Nationalism: Empirical and Normative Issues

Professor Neil J. Mitchell

Nationalism

“Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country”

• President John F Kennedy

Empirical and Normative

• Empirical or Normative?

• You ought not to trust anyone over 30

• SNP voters are more likely to male than female.

• Are Italians more nationalistic than Americans?

• Is nationalism good for a nation?

Empirical Issues - Outline

• Definition and Origins

• Boundaries

• Evolution and Challenges

• Inertial forces

• Measuring Nationalism

• Explaining Nationalism

Empirical Issues

• Origins of the Nation State– Definition of terms

• Nation• State

– Fit together more or less exactly• Iraq is a “less exactly” case

• Boundaries of nation-states

Political Evolution and Transitory Forms: Nation State

• Relatively recent European development– Economic and political forces

• Challenges to the Nation State– Technological – Economic– Cultural– Organisational and non-state actors

Inertial forces

• Those with a stake in the present

• Emotional attachmentBreathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land!

Walter Scott

Pervasiveness of nationalism

• Are we all nationalists?

• Is it more intense in Belgium or the Balkans?

How to measure it?

• Flags on cars

• Pay taxes voluntarily

• Tax rates in democracies

• Tax avoidance/corruption

• Volunteer army

• Voting and political participation

• Ask people

Variation in Nationalism

• Civic Culture Data (1959/60 except France) from Almond and Verba (1963) and John Ambler, Trust in Political and Nonpolitical Authorities in France Comparative Politics Oct 1975

Civic Culture Data

How to explain nationalism?

• “one nation under God”

• Inglehart Modernisation (1997) 1990 data

Explaining nationalism

• Links to other core values

• Experience of nationalism– What has your country done to you recently?

• Do we teach nationalism – pledges, anthems, war cemetery visits, British values etc?

• What have been the costs/benefits of nationalism in country X?

• Who amongst us is more nationalistic?

Smith and Kim, National Pride in Comparative Perspective Int’l Journal of Public Opinion Research 2006

Smith and Kim, National Pride in Comparative Perspective Int’l Journal of Public Opinion Research 2006

Demographics and Nationalism, Smith and Kim

• What predicts higher levels of nationalism?

• Age – older

• Education– Less educated

• Gender– Male rather than female

Normative Issues With Nationalism

• Ought we to be Nationalists?

• Perspectives on Love of Country

• Sneaky Nationalism

• Rescuing Nationalism

• Non-Toxic Nationalism: J.S. Mill

Love of Country

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever EnglandRupert Brooke (1887-1915)

Love of CountryBreathes there the man, with soul so dead,Who never to himself hath said,This is my own, my native land!…Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust, from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonor'd, and unsung. O Caledonia! stern and wild, …..

Walter Scott (1771-1832)

Or “the last refuge of scoundrels”

If the war is lost, the people will be lost also. It is not necessary to worry about what the German people will need for elementary survival. On the contrary, it is best for us to destroy even those things. For the people has proved itself to be weaker, and the future belongs exclusively to the stronger people of the East. Those who will survive this struggle will in any case be inferiors, for the good are already dead.”

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

• Sneaky Nationalism

• Why not just abandon nationalism?

• Rescuing Nationalism– Civic versus ethnic– Non-toxic nationalism

Non-toxic nationalismWe need scarcely say that we do not mean nationality in the vulgar sense of the term; a senseless antipathy to foreigners; an indifference to the general welfare of the human race, or an unjust preference of the supposed interests of our own country; a cherishing of bad peculiarities because they are national or a refusal to adopt what has been found good by other countries. ... We mean a principle of sympathy, not of hostility; of union, not of separation. We mean a feeling of common interest among those who live under the same government, and are contained within the same natural or historical boundaries. We mean, that one part of the community shall not consider themselves as foreigners with regard to another part; that they shall cherish the tie which holds them together; shall feel that they are one people, that their lot is cast together

John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic (1843), Book VI, Chapter 10. 

An ideology?

• System of belief – the whole or “people” – individual sacrifice not selfishness – loyalty to “imagined community”

• Worldly focus and has a programme of action

• Justifies and legitimates institutions and policies

• Intense, durable and pervasive idea

Or Not

• Just a “loyalty to a land mass”– A belief more than a system of beliefs

• Spawns heterogeneous parties/programmes– SNP to BNP

• No great philosopher