The rapid increase of national self-consciousness among the peoples of the world and the increasing part everywhere played by the sentiment for national existence are in short the dominant facts in the present period of world history; their influence overshadows all others.
Since, then, any nation exists only in virtue of the existence of the idea of the nation in the minds of the individuals of whom it is composed, and in virtue of the influence of this idea upon their actions, and since this idea plays so great a part in shaping the history of the world, it is absurd to maintain that the general will is but the blind resultant of the conflict of individual wills striving after private ends and unconscious of the ends or purposes of the nation. In opposition to such a view, we must maintain that a population seeking only individual ends cannot form or continue to be a nation, though all the other conditions we have noticed be present; that a nation is real and vigorous in proportion as its consciousness of its self is full and clear. In fact national progress and power and success depend in chief part upon the fulness and the extension, the depth and width of this self-consciousness—the accuracy and fulness with which each individual mind reflects the whole; and upon the strength of the sentiments which are centred upon it and which lead men to act for the good of the whole, to postpone private to public ends. And the same holds good of all the many forms of corporate life within the nation. Each individual’s sense of duty, in so far as it is a true sense of duty, and not a fictitious sense due merely to superstitious fear or to habit formed by suggestion and compulsion, is chiefly founded upon the consciousness of the society of which he forms a part, upon the group spirit that binds him to his fellows and makes him one with them. And the nations in which this national self-consciousness is strongest and most widely diffused will be the successful nations.
Reflect a little on these facts vouched for by General Sir Ian Hamilton. No soldier of the Japanese army, none even of the coolies, would accept anything in the shape of a tip even for honest services rendered, lest the purity of his motives should be sullied; and each man always went into action not merely prepared to die if necessary, but actually prepared and expecting to conquer and to die for the good and glory of his nation. He writes “Japanese officers have constantly to explain to their men that they must not consider the main object of the battle is to get killed[87].” And he goes on to show that they are not fanatics, are not inspired by any idea of the supernatural or by any hope of rewards after death, as is usually the case of the Moslem soldier who displays an equal recklessness of life. Surely, if in any nation the national consciousness could inspire and maintain all classes of its people in all relations of life to this high level of strenuous self-sacrifice for the welfare of the nation, that nation would soon predominate over all others, and be impregnably strong, no matter what defects of individual and national character it might display.
The idea of the nation is, then, a bond between its members over and above all those bonds of custom, of habit, of economic interdependence, of law and of self-interest, of sympathy, of imitation, of collective emotion and thought, which inevitably arise among a homogeneous people occupying any defined area; and it is the most powerful and essential of them all. As Fouillée put it, the essential characteristic of human society is that “it is an organism which realises itself in conceiving and in willing its own existence. Any collection of men becomes a society in the only true sense of the word, when all the men conceive more or less clearly the type of organic whole which they can form by uniting themselves and when they effectively unite themselves under the determining influence of this conception. Society is then an organism which exists because it has been thought and willed, it is an organism born of an idea[88].” In this sense Society has never yet been perfectly realized, but it is the ideal towards which social evolution tends.
National group self-consciousness plays, then, an all-important part in the life of nations, is in fact the actual, the most essential constitutive factor of every nation; and nationhood or the principal of nationality is the dominant note of world history in the present epoch; that is to say, the desire and aspiration to achieve nationhood, or to strengthen and advance the life of the nation, is the most powerful motive underlying the collective actions of almost all civilised and even of semi-civilised mankind; and the consequent rivalry between nations overshadows every other feature of modern world history, and is convulsing and threatening to destroy the whole of modern civilisation. It is surely well worthy of serious study. Yet, owing to the backward and neglected state of psychology, not only is this study neglected, but, as we have seen, some of our leading political philosophers have not yet even realized the essential nature of the problem; and many of the historians, economists and political writers are even further from a grasp of its nature. They have been forced by the prominence and urgency of the facts to recognise what they call the principle of nationality; and even now the majority of them are demanding that, in the European settlement and in the affairs of the world in general, the principle of nationality shall be given the leading place and the decisive voice. But they do not recognise that the understanding of this principle, this all-powerful political factor, is primarily and purely a psychological problem. We find them, in discussing the nature of nations and the conditions of nationality, perhaps mentioning the psychological view of nations as a curious aberration of a few academic cranks, from which they turn to discover the true secret of nationality in such considerations as geographical boundaries, race, language, history, and above all economic factors; they do not see that each and all of these conditions, real and important though they are and have been in shaping the history and determining the existence of nations, only play their parts indirectly by affecting men’s minds, their beliefs, opinions, and sentiments, especially by favouring or repressing the development in each people of the idea of the nation.
The all-dominant influence of the idea of the nation, I insist, is not a theory or a speculative suggestion, it is a literal and obvious fact. Let every other one of the favouring conditions of nationality, the geographical, historical, economic be realised by a population; yet, if that population has no collective self-consciousness, is not strongly actuated to collective volition by the group spirit, it will remain not a nation, but a mere aggregate of individuals, having more or less organic unity due to the differentiation and interdependence of its parts, but lacking that higher bond of unity which alone can ensure its stability and continuity, and which, especially, can alone enable it to withstand and survive the peaceful pressure or the warlike impact of true nations.
I am not at present defending nationality; I shall come back to the question of its value. I am now only concerned with the psychological problem of the nature and conditions of the development of national self-consciousness. I have been using the latter phrase and the phrase ‘the idea of the nation’ as a shorthand expression; but I must remind the reader that we have to beware of the intellectualist error of regarding ideas as moving powers; ideas as merely intellectual representations or conceptions have no motive power, they are in themselves indifferent. It is only in so far as the object conceived becomes the object of some sentiment that the conception of it moves us strongly to feeling and action. I must refer, therefore, to what I have written on the sentiments and the self-regarding sentiment[89]. Here I would insist on the strictness in this point of our analogy between the individual and the national mind. I have pointed out that the individual’s idea of himself only develops beyond a rudimentary stage in virtue of and in so far as this idea becomes the nucleus of a strong self-regarding sentiment which gives him an interest in himself, directs his attention upon his own personality and its relations, and impels him to strive to know himself. So that a developed individual self-consciousness never is and never can be a purely intellectual growth, but always involves a strong sentiment, a centering of emotional conative tendencies upon this object, the self. Exactly the same is true of nations.
Hence national self-consciousness can never develop except in the form of an idea of strong affective tone, that is to say a sentiment. Hence, whenever we speak of national self-consciousness or the idea of the nation as a powerful factor in its life, the sentiment is implied, and I have implied it when using these expressions hitherto. This national sentiment, which, if we use the word in its widest sense, may be called patriotism, is, like all the other group sentiments, developed by way of extension of the self-regarding sentiment of the individual to the group, and may be further complicated and strengthened by the inclusion of other tendencies. A point of especial importance is that this great group sentiment can hardly be developed otherwise than by way of extension of sentiments for smaller included groups, the family especially. For the idea of the nation is too difficult for the grasp of the child’s mind, and cannot, therefore, become the object of a sentiment until the intellectual powers are considerably developed. Hence the development of a family sentiment, or of one for some other small easily conceived group, is essential for the development in the child of those modes of mental action which are involved in all group feeling and action. For this reason the family is the surest, perhaps essential, foundation of national life; and national self-consciousness is strongest, where family life is strongest.
The development of the group spirit in general and of national self-consciousness in particular is favoured by, and indeed dependent upon, conditions similar to those which develop the self-consciousness of individuals. Here is another striking point of the analogy between the individual and the national mind. Passing over other conditions, let us notice one, the most important of all. The individual’s consciousness of self is developed chiefly by intercourse with other individuals—by imitation, by conflict, by compulsion, and by co-operation. Without such intercourse it must remain rudimentary. The individual’s conception of himself is perpetually extended by his increasing knowledge of other selves; and his knowledge of those other selves grows in the light of his knowledge of himself. There is perpetual reciprocal action. The same is true of peoples. A population living shut off, isolated from the rest of the world, within which no distinctions of tribe and race existed, would never become conscious of itself as one people and, therefore, would not become a nation. Some such conditions obtained for long ages among the pastoral hordes of the central Eurasian Steppes, which, so long as they remained there, have never formed a nation; and the same was true of the tribes of Arabia, until Mahomet impelled them by his religion of the sword to hurl themselves upon neighbouring peoples.