Notes on Notes on Nationalism

George Orwell's Notes on Nationalism (1945) contrasts nationalism with patriotism. Nationalism, he says, is the idolization of a particular group of people (not necessarily one's own nation, or even any nation at all), whereby the pursuit of that group's interests becomes one's overriding concern. One's individuality is sunk into the national or other group. Patriotism, on the other hand, is devotion to a particular place or way of life, which one believes to be "the best in the world" but which one has no desire to foist on other people.

I would question Orwell's assertion that the true patriot must believe his country to be the best in the world. One should be capable of acknowledging flaws in an object of one's love without ceasing to love him/her/it. Indeed any love that is dependent on the absolute superiority of the object seems doomed to fail in the end, with the exception, presumably, of the love of God. Orwell's "patriotism" thus seems to be partly infused with idolatrous "nationalism".

It does seem difficult to tell if a given person exhibits nationalism or patriotism, just as it is difficult to tell whether one person's love for another is grounded in illusion or reality, or indeed in some mixture of the two, as seems most likely. Kill off all vicious nationalistic feeling, and one may find that virtuous patriotism has been inadvertently destroyed as well. But this doesn't seem to be what Orwell is saying.

Most of the essay consists of criticisms of various "nationalisms" (Trotskyism, Zionism, Celtic nationalism, etc.) It is difficult to judge the accuracy of most of these descriptions without firsthand knowledge. What particularly struck my eye, however, was Orwell's section on the species of "negative nationalism" he refers to as "Anglophobia", i.e., national self-loathing on the part of English intellectuals. I was under the impression that such self-hatred, which has by now grown to psychotic proportions, had become noticeable starting somewhere around the end of the First World War, but that it had been temporarily put into abeyance by a tremendous spirit of national solidarity during the fight against Nazi Germany. But Orwell thinks that English left-wing intellectuals were more or less disloyal to their own country even during Britain's fight for self-preservation. Presumably Orwell should know about this, since he was a leading English intellectual himself. The relevant paragraph in full:

Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a markable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, 'enlightened' opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.