Notes on Nationalism: George Orwell (Penguin Modern)

Product Information

Nationalism is not a consensual idea: We might say that it is doubly contested. On the one hand, there is little consensus on what it is. Primarily, historians and sociologists have conducted descriptive research: They argue for a definition of nationalism as well as an account of its emergence, and they advance typologies of nationalism or stages of its transformation. Arguably, the central debate concerns the origins of nationalism and nations: When did they emerge and why did they do so? Modernists claim that nationalism emerged in the past few centuries and created nations: The ideology invents a new and artificial form of community. Their critics, often experts on premodern eras, either respond that nations are far older than the modernist paradigm allows or that they are transformations of older communities rather than ex nihilo creations. the habit of mind I am talking about is widespread among the English intelligentsia, and more widespread there than among the mass of the people.” The point is not that there existed a clear doctrine called “core nationalism” that people simply adopted or not. There are and have been nationalists of all ideological stripes—conservative, liberal, socialist, and so on. The point of putting forward core nationalism is to identify those beliefs most shared between them that allow us to recognize that despite their differences and nuances, there are common threads.

A rival view explains the origins of nationalism by appealing to another modern phenomenon: capitalism. For theorists like Tom Nairn, nationalism is a strategic response to the uneven spread of capitalism and the power that it provides ( Nairn, 1977). The unequal development and spread of capitalism distribute resources and power unequally: There are centers that benefited from the development of capitalism and there are poorer peripheries. Peripheral elites design an ideology that takes advantage of their only abundant resource: people. And to effectively mobilize and motivate those who do not share their class or interests, these peripheral elites must create a powerful sense of belonging. The solution is to draw on popular beliefs and practices to create a new interclass community: the nation. Thus, economic variants of modernism explain the advent of nationalism in terms of recent economic change, namely, capitalism. Abu NM. Waheeduzzaman. “ Repositioning Globalization Under Nationalism,” Journal of Competitiveness Studies. Instability. Nationalist loyalty isn’t fixed, but transfers as and when it’s most useful or convenient. Here Orwell points out how many nationalist leaders are foreign born: Hitler, Napoleon, Stalin. There are deeper problems for modernist accounts. All of them purport to offer a unitary explanation and yet none do. Each variant draws its strength from its ability to compellingly explain certain cases, but none can explain all the central let alone the plausible cases. While economic theories rightly show how nationalism can be a strategy in an unequal contest, this hardly proves that nationalism is the consequence of such conditions: Underdevelopment often fails to produce nationalism, and nationalism regularly emerges among the (over)developed ( Connor, 1994). Similarly, explaining nationalism as a response to industrialization fails to account for those cases where the former precedes the latter ( Smith, 1983). And political accounts of nationalism fail to explain why nationalist energies can focus on something besides the state or sovereignty. If nationalism is only about the pursuit or consolidation of state power, what are we to make of cultural nationalism: artistic renaissances, campaigns for moral regeneration, and attempts to transform through education? And given that cultural and political nationalism feed off each other, why focus solely on the latter ( Hutchinson, 1987, 1994)?The important thing, he says, isn’t to deny this, but to face it head on. Once you recognise your prejudices, you can stop them contaminating your mental processes. If there’s a message we would all benefit most by adopting today, this is it. In the classification I have attempted above, it will seem that I have often exaggerated, oversimplified, made unwarranted assumptions and have left out of account the existence of ordinarily decent motives. This was inevitable, because in this essay I am trying to isolate and identify tendencies which exist in all our minds and pervert our thinking, without necessarily occurring in a pure state or operating continuously. It is important at this point to correct the over-simplified picture which I have been obliged to make. To begin with, one has no right to assume that everyone, or even every intellectual, is infected by nationalism. Secondly, nationalism can be intermittent and limited. An intelligent man may half-succumb to a belief which he knows to be absurd, and he may keep it out of his mind for long periods, only reverting to it in moments of anger or sentimentality, or when he is certain that no important issues are involved. Thirdly, a nationalistic creed may be adopted in good faith from non-nationalistic motives. Fourthly, several kinds of nationalism, even kinds that cancel out, can co-exist in the same person. Here there’s discussion of neo-Toryism. This is marked by the desire “not to recognize that British power and influence have declined”. For modern readers, this may chime with the Brexit narrative.

While Orwell gives many examples of nationalism, the frame for his argument is the failings of intellectualism in the 1940s: Liberal nationalism is not part of an explanatory theory of nationalism. 18 Instead, it is an attempt to revise nationalism so that it can be reconciled with the dominant post-Enlightenment political framework, liberalism. Recall that the core ideology of nationalism involves certain claims about morality and human flourishing. On the one hand, we find claims about the value of community and membership. For instance, we saw that proposition (ii) of core nationalism was that individual freedom or flourishing required membership in a nation. Either way, the point is the connection between membership in a nation and human well-being. On the other hand, we find claims that are action-guiding: Proposition (v) is that national loyalty always comes first. The convergence of factors explains what is needed for the narrative to take form and succeed. Print capitalism provides both the material means and an economic incentive to help construct and sustain reading publics, united by a vernacular language. Yet, the impetus to tell this story, to imagine such communities, comes from disaffected civil servants. Here we find echoes of the ideological account: Disaffected functionaries in Latin America came to resent their careers stunted by imperial metropoles. In short, the construction of nations through the nationalist narrative is made possible by several factors: new technology, changing ideas, and a class of people motivated to reimagine their sense of belonging. Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate; “To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods.” Indifference to reality refers to "the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts" and is a feature of all nationalists, according to Orwell. He describes how nationalism clouds people from perceiving facts of the real world. The use of torture, hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians all prove to be irrelevant towards the notion of "good or bad", and there is no outrage from within the public, as the atrocities are committed by "our side". Some nationalists even go into the trouble of defending such actions and search for arguments to support their case.Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported — battles, massacres, famines, revolutions — tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world. For instance, Walker Connor insists that nations begin at the end of the 19th or early 20th century because they require mass consciousness, which in turn depends upon mass communication and standardized education. Adrian Hastings believed that so long as national consciousness extends to many people beyond government circles and the ruling class, then one can speak of a nation ( Connor, 1994; Hastings, 1997). Regarding instability, Orwell reasons that nationalism can become ironical in various ways. Many of the leaders revered by nationalist factions are outright foreigners, who do not even belong to the country that they have glorified. More often, they are "from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful". For instance, Stalin was a Georgian, and Hitler was an Austrian, but both were respectively idolised in Russia and Germany.

Nor is there any consensus on the precise relationship between nationalism and nations. For some, nations predate nationalism but are transformed by it, while for others, nationalism creates nations, and for others yet, nations are the modern transformation of prenational communities.One view is that patriotism is loyalty to political institutions, specifically republican, rather than to an ethnocultural community ( Connor, 1994; Dietz, 1989; Taylor, 1997; Viroli, 1995). However, this definition is questionable. Even if “patriots” has often been used to name advocates of republicanism, it is certainly not the only recorded use. Nor does this view match the common uses of “patriot” or “patriotism” to speak of the intense loyalty of those who have no institutions or do not necessarily believe in republicanism (e.g., patriotic Kurds). Worse, if patriotism is loyalty to institutions and nationalism is loyalty to an ethnocultural group, then those who defend this distinction seem committed to the claim that nationalism is ancient. How else can they describe loyalty to the Jewish people and Kingdom during the Jewish-Roman wars? This kind of nationalism chimes with English football hooliganism of the 1980s. Various ‘firms’ (football fans) would regularly fight each other, sometimes with deadly force. Ziya Öniş Mustafa Kutlay. " The Global Political Economy of Right-Wing Populism: Deconstructing the Paradox," The International Spectator. The essay was written during the final stages of World War II while Europe had just witnessed the destructive effects of political movements. Nazism is used as an example of how nationalism can cause havoc between groups of people and can instigate ignorance within those groups. Orwell compares Nazism with other forms of nationalistic ideologies to generate an overall argument and questions the function of nationalism.

ii) Celtic Nationalism. Welsh, Irish and Scottish nationalism have points of difference but are alike in their anti-English orientation. Members of all three movements have opposed the war while continuing to describe themselves as pro-Russian, and the lunatic fringe has even contrived to be simultaneously pro-Russian and pro-Nazi. But Celtic nationalism is not the same thing as anglophobia. Its motive force is a belief in the past and future greatness of the Celtic peoples, and it has a strong tinge of racialism. The Celt is supposed to be spiritually superior to the Saxon — simpler, more creative, less vulgar, less snobbish, etc. — but the usual power hunger is there under the surface. One symptom of it is the delusion that Eire, Scotland or even Wales could preserve its independence unaided and owes nothing to British protection. Among writers, good examples of this school of thought are Hugh McDiarmid and Sean O'Casey. No modern Irish writer, even of the stature of Yeats or Joyce, is completely free from traces of nationalism. The key point is that all these arguments seek to show that without the nation, human life would be greatly impoverished. Our national identities and our national loyalty constitute, at least for many of us, part and parcel of what it is to live a meaningful or good life. Obsession with the superiority of the power unit. Nationalists are over-sensitive. They imagine slurs and slights against the unit at every chance. Orwell’s example is the Anglophobe American, who refuses to use a slang phrase if it has a British origin. Indifference to reality. Nationalists can recognise torture, murder and forced labour as an evil when done by others. Yet these same crimes become acceptable or excusable when done by one’s own side.

PACIFIST: Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf. An excellent example of the way that debate has proceeded is the way that Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) is cited or discussed. MacIntyre does not discuss let alone defend nationalism but patriotism. His focus is clearly on a character trait and not an ideology: Nowhere does he claim that all political legitimacy comes from the nation or that nations must be as autonomous as possible. Of course, this does not mean that MacIntyre’s defense of patriotism is irrelevant—he does after all make strong claims about communal life and human flourishing. The point is that many philosophers and political theorists treat nationalism and national partiality as interchangeable. Consequently, what is discussed on the heading of “nationalism” in the normative debate is often an anemic understanding of what historians and sociologists are discussing. Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word longeur, and remarks in passing that though in England we happen not to have the word, we have the thing in considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word ‘nationalism’, but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation — that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty. Nations, and nationalisms, are often sorted according to two ideal types: French and German, Western and Eastern, or civic and ethnic. 13 This typology refers to the nature of the community or the identity that defines the nation. The Western or civic nation is primarily a political association and therefore more of a voluntary community. On this view, the nation is a pact or covenant, a social contract. The nation qua political community occupies a territory that is governed by laws and institutions. This is the view of the nation most associated with Western nations, particularly France, where republicanism played an important part in defining membership in the nation.