Two Mosaics of Nationalities: A Contrast
NATIONALITY is not nationhood, although it is the most important constituent of nationhood. Many nationalities may compose a nation (such is the case of the British, Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Turkish Empires, of the Swiss Republic, of our own Union), and then the relation between the nationalities will determine the strength or the weakness of the nation. Again, a single nationality may be divided among many nations (such is the case of the Poles, of the Serbs and other Slavs, of the Jews), and then the stability of the nations will be largely determined by their effect on the nationalities divided among them.
The Swiss Republic, for example, is a nation composed of three nationalities, two of which belong to powers at war with each other. These are the French and the German; the third is the Italian. Yet the nationhood of Switzerland is the most integral and unified in Europe to-day, because Switzerland is as complete and thorough a democracy as exists in the civilized world, and the efficacious safeguard of nationhood is democracy not only of individuals but of nationalities. The German, French and Italian citizens of the Swiss Republic are to-day under arms to defend the neutrality of their nation from possible violation by German, French or Italian belligerents, and in defending their nation, they are defending also the autonomy of each other's nationality. In Switzerland, nationhood, being democratic, is the safeguard and insurance of nationality.
Contrast Swiss nationhood with Austro-Hungarian nationhood. Austria-Hungary is the immediate and direct occasion of the great war by reason of the fact that, although she is a mosaic of nationalities like Switzerland, her government, instead of being a democracy, has in the long run been directed toward the control and exploitation of many nationalities by one or two. Hungary contains a population of seven million Magyars among twelve million Slavs; yet the Hungarians, having the economic and political upper hand, have sought to Magyarize by force and trickery this almost doubly greater and culturally equal population. They have tried to compel Magyar forms and standards in language, in literature, in history, the arts, the sciences, religion, law, in every intimate or remote concern of the daily life and national genius of their Slavic subjects. The result has been the steady disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian mosaic, the increasing use of force to hold it together, the corresponding increase of restlessness among the subject-peoples, plot and counterplot, the assassination of the Archduke, and the attack on Serbia, which precipitated the war. In this war Austria has come off worst of all the combatants, and for the same reason: the attempt to maintain the unity of a nation of nationalities by the force of one of them instead of by the democratic coöperation of all. In Austria-Hungary, nationality, having been exploited and suppressed, has been the enemy and destroyer of nationhood.
America A Commonwealth of Nationalities
IN this country the whole spirit of those institutions which constitute American nationhood makes for the liberation and harmonious coöperation of nationalities. This spirit is also a part of the Hebraic spirit, a part of the explicit program of our prophets, those champions and vindicators of social justice and international righteousness and peace; and this, significantly, is the spirit that literally inspired the democracy of our America.
For the democracy of America had its first articulate voicing in the Pilgrim Fathers and the Puritans of New England. These men and women, devoted to the literature of the Old Testament, and upheld by the ancestral memories of the Jews, were moved to undertake their great American adventure by the ideal of nationality. It was not because of an overwhelming oppression of body and soul that the Pilgrims adventured to America. It was not "freedom to worship God" that they sought. They had that in Holland. They sought freedom to be themselves, to realize their national genius in their own individual way. Their English manners, English speech, English history, and English loyalty were, in fact, more important to them than their Hebrew Bible. They used that as the spiritual pabulum which nourished their English corporate life. Their Calvinism was a reinterpretation of its prophetic nationalism expressed in the doctrine of the "chosen people"; their political institutions were a modification of the ideal political order it was supposed to reveal. As Cotton Mather narrates, his grandfather, John Cotton, found, on his arrival in New England, that the population was much exercised over the framing of a "civil constitution." They turned to him for help, begging "that he would, from the laws wherewith God governed his ancient people, form an abstract of such as were of a moral and lasting equity." So "he propounded unto them an endeavor after a theocracy, as near as might be to that which was the glory of Israel." Out of this beginning the democratic mood of America surges; in such conceptions the ideals which express the mood have their origins. These ideals are the conservation of nationality, and the equality of men before the inconceivable supremacy of their God. Hebraism and English nationality—these are the spiritual background of the American commonwealth.
Political freedom in America has tended to generate self-expression of each national group, and our country is to-day, broadly speaking, a great coöperative commonwealth of nationalities, British, French, German, Slavic, Jewish, each freely developing, in so far as it is self-conscious, its national genius, its language, literature and art in its own characteristic way as its best contribution to the civilization of America as a whole,[C] realizing in this way the ideal of the democracy of nationalities, of international comity and coöperation which our prophets were the first to formulate.
American nationhood, thus, is in the way of becoming what Swiss nationhood fully is, the liberator and protector of nationality; its democracy is its strength, and its democracy is "hyphenation." "Hyphenation" may, it is true, become perverse. As an expression of the coöperation of nationality with nationality in the life of the State, it is inevitable and good; as an attempt to subordinate all nationalities to one, to use all for the advantage of one, it is partial, undemocratic, disloyal. Our nation is a democracy of nationalities having for its aim the equal growth and free development of all. It can take no sides. To require it to take sides, German or Anglo-Saxon, Slavic or Jewish, is to be untrue to its spirit and to pervert its ideal.
The Renaissance of Nationality in the Past Century