Nativism, Nationalism, and Patriotism by Eamon Doyle

Author:Eamon Doyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing
Published: 2020-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

“Pluralizing Nationalism, Or Why ‘New Patriotism’ Might Not Be an Answer,” by Slavica Jakelić, Religion and Its Publics, June 20, 2018. Reprinted by permission.

George Orwell, to whom Dionne refers, famously argued that patriotism is about a devotion to a place and a way of life, while nationalism is about power and blind loyalty to one’s country that places it beyond good and evil. Philosophers tell us that patriotism is about the love of country, and nationalism is about love of one group of people with whom one shares ethnic or historical bonds. They also instruct us that patriotism can be shaped in accord with virtue and morality. It can be, to use Igor Primoratz’s term, “ethical,” asking whether policies and institutions of one’s country are just, domestically and internationally. Nationalism, we are told, is always about special love for one’s people. Here, loyalty precedes morality and attachments precede moral concerns.

As with any neat list of conceptual distinctions, the problem with this one is that even those who elaborate it often blur the differences between patriotism and nationalism, sometimes conflating the two notions altogether. (Dionne, for example, moves without explanation from patriotism to the “national culture we share and shape.”) The second problem with patriotism-nationalism distinctions is how they fuse conceptual thinking with the act of political moralizing: nationalism is emptied of any ethical force while patriotism is imbued with moral content in ways that all to easily get us to claims that we are patriots while they are nationalists. There is yet another difficulty with neat patriotism-nationalism differentiation, this one directly related to the patriotism advocates’s desire to shape a response to nativism, a response that allows both for plurality and bonds of identity. This problem emerges from the view of patriotism as individualistic, reasonable, and open to contestations, and of nationalism as collectivistic, visceral, and exclusivist.

Despite the messiness or impossibility of patriotism-nationalism distinctions—as conceptually discussed or practically enacted—I want to suggest that patriotism is always posited as an ethical ideal in terms of a capacity to reconcile one’s responsibility to her community and the sovereignty of the individual. The concern with individualism, against all forms of collectivisms, is the background of Orwell’s understanding of nationalism; individualism is also at stake in the discussions of philosophers, political theorists, and public figures mentioned here. They know that something is needed to bind individuals into a meaningful democratic polity but reject nationalism seeing it as collectivistic and ultimately violent.

Such concerns about nationalism are justified: nothing taught me more about nationalism’s hegemonic and violent faces than the brutality of the 1990s war in my own country, Croatia. Yet, this does not change my doubts about the purported moral promise of patriotism and its superiority over nationalism, and my earlier invitation to pluralize our thinking about nationalism. Hence my questions:

Can one’s love of a place bind an individual to others, into a meaningful democratic political community that has long been divided? Can one’s pride about one’s country’s ideals heal divisions that result also from

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