John Lukacs on nationalism
Lukacs' views from Democracy and Populism (Yale University Press, 2005):
Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a "people," justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion. Patriotism is old-fashioned (and, at times and in some places, aristocratic); nationalism is modern and populist
. . . . After 1870 nationalism, almost always, turned anti-liberal, especially where liberalism was no longer principally nationalist
. . . . [p. 36] . . . . One hundred and fifty years ago a distinction between nationalism and patriotism would have been labored, it would not have made much sense. Even now nationalism and patriotism often overlap within the minds and hearts of many people. Yet we must be aware of their differences—because of the phenomenon of populism which, unlike old-fashioned patriotism, is inseparable from the myth of a people. Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and cosmopolitan (certainly culturally so). But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism is less racist than populism. A patriot will not exclude a person of another nationality from a community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years; but a populist will always be suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his tribe
. . . . [p. 72] Since it appeals to tribal and racial bonds, nationalism seems to be deeply and atavistically natural and human. Yet the trouble with it is not only that nationalism can be anti-humanist and often inhuman but that it also proceeds from one abstract assumption about human nature itself. The love for one's people is natural, but it is also categorical; it is less charitable and less deeply human than the love for one's country, a love that flows from traditions, at least akin to a love of one's family. Nationalism is both self-centered and selfish—because human love is not the love of oneself; it is the love of another. Patriotism is always more than merely biological—because charitable love is human and not merely 'natural.' Nature has, and shows, no charity.
[p. 73]
Lukacs sees nationalism as central to the history of the last century and a half. Stalin, for example, to Lukacs seems to have been essentially a nationalist, who relied on communism mainly because the communists (especially in Eastern Europe) were the only people who could be relied upon to obey him. Lukacs also regards "Americanism" as basically an American nationalist creed, not as patriotism
(See also Michael Gove: The virtue of the nation-state)
Labels: Nationalism
posted by Mr. Spog | 7:17 p.m.
6 Comments:
Like many Jewish intellectuals, Lukacs anti-nationalism serves his ethnic interest.
It was, however, his maternal grandparents who were most responsible for the person he was to become. "They were," he has written, "the most admirable people I have ever known ... they were well-to-do, modest, Jewish and thoroughly bourgeois." (3) Because of their "reactionary virtues," he developed a lasting respect "not so much for the aristocratic eras and the Middle Ages as for the relatively recent bourgeois period of European and Hungarian history."
Why, because the bourgeois period of European history, following Napoleon's emancipation of the Jews, was a time of great prosperity for Lukacs people.
In the years leading up to 1900, and to a large extent to 1914, there was no better home for Jews than Hungary. By assimilating in large numbers, they aided the grateful Magyars in their struggle to achieve and maintain a majority in their multinational kingdom. True, Ferenc Deak, the great Hungarian liberal and architect of the 1867 Ausgleich with Austria, had begun to express concern about the growing number of Jewish immigrants from the East. But Lukacs argued that that was not the real problem. Drawing upon his ability to discern larger historical trends in everyday occurrences, he concluded that "sometime between 1900 and 1905 the people of Budapest, both Jewish and non-Jewish, began to recognize, or at least sense, uneasily, that the problem was no longer only the extent of Jewish immigration but also the acceptance of Jewish assimilation."
The Great War changed all that. One of the many unhappy byproducts of that dissolution was the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, a tyrannical regime led by Bela Kun who, like 31 of 44 other "commissars," was of Jewish origin. Partly as a consequence of Kun's 133 days in power, the counter-revolutionary government of Regent Miklos Horthy was both anti-communist and anti-Semitic, communists and Jews being, in the traumatized minds of many Hungarians, interchangeable identities.
Nationalism arose in the late 19th century, largely in response to competition to large scale Jewish immigration and rise of Zionism and its comrade in arms Judeo-Bolshevism. Nationalism was a natural response to the terror of the other and evolved, as Darwin discovered 150 years ago, as a strategy for survival. Survvial being the first law of nature.
I haven't read this particular book by Lukacs, but he makes a similar distinction between patriotism and nationalism in another book The Hitler of History. In that book, Lukacs cites an essay by George Orwell as the source of this distinction.
You probably know this already, but there is a huge academic literature on nationalism. The problem with this literature is the authors don't always agree on what nationalism is. Someone's conclusions about nationalism depend to a considerable extent on how he defines the word. Some scholars, I think, would say that what Lukacs calls "patriotism" is in fact a kind of nationalism and that what he calls nationalism is in fact a particular kind of nationalism: "ethnic nationalism."
Of course, I'm not a scholar and I'm simplifying a complicated subject, but if you're interested in nationalism, you might want to visit this site: What is nationalism?
Thanks for the references. I think I already came across your blog post that linked to the "Nationalism Project" ... the problem with all that academic material is that one doesn't know which parts of it are actually worth reading ...
I know what you mean Mr. Spog. I have trouble understanding a lot of it myself. To me the important point is that there is some confusion surrounding the concepts of nation and nationalism. By the way, I like John Lukacs.
There are a couple(?) of recorded lectures by Lukacs which might interest you, available at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute archive, www.isi.org. (In one of them he seems to be drunk, but is still remarkably coherent.)
I am interested. Thanks for the tip.
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