Nationalism

Like roguefrog quoted already, Orwell described the concept of nationalism as it’s being described here. And that was, what, 80 years ago?

I cringe when I hear people say that Canada is the best country in the world. Anyone who says that has obviously never travelled anywhere. I used to be the guy who had a huge Canada flag on his wall in university and would put a Canada flag patch on my backpack. Now it seems a little gauche to me. It doesn’t help that the anti-vaxxer crowd seems to have co-opted the Canadian flag, much like MAGA has done with the US one.

You want historical context?

Nationalism was at the heart of both World Wars and pretty much all genocides, ever.

Sorry for the Godwin, but Hitler and his gang in the beer halls of Munich were ODing on it. “Germany will rise again!”

Reading the first message again, I don’t see the unfairness. Roguefrog is literally starting off with “nationalism is a bad word”. It’s a question of words right from the start, not concepts, and nobody is allowed to question his definition?

Sure, that’s a really interesting question. So is the tendency of nationalist movements to degenerate after achieving their initial goals.

But it seems that this isn’t the thread for that. This is the thread to argue about whether an unwavering belief in the superiority of your country is good or bad. I don’t know who you’re expecting to pick the other side of that argument though, so it’ll probably be a short one.

By all means, but I understood we were talking about two very different concepts.

Nationalism in terms of only self-determination and Nationalism in terms of how it affects policy and attitudes of people, especially today. It’s very zero-sum us vs them. Winners and losers.

I mean if you want to talk specific policies I think were heavily influenced by Nationalism in America in recent times: Trumps Mulism ban and cruel immigration practices easily. Any sort of strong anti-immigration or anti-refugee policy is inherently Nationalistic. The CCPs Uyghur concentration camps again, another contemporary example. “They are Uyghur (and not Han Chinese) and that is good enough reason for them to be in those camps!” A Nationalist would say.

So yeah, Nationalism is a bad word, in that it carries loads of negative energy, throughout history, past and current present.

But I do agree on one thing, spinning it as a good thing is much harder to do.

I guess another way I think about it is,

Nationalism includes racism, xenophobia, pure bloodlines, etc but it is on a National scale, and people can be supportive or tolerate this type of national mindset including policy up to and including genocide.

This is fair, but my objections came later in the thread where the idea being pushed was that nationalism essentially began and ended in the nineteenth century and any other use was some bastardization of the term. Nationalism is very much alive and a current concern so any definition that at minimum acknowledges that is going to be preferable to one that locks it into a specific moment.

Good for Orwell, but is there any reason to believe his description of nationalism is exhaustive?

You are excluding whole dimensions of the word here, which is why this whole thead seems IMO to have started off on the wrong foot.

If you wanted to assert that “believing your country/people are better than all others is bad,” then I can’t imagine anyone around here disagreeing, but also don’t find it a very interesting discussion and I will for the last time register an objection to an IMO incomplete definition of the word.

Also, saying stuff like “you want history? Hitler!” doesn’t impress me because I can throw out the names of people who were motivated by nationalist ideals to do good things, culturally and otherwise. You can argue that on balance the evil outweighs the good, but your opening salvo lacked such nuance.

So your goal in redefining the word is to make it toxic, right? But the only people you’re hurting by doing it are the people who need the word for its actual meaning.

But if/when the word becomes toxic (or maybe it already has), the people you’re actually worried about will not be harmed. They will just move to co-opt some other positive word. For example the word patriot, which you like so much despite it being what that January 6th rabble seems to self-identify as. Why are you legitimising them by taking about how virtuous patriotism is?

(And this is not theoretical. Where I come from, no serious political party would ever name themselves as the patriotic party, because it would be seen as overtly fascist due to historical reasons.)

No, it doesn’t. If you look at most currently existing (legit) nationalist movements in the West that hasn’t achieved its goal of independence, their policies and opinions are more like main stream social democracy. Not death squads and concentration camps.

Again, if the concern is that xenophobia is bad, or racism is bad, or an obsession with purity of bloodlines is bad, just say so. Of course they are all bad! By instead aiming at an innocent proxy word, all you’ve managed to do is make those racist xenophobes more credible.

Kurdish nationalism seems pretty positive, right? It would be great for them to have a country where they aren’t massacred by the hundreds of thousands by their Imperial overlords. But to you it appears categorically evil.

[struggling not to make a joke about Polish nationalism]

Hm. Making a thread to end a conversation and not start one. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton…

The sort of strategy you’d see in nationalist circles even ;)

You can look at basically all political thought since the 40’s.

https://www.cato.org/blog/uncomfortable-truths-azar-gats-nations-long-history-deep-roots-political-ethnicity-nationalism

Gat’s second claim is a definition of nationalism that is easy to understand and makes immediate sense. Gat defines nationalism as political ethnicity. In other words, nationalism is just identity politics taken to its logical extreme of one ethnicity dominating a state. His definition distinguishes nationalism from patriotism, is consistent with my observation of nationalist political movements that seem to rely on support from narrow slices of demographics, and seeks to define who is a “real” member of the nation.

I recommend this one simple trick to understand nationalism as written in Hazony’s book: cross out the word “culture” wherever it appears and replace it with “ethnicity.”

That’s Cato. Who have members who would argue nationalism is good (and have!).

There is nothing particularly controversial at all about these statements. Defined in these terms, it sounds like little more than simply defending nationality or national sovereignty, which is why Lowry, Hazony, and others insist their definition of nationalism has nothing to do with the most virulent forms involving ethnicity, race, militarism, or fascism.

Here’s the problem. I suppose any of us can take any tradition that has a definite history and simply redefine it to our liking. We could then give ourselves permission to castigate anyone who doesn’t agree with us as “misunderstanding” or even libeling us.

I picked right-wing sources since it’s usually right-wingers that defend Nationalism.

Nationalism is bad. It’s the other side of patriotism’s coin. The side that says it’s okay to kill or oppress people because they’re different. It’s better to kill a million Others than lose a single Pure person.

In one of the Civs researching Nationalism unlocked Fascism as a government type. That wasn’t random. It’s because Nationalism leads to fascism. And it’s not “redefining” a word. If anything saying “Nationalism is okay” is the redefining. Again, you can cite all of political discourse for the last hundred years or so. It’s only very recently that people have said otherwise. And those people are fascists and protofascists.

Nope. It already has been for a long while before I even existed. It is pretty clear from the beginning you were talking about a completely different thing entirely, which is fine.

I speak of Nationalism as it is applied to an existing nation and how it leads to bad policy, up to and including genocide. You are talking about self-determination. This is the current impasse.

It should also unlock Jingoism if you specialized in the Military tech tree.

I don’t really see the problem with saying

there is a thing we call nationalism (promotion of one’s nation-state, or even one’s ethnicity, over all others) and that thing is very bad, despite that fact that we also call some other thing nationalism (the desire for an end to the subjugation of your putative nation-state by others) and that other thing is not so bad, maybe even good.

Just make it clear you’re talking about the former, not the latter, and then have the conversation about the former. Words are funny things; they can mean different things.

I mean, feel free to do so? The political force in Europe during the 20th century was more or less, Nationalism…more so then any competing ideology.

You’re both right. Nationalism will mean different things to a nation that has not yet constituted itself with a state, and a nation that has.

That’s a hard sell given that most of Europe gave up sovereignty, the holy grail of nationalism, to join a Union with each other.

Haha and then the brits, in a fit of misguided nationalism fucked themselves hard by leaving that union.

Perhaps we, the Europeans who invented the concept should redefine it. Get rid of the toxic zero sum race for the top bullshit and make it about pride in the peculiarities of our respective cultures. I have big Dutch flags on my bike because i am proud of that particular bit of dutch culture.

My decidedly non-academic take:

Patriotism ~ loving your family, celebrating the good things
Nationalism ~ your family is the best and deserves all the good things
Toxic nationalism ~ nepotism, buying your kids into colleges, etc.

It can be a short slide from one to the next. There’s nothing wrong with loving and caring for your country. There’s nothing wrong—aside from being misguided by an overly simplistic perspective—in thinking your nation is “the best.” It only gets bad when someone uses that perspective to the significant detriment of others; that’s typically when people start dying. Unfortunately, we have all seen how easy it is to do and how horrible the outcomes can be.