Russians....