Commentary
Few words in the English language have such migratory meanings as nationalism. It has changed again in our time. Today it suggests self-determination of peoples against a growing global hegemon in a range of areas from finance to agriculture to health to the uses of the military and surveillance.
Those who call themselves nationalists affirm the rights of a people in a defined geography to manage their own lives apart from impositions of the neoliberal order, which is deeply weakened as compared with a decade ago.
The Virtue of Nationalism
by Yoram Hazony, published in 2018. He argues that nationalism—a wide diversity of governing principles among sovereign nations—is essential for the preservation of freedom, tradition, and cultural meaning. It is not aggressive but merely protective, a barrier to impositions by international agencies, manipulative finance, and a howling secular media. The book became a sensation among conservatives mainly because it broke a taboo of the use of the term.
When I first read it, I was fully prepared to oppose the idea. Having been intellectually shaped in a period of the old consensus, I had presumed that all forms of nationalism have a toxic root as compared with the aspiration of universal human rights and global cultural norms. The experience of pandemic controls, imposed simultaneously the world over, shifted my own views because it was a paradigmatic case of the illiberalism of globalism. No longer did internationalism imply freedom; quite the opposite. This experience forced me to consider what I might have missed.
There were only three nations that resisted compulsory measures such as lockdowns, business closures, population masking, and then shot mandates. They were Sweden, Tanzania, and Nicaragua. In each case, the reason came down to some form of: that is not how we do that here. Sweden embraced traditional public health principles. Nicaragua said that lockdowns would harm their people. Tanzania rejected lockdowns because something seemed sketchy about the whole scheme.
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World media howled in fury at these three nations, hoping for failure from them all, as if to punish any country that dared to go a different way. All three ended up with similar or better health outcomes without having destroyed their citizens’ lives or trampling on rights and liberties in law. In practical terms, the COVID response wrecked the association many people (including me) held between globalism and freedom. Globalism today is more likely to be seen as a danger not only to sovereignty but also to the rights of peoples.
The controversy over nationalism began in the late 19th century as multinational empires began to fall apart and new nations were formed out of language groups, ethnicities, and religious groupings in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. To shore up the status of the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire under ecclesiastical control was the whole point of the calling of the first Vatican Council in 1869. The Pope sought affirmation of his own political infallibility in order to retain the Papal states, but that effort failed (the council only affirmed doctrinal infallibility under rare conditions). A century later, a second Vatican Council made the point and affirmed the rights of religious liberty.
What Is a Nation?
” (1882). The essay still holds up as a long history of the idea of the nation, and sets forth reasonable parameters concerning central principles of organizing them. He delineates five factors: religion, language, territory, heritage, and ethnicity (race), each of which can be benign or threatening depending on circumstances.
The essay was just what was needed at these times, and ended up having great influence following the Great War, which finally ended shattering the Habsburg and Prussia monarchies and codifying democracy as the preferred political system. Russia’s revolution introduced further trauma as that monarchy too collapsed. Looking back, it is a wonder that the UK monarchy served the period at all but it was only through making every compromise possible with parliamentary control plus the affirmation of religious liberty.
The self-determination of nations became the central slogan of postwar policy, a slogan pushed by the Woodrow Wilson administration as the map of Europe was redrawn in ways that proved unsustainable. Nonetheless, in those years, nationalism was regarded as benign and even necessary for peace, even as elites rallied around new globalist institutions such as the League of Nations as guarantors of the principle of non-aggression. Self-determination generally affirmed the right of a people to govern themselves through plebiscite.
Article 22 of the League of Nations said: “To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation …”
The controversies over nationalism were hardly finished, however, as democratic institutions in Germany collapsed following economic crisis and political upheaval. What took its place was the aggressive nationalism of the Nazi Party together with the rise of Imperial Japan, leading to a repeat and intensification of the first world war.
The nationalist idea was discredited after the German attempt to create a racial state led to a devastating world war. In the aftermath, globalism rose to prominence with the establishment of organizations like the IMF, GATT, World Bank, and the UN. Nationalism remained discredited for decades until the breakup of the Soviet Union reignited interest in national identity.
Since 1990, the struggle between globalism and nationalism has defined world politics, with Western democracies becoming battlegrounds for these ideologies. The rise of a new form of nationalism, exemplified by Brexit, has challenged globalist ambitions.
The question of whether this new nationalism is liberal is complex, as it is driven by factors like immigration concerns, industrial decline, and pandemic responses. Populist movements have gained momentum in response to these challenges, leading to a divide between those advocating sovereignty and those supporting the neoliberal order.
Freedom lovers must consider the role of nationalism in guaranteeing freedom, as the balance between national sovereignty and global cooperation continues to evolve. The eventual replacement of the neoliberal order with a world of sovereign nations seems inevitable based on current political trends.
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