In many quarters of our society today it is taken for granted that nationalism is a malign force, just a step or two removed from Nazism. I take a different view: nationalism rightly understood can be a powerful positive force. Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle were nationalists, after all.
A similar view is taken by Paul Collier, economics and public policy professor at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, writing in the Times Literary Supplement:
“Shared identity based on nationalism has been so universally condemned as to have become unacceptable. Liberal disdain has been driven by fears that nationalism would incite a return to majority violence against minorities, and by the hope that nation-based governance can be superseded by multiculturalism and global citizenship. Neither the fears nor the hope are well founded.”
Collier argues that an “inclusive” nationalism, asserting the unity of all a nation’s citizens, is benign. Nationalism is only harmful when it is “divisive within the society” (as of course Nazism was). An inclusive nationalism is a positive good. “Nationhood is the only force that has proved to be sufficiently powerful to bind millions of people together in a sense of shared identity.”
Empirically, he believes that attacks on the allegedly malign nationalism of those who want to restrict mass immigrant or refugee inflows only serve to move a potentially benign nationalism in a malign direction.
“The belief of the Left that any questioning of the benefits of further rapid inflows of migrants would license hostility to past immigrants may be precisely wrong,” he writes. “[O]nly by removing recent fears of future uncontrolled immigration will natives again be relaxed about those already here.”
Bottom line: “by eschewing inclusive nationalism, liberals have handed the only force capable of uniting our societies to the charlatan extreme.” A thoughtful essay worth reading in full.
