The Value Of Nationality
At the present time, while the mass of men continue to accept the duty of patriotism unquestioningly, and historians for the most part are content to describe with some astonishment the immense development of nationalism in the past century, many voices are loudly raised for and against nationality. The great mass of men no doubt are swept away in the flood of patriotic feeling. But the war has also intensified the antipathy, and given increased force to the arguments, of those who decry nationality and deprecate patriotism—for these are but two different modes of expressing the same attitude.
There are two principal classes of the anti-nationalists. First, the philosophic anarchists, who would abolish all states and governments, as unnecessary evils, men like Kropotkin and Tolstoi. Secondly, the cosmopolitans, who, while believing in the necessity of government and even demanding more centralised administration, would yet abolish all national boundaries as far as possible, boundaries of geography, of language, race and sentiment, and all national governments, and would aim at the establishment of one great world state.
Though the aims of these two parties are so widely different, they use much the same arguments against nationalism. According to the anti-nationalist view, nationalism and the patriotism in which it is founded are a kind of disease of human nature, which, owing to the unfortunate fact that mankind has retained the gregarious instinct of his animal ancestors, inevitably breaks out as soon as any community begins to come into free contact and rivalry with other communities, and which tends to grow in force in a purely instinctive and irrational manner the more these contacts and rivalries increase.
The liability to patriotism is thus regarded as closely comparable with mankind’s unfortunate liability to drunkenness, to feel the fascination of strong liquor—as merely a natural and inevitable result or by-product of an unfortunate flaw in human nature—a tendency which will have to be sternly repressed and, if possible, eradicated, before men can hope to live in peace and tolerable security and to develop their higher capacities.
The fact that patriotism of some degree and form is universally displayed, and that it breaks out everywhere into heat and flame when certain conditions are realized, does not for them in any degree justify it; and it should not, they hold, reconcile us to its continued existence; they draw an indictment not merely against a whole people, but against the whole human race. They attack nationalism, firstly, by describing what in their opinion patriotism is and whence it comes; secondly, by describing what they believe to be the natural consequences and effects of nationalism.
The most common mode of attack is to identify patriotism with jingoism; they speak of “jelly-bellied flag-flappers” of flag-wagging and mafficking; they assert that the essence of patriotism is hatred and all uncharitableness towards other countries and their citizens.[93]
Less virulent is the criticism of those who, looking coldly upon patriotism, describe it as the mere blind expression of the working of the gregarious instinct among us, and as something therefore quite irrational, which must and will tend to disappear, as men become more enlightened and are guided more by reason and less by instinct.[94]
Again, it is said that patriotism is a form of selfishness and therefore bad; that it is a limitation of our sympathies, a principle of injustice; that it stands in the way of the realisation of universal justice, of the universal brotherhood of man, which is the ideal we obviously must accept and aim at. Or in other words, and this is the main indictment, it is alleged that patriotism and nationalism inevitably tend to produce war, that they keep the rival nations perpetually arming for possible wars and actually in commercial and economic war, if not at real war. And of course the evils of warfare and of such perpetual preparation for war are great and obvious enough in modern Europe. In support of this indictment, they point to the golden age of the Roman Empire, when the inhabitants of all its parts were content to sink their differences of race and country and were proud to proclaim themselves citizens of the Roman Empire; and they say that in consequence the civilised world attained then a pitch of prosperity and contentment never known before or since over any large area of the earth.
This is a formidable indictment, to which the exponents and advocates of patriotism have for the most part been content to reply by renewed exhortations to patriotism, by emotional appeals, by rhetoric, by the quotation of patriotic verses, the citation of the glorious deeds of our armies and soldiers now and in past times, by all the arts of persuasion and suggestion. As a fine example of this method one may cite Mr Stratford Wingfield’s History of British Patriotism, in which he not only confines himself to these methods, but shows a positive dislike and contempt for all attempts to apply reason and scientific method to the study of human affairs.[95] In maintaining this attitude, the advocates of patriotism give some colour to the claim of their opponents that patriotism or nationalism is essentially irrational, in the sense that it is incapable of justification by reason.