Nationalism has a bad name. For many Americans, mention of the word summons up visions of Hitler and Nazism. Some condemn nationalism as thoughtless bragging that your nation is better than others, which should be discouraged just as second graders are told not to brag lest they hurt classmates’ feelings.
Historical and international perspective is supplied by one of the conveners of the well-attended conference of “National Conservatism” in Washington last month, Israeli think tank head Yoram Hazony, in his 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism Hazony argues that nationalism first emerged in the northwest corner of Europe, in Tudor England and in the Dutch republic rebelling against the overlordship of the King of Spain. These were small maritime nations, growing rich through international trade even while threatened by massive monarchies. In the years of religious wars they were the most religiously diverse and tolerant polities in Christendom.
Hazony contrasts nationalist states with what he calls imperialist polities, which include international organizations from the Holy Roman Empire to the United Nations, as well as Nazi Germany, not just to govern Germany but to conquer untermensch peoples, and the Soviet Union. As an Israeli, he is very much aware that his successful nationalist state is under constant attack from such imperialist bodies.
Nationalist states, he argues, can provide peaceful havens for those of differing cultural views and economic interests who share a common citizenship. They will, he argues, protect their individual liberties and will (here some readers will disagree) abjure external conquests. “The best political order that is known to us,” he writes, “is an order of independent national states.”
This is congruent with the words of two of President Trump’s thoughtful set speeches, delivered in Warsaw, Poland in July 2017 and in Normandy on D-Day this year. In them, he pays generous tribute to other nations’ nationalisms and how they have advanced human liberty. It is congruent also with the rhetoric of Boris Johnson as he tries to give effect to British voters’ decision to leave what in Hazony’s terminology is an increasingly imperialistic European Union.
Hazony seems to me on solid ground in arguing that nationalism, rightly understood, can be a force for good. Trump’s words on D-Day, and those of presidents before him on earlier anniversaries there, should remind us that the Allies who cooperated in that enterprise were all led by nationalists — America’s Franklin Roosevelt, Britain’s Winston Churchill, France’s Charles de Gaulle, and the leaders of Canada, Poland, Norway, and Australia as well.
One might add that an ally left unmentioned, the Soviet Union’s dictator Josef Stalin, portrayed himself, temporarily, as a nationalist rather than a Communist, to rally his people to fight on the Eastern Front, even as democratic nationalists worked together to open the front on the West.
The nationalist sensibility is an important part of domestic partisan politics. In an article I wrote for the Public Interest in 1993, I argued that the political parties and political leaders of Western democracies partake, in varying proportions, of four different dispositions — religious, socialist, liberal, and nationalist.
Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Religious parties come to grief when people abandon religion (like the Christian Democrats in largely secular Western Europe), and they struggle to amass majorities in religiously diverse nations like the United States.
Socialist parties’ weakness is that socialism just doesn’t work. When that became apparent in Britain, Margaret Thatcher controversially rolled back postwar Labour Party policies in the 1980s. More quietly, Scandinavian nations rolled back their welfare states in the 1990s. Venerable social democratic parties have now all but disappeared in Germany, France, and Italy.
Liberal parties — liberal in the sense of secular and free market, as in the nineteenth-century — have sometimes governed effectively but proven incapable of defending themselves against destruction. Britain’s Liberals, dominant in 1916, were ground to bits between the Conservatives and Labour in 1924. The dominant secular party in Italy was swept from power by Mussolini’s brownshirts in 1922 and the one in France by Hitler’s troops in 1940.
Only parties with a strong nationalist strain have proved to be lasting — including, over most of their histories, America’s Democratic and Republican parties. Today we’re told that Trump’s Republicans are dangerously and self-destructively nationalist. Headline speakers at Hazony’s conference — tech mogul Peter Thiel, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, national security adviser John Bolton, Sen. Josh Hawley — seemed to disagree. And many observers are wondering whether Democratic presidential candidates’ enthusiasm for open borders is a politically hazardous trashing of a sensible nationalism, long essential for political success.
