‘Nationalism is a Recipe for Peace and International Order.’ Discuss

Note: One of my duties in the various places where I teach is to show students how to write essays – something most young people are not nowadays taught to do. What I like to do in class is to choose a question at random, discuss possible approaches, and then dictate an answer one paragraph at a time. Some of these answers are very short. Some are just notes. Some amount to small dissertations. In this latter case, the students take turns at looking on-line for the information we decide is needed. It they cannot find it, I show them how to change the structure of what has already been written, or to strike out in a new direction.

It is a “writing masterclass” approach that makes use of my own strengths, and is often a welcome alternative to formal teaching. It fills up a long morning session. Everyone learns something, and the more attentive will improve their final grades by at least one step.

Here is an example of the finished product. Do not take it as a statement of personal opinion. It is an answer produced for a specific question, and it bears in mind what a possibly unknown examiner will appreciate, and what can be written to incorporate the sources found in class. SIG

PS – If anyone wants to engage my services as a teacher of these skills, please click on the image to the left. Though they are my niche subjects, Greek and Latin are not my exclusive focus as a teacher. I do much else besides.

To what extent is nationalism compatible with international peace and order?

The short answer is possibly yes and very often no. It depends very much on which kind of nationalism is under discussion. A minimal definition of nationalism is the belief that different groups of human beings exist, marked off from each other by some mixture of race, religion, language, history, culture, or inherited memory, and that each of these groups ought to enjoy assured territory and control of the state machinery within that territory. This definition says nothing in itself about peace or war, or about international order and disorder. Nationalism can be attached to liberalism, conservatism, socialism, imperialism, even racial mysticism. It can be moderate and defensive, or expansive and messianic. That is why the question cannot be answered with a flat yes or no.

Even so, if one looks at the historical record with any care, the balance of evidence is not encouraging. There are certainly forms of nationalism that can be reconciled with peace and order, and there are cases in which national self-determination has reduced conflict. But nationalism carries within itself such strong tendencies towards exclusion, grievance, border disputes, and myth-making that it has more often undermined peace than secured it. Liberal nationalism is the most respectable version of the doctrine, and even that, when examined closely, proves less innocent than its admirers suppose.

To begin with the strongest case in favour of nationalism, liberals have often been nationalists. Indeed, for much of the nineteenth century, nationalism and liberalism were widely seen as natural allies. Men such as Garibaldi in Italy, Mazzini before him, and later Woodrow Wilson in the United States, thought that multinational empires were unstable, repressive, and prone to aggression. A people ruled by aliens, or by a dynastic structure indifferent to nationality, could not be genuinely free. Therefore, the way to create peace and order in Europe was to replace the old empires—Austrian, Ottoman, Russian—with self-governing national states. Once each people had its own government, and once that government was constitutional and representative, the grounds of conflict would diminish. Liberal institutions at home would produce freedom, trust, and moderation. These in turn would produce an enlightened foreign policy abroad.

This is not a foolish argument. There is obvious force in the claim that states are likely to be more stable if the governed feel some common loyalty to one another. A population that shares language, history, and inherited sympathies may be more willing to accept democratic outcomes, to compromise within one political system, and to pay taxes to a government seen as its own. From that point of view, nationalism can indeed assist peace by creating states that are internally cohesive and therefore externally moderate.

There are examples that seem to support this argument. Switzerland is often cited, though it complicates the theory as much as it supports it, because it is not a nation-state in any simple sense. But it does show that a strong shared patriotism, even across languages and confessions, can underpin stability. Norway, after its separation from Sweden in 1905, developed as a peaceful and liberal national democracy. Italy, though unified by war and intrigue as much as by popular feeling, is another case where nationalism was associated with liberation from foreign domination and with eventual constitutional statehood. One may add the peaceful separation of Britain and most of Ireland after 1922, at least if one ignores for a moment the ugliness of the process and the later history of Northern Ireland. The Czech-Slovak split in 1993 is a still cleaner example: two peoples decided they were better apart than together, and the result was not war but the so-called Velvet Divorce, followed by relatively friendly relations. In these and other cases, national separation or national unification appears to have promoted order rather than destroyed it.

If one stopped there, liberal nationalism would look highly persuasive. It would appear to say to the world: let each people have its own state, bind those states by law and diplomacy, place them in multinational organisations such as the League of Nations or the United Nations, and peace will follow because no one will any longer need to fight for self-government. The old imperial order, with its arbitrary borders and foreign rulers, will disappear. In its place will arise a concert of democratic nation-states, secure at home and therefore peaceable abroad.

The difficulty is that this attractive picture rarely matches the facts on the ground. The first and most obvious problem is that national and state boundaries very often conflict. Peoples are not arranged in neat territorial blocks like colours on a school map. They are mixed together, layered over one another, scattered by migration, conquest, religion, and commerce. It is therefore usually impossible to draw clean borders. Every nation-state contains minorities. Every proposed frontier leaves some people on the wrong side of it. A border that seems just to one group will look like robbery to another.

This is not an incidental defect in nationalism. It is one of its permanent conditions. Before 1945, there were large German minorities scattered across Eastern Europe. These minorities could be treated as hostages, as suspect populations, or as excuses for intervention by neighbouring Germany. The same general problem existed, and still exists, in many other places. The ethnic map of Africa bears little correspondence to the borders imposed by colonial powers. The result has been a long history of civil war, repression, and secessionist conflict. Yugoslavia is another well-known example. On paper it was a state of South Slavs; in practice it contained multiple peoples with different religions, scripts, historical memories, and external loyalties. Once Communist coercion weakened, the state dissolved into bloodshed.

Because clean borders are so difficult to achieve, the practical creation of nation-states has very often involved coercion. Indeed, it has often involved crimes that liberal nationalists prefer not to notice. Greece and Turkey after 1922 are a classic case. National peace was purchased by mass expulsion. Populations that had lived intermingled for centuries were sorted by religion and driven into separate states. The exchange may have reduced one kind of conflict in the long term, but it was not liberal, and it was certainly not peaceful for those who suffered through it. The Irish case, also, is less tidy than liberal nationalism likes to admit. The creation of the Irish Free State did not solve the national question so much as relocate it, leaving behind Northern Ireland as a permanent sore. The later troubles there were a reminder that partition may freeze conflict rather than end it.

The former Yugoslavia gives the same lesson in a harsher form. Once competing nationalisms took hold, every village became a map argument, every mixed district a provocation, and every minority a fifth column. The result was ethnic cleansing, siege warfare, concentration camps, and massacre. That was not an accidental collapse of an otherwise rational doctrine. It was nationalism operating in a region where peoples were too entangled for self-determination to be achieved without violence.

Nor is outright cleansing the only method by which nation-states make themselves homogeneous. There is also forced assimilation. The Lusatian Sorbs in Germany have long been pressured by a larger national culture. The Basques in France and Spain have often faced suppression of language and identity. The Welsh in the United Kingdom were for generations encouraged to think their own language an embarrassment and their own traditions an obstacle to advancement. None of this is genocide, and much of it is milder in modern times. But it shows how even respectable nation-states tend to dislike internal diversity. The theory says that a nation-state expresses the will of a people. The reality is often that a state manufactures a people by rewarding conformity and eroding local particularities.

There is also the grimmer list of expulsions and massacres. The expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe in 1945 was justified by many as necessary for future peace. Perhaps it did reduce one future danger. But it was carried out on a gigantic scale and with much cruelty. Again, one may say that order was eventually established. But if the price of national order is the removal of millions from their homes, one should be careful before calling the doctrine peaceful.

Looked at in detail, therefore, liberal nationalism is usually not very liberal. It speaks the language of consent and self-determination, but it often depends on selective history, pressure on minorities, coercive border changes, or the hardening of cultural distinctions that were previously more fluid. It promises peace, but it tends to begin by asking: who really belongs here? That question is not one that usually ends in tranquillity.

If even liberal nationalism is problematic, aggressive nationalism is much worse. Once nationalism becomes expansionist, racialised, or civilisational in tone, its compatibility with international peace all but disappears. The clearest example is Germany between 1933 and 1945. Hitler could, up to a point, present himself as acting within the language of national self-determination. The union with Austria had obvious support among many German-speakers, and there was at least an arguable liberal-nationalist case for revising the status of the Sudetenland in 1938. Had German policy stopped there, historians would still argue about whether it had been wicked or merely rough justice after Versailles. But Hitler did not stop there. He wanted Lebensraum. He believed in German racial supremacy. He treated nations not as equal claimants to self-government, but as higher and lower forms of human stock. The result was war, conquest, enslavement, and mass murder on a continental scale. Aggressive nationalism of this type is plainly incompatible with peace or order unless one defines order as the silence of the graveyard.

One may say the same, though with proper distinctions, of Russian expansion after 1944. Soviet ideology spoke of world revolution and class struggle. But Russian conduct in Eastern Europe also owed much to older nationalist habits: paranoia about invasion, insistence on buffer states, and a willingness to dominate neighbouring peoples in the name of security. Again, nationalism here did not create peace. It created an imperial glacis enforced by tanks, secret police, and occasional massacre.

The nineteenth-century European empires were likewise driven in part by nationalist ideas, especially once nationalism fused with racial theory. Europeans told themselves they were civilising inferior peoples, but beneath the rhetoric lay national prestige, competition for power, and the vanity of conquest. The result was the subjugation of most of the globe. Such empires may have maintained a kind of order, but it was not international order between equals. It was domination. American Manifest Destiny provides a related example. It wrapped expansion in providential language and national mission. The result was the annexation of half Mexico and the destruction of much of the indigenous population. It may have created a larger and stronger United States. It did not advance peace in any morally serious sense.

At this point it may be objected that I am selecting only the worst forms of nationalism, and that any ideology can become destructive when detached from moral restraint. That is true. But the trouble with nationalism is that the move from the moderate to the aggressive form is often easier than its defenders admit. If one begins by saying that a people ought to have its own state, one soon meets awkward questions. What if part of that people lies outside the state? What if minorities inside the state refuse assimilation? What if the territory thought necessary for national flourishing is presently occupied by others? What if historical memory points to former borders larger than present ones? The doctrine is full of latent grievances. A patriot with a map is rarely harmless for long.

There is also a deeper problem. Nationalism encourages people to think politically in blocs of inherited loyalty. It takes a natural human tendency—the preference for one’s own—and raises it into a principle of statecraft. Human beings are, in many respects, pack animals. They do tend to prefer living among their own. There is nothing surprising in this, and perhaps nothing shameful either. The difficulty is that this preference does not of itself tell us how to organise mixed regions, how to manage minorities, or how to restrain ambition. Once political legitimacy is attached to nationality, every demographic fact becomes politically charged. Census returns become strategic documents. Schools, churches, language laws, and birth rates become instruments of national survival. Peace then depends not on law alone, but on the highly uncertain virtue of rival national elites.

For this reason, one may argue—though the argument is unfashionable—that the most stable political structures have often been multinational empires rather than nation-states. The Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Habsburg monarchy all ruled over multiple peoples for centuries. They were not liberal, and they were not free from violence. No sane person would describe them as ideal. But they had one advantage over nationalism: they did not require every people to have a separate sovereign state, nor every frontier to match an ethnic map. They could tolerate overlap, layered loyalties, and legal pluralism. They often managed diversity by hierarchy and compromise rather than by homogenisation. Their collapse, especially in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, did not usher in a golden age of national self-determination. It more often produced border disputes, expulsions, and permanent instability.

This is not to say that empires are morally preferable in all respects, still less that peoples never have the right to govern themselves. It is only to say that nationalism should not be flattered with an historical record it does not possess. Where it succeeds, it often succeeds because circumstances are unusually favourable: populations already fairly separated, elites willing to compromise, neighbours not too predatory, and minorities not too large or too embittered. Where these conditions are absent, nationalism is more likely to produce war than peace.

In conclusion, nationalism is only intermittently compatible with international peace and order. In its moderate liberal form, and under favourable conditions, it can produce stable states and even reduce friction, as in Norway, the Czech-Slovak separation, or to some extent the settlement between Britain and the Irish Free State. But these cases are not the rule. More often, nationalism runs into the hard fact that peoples are mixed and histories are disputed. The attempt to fit state boundaries to national identities then leads to assimilation, expulsion, cleansing, or war. In its aggressive form, nationalism is plainly one of the great destroyers of peace. Even in its liberal form, it is less liberal, and less peaceable, than its admirers like to suppose. The doctrine begins from a human reality, but it has a very poor record of turning that reality into a just and stable international order.

 

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,