Nationalism

NATIONALISM

Nationalism has existed in a variety of guises throughout the last two millennia. In the last 150 years however it has been one of the most important forces in political life in all societies with a body politic moulded by ideas of the modern nation state, that is to say almost all societies. At its kernel the notion of the modern nation state holds that a group of people all existing within certain defined boundaries have common interests derived in part from their common circumstances and from their common identity.

These interests are in theory represented and advanced by apparatuses of state and government such as the bureaucracy, executive, legislature, judiciary, and government authorised authorities. However, governments frequently justify their advancement of sectional interests and the exploitation or neglect of vulnerable peoples, both inside and outside their national boundaries, on the grounds that these actions will benefit the community of the nation as a whole. This concept of national community animated nationalism throughout the twentieth century.

Potent and powerful as it is national community is a construction rather than a reality. It is, as Benedict Anderson says, an "imagined community", where thousands and usually millions of people who never meet or interact in any meaningful way assume a common identity on the grounds that they happen to live within a particular set of borders.

This national identity is both implicitly and explicitly melded into the personal identities of most people. Done through education, socialisation, popular culture, high culture, myth, political discourse, symbols such as flags, and contrived rituals such as national holidays, this is constantly reinforced and assuages the deep human need to feel connected to something beyond themselves.

Along with this it furnishes personal identity with vital content that gives people a plausible, if vacuous, sense of their place in the world and in helping people feel a part of a large community can be an opiate for feelings of vulnerability. As both something people are immersed in from cradle to grave in most countries, especially 19th, 20th, and 21st century USA, and a contrived but nevertheless crucial aspect of personal identity, national identity is a most reliable tool of exploitation for by power elites, especially in dealing with people of other nations.

By far the most important product of nationalism is the 'them' and 'us ' distinction it makes between people. In the workings of politics this is imbued with tacit, unspoken assumptions that people not included in the national community have fewer rights than those who are, and sometimes no rights. Sometimes this extends to such people being seen, portrayed, and treated as 'non -people' as happened to refugees attempting to arrive in Australia by boat since the early 1990's. In the 1920s Indian thinker Rabindranath Tragore pilloried nationalism because it subsumed the real individuality and dignity of each human person to the abstract concepts of the nation and state.

Crucially, this distinction and its consequences have been standard practice in political discourse and activity for more than a century throughout the modernised world. Certainly in the United States of the 30's and 40's ideas that non Americans mattered less than Americans pervaded both American society and American government. At this time these norms shaped political thought and action along with anti- Semitism, race focussed social Darwinist thought and the enthusiasm for the promises of eugenics all so prominent in both American and industrial societies.

It is inconceivable that the 'them' / 'us' thinking of nationalism did not influence most American people, including most power elites in either seeing refugees fleeing the Nazis as 'non people' or as unworthy of concern. A matter worth considering is the precise influence of nationalism in this matter, something yet to be comprehensively elaborated, as well as a matter of contention.