Europe longs for unity, not ‘ancient hatreds’, I argue in today’s Boston Globe. But if confidence in the ‘European project’ continues to fail — and the EU along with it — the way that longing expresses itself will make for a rude awakening in America. Our foreign policymakers and thinkers should prepare accordingly.
This is an oldish, but haunting, item from Discovery Channel news:
“The Titanic was built in Great Britain, operated by British subjects, and manned by a British crew. It is to be expected that national ties were activated during the disaster and that the crew would give preference to British subjects, easily identified by their language,” the researchers said.
Savage and Frey realized that assumption was off after investigating passenger data.
They found that British passengers, who queued for a place in one of only 20 lifeboats provided for the 2,223 on board, had 10 percent lower chance of survival than any other nationality.
In contrast, Americans, who reportedly elbowed their way to the front of lines, had a 12 percent higher probability of survival than British subjects.
“Be British, boys, be British!” the captain, Edward John Smith, shouted out, according to witnesses.
“Being British” meant to forget mass panic behavior — everyone looking after themselves — and rather follow the social norm of “women and children first.”
Our problem with the British would be not that they stoically privileged the lives of females and kids, but that they needed nationalism to do so. Yet can we even imagine some authority figure — or random crowd member — shouting, in one of our own disasters, “Come on, people, be American!” — ? That’s hardly the American way.
In reference to a Ross-Daniel back-and-forth, John Schwenkler says the following:
while I am similarly sympathetic to the corresponding Douthatian skepticism of the idea that a conservatism centered solely on apolitical calls for social and cultural reform – yes, even of the culinary sort – is going to be the thing to save America, that doesn’t mean that the conservative agenda can proceed forward in the absence of such elements, either. The relevant institutions and societal mores are in quite bad shape, and if all parties to the debate agree that they’re neither going to be recreated simply through creative economic and social policies nor spring up magically when the rug is pulled out from under the welfare state, then there ought to be a strong consensus that deliberate and concentrated “grassroots” attempts at bottom-up reforms should constitute an important part of the conservative project, too. I’m quite confident that Ross thinks this as well, and so that the disagreement here is primarily one of emphasis rather than substance – but it’s important to be clear that this can be a both/and, and not a simple either/or.
What follows is a meditation on the dilemmas this situation raises for conservatives and libertarians, especially Christian ones, and especially with regard to the strange third leg of the Revolutionary Stool — not liberty or equality but fraternity, AKA solidarity.
Andrew, a little extremely:
Here’s a story to cheer you up:
L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he’d ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms. Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley [my emphasis!]. When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours’ delay, one of Eason’s employees hung the flags at half-staff.
Bad news: other than POTUS, only the governor of the state may order the flag to be at half staff to honor the death of a national or state figure. Indeed, Gov. Easley was simply carrying out the duties of his own office. The flag is to be flown at half staff the day, and the day after, a Senator or Representative dies. Bone up on your flag honor code here.
The scholarly article to read on the topic of Sen. Helms and Mssrs. the Edge and Bono is Bono Made Jesse Helms Cry: Jubilee 2000, Debt Relief, and Moral Action in International Politics, by Josh Busby. The setup:
Bono claimed that Helms wept when they spoke: “I talked to him about the Biblical origin of the idea of Jubilee Year…. He was genuinely moved by the story of the continent of Africa, and he said to me, ‘America needs to do more.’ I think he felt it as a burden on a spiritual level” (Dominus 2000, 6). Of his meeting with Bono, Helms said, “I was deeply impressed with him. He has depth that I didn’t expect. He is led by the Lord to do something about the starving people in Africa” (Wagner 2000). The story of Helms’ tears may be apocryphal, but it speaks both to the peculiar religiosity of the United States and more generally to the power of a compelling frame to persuade key veto players or “policy gatekeepers” to support a morally motivated policy. This article, through a case study of the Jubilee 2000 campaign for debt relief, seeks to explain how states may be moved to support “moral action.”
Indeed. The spiritual burden to take on the burden of the suffering of foreign strangers is right at the heart of Gersonism, and when Gerson is finished applauding Obama for joining spirit and state on behalf of domestic citizens, get ready for a ringing eulogy of Helms. Also prepare for a great irony: opponents of Gersonism recommending the morally decent but relatively hands-off policy of ‘just throwing money at the problem’ — especially by recycling Holbrooke’s notion that AIDS, for instance, is a national security problem.
The point, I think, is that a substantial difference can be drawn between applying federal resources to actions with morally laudable ends and organizing federal action around the pursuit of interminable moral imperatives. The preservation of prudence requires a certain amount of circuitousness, messiness, and roundabout indeterminacy. But the kinds of evasive, wiggly, reticent paths you wind up with given a politics of prudence is starkly at odds with the marching orders of modern culture: straight line to fixed destination. Postmoderns (except Rorty) want us to waver away: bad for the culture, but good for domestic politics. So we come back to a basic question: how much should what’s going on in the rest of the world distract us from doing our own thing in a healthy, successful way? At the meta level, my bet is that we can recur to prudence again.
It’s time to consider whether the popular wisdom, in trying to get a handle on the history of US interventionism, has failed to understand the American character. My conclusion: Yes. Come along on a magical trip involving monarchical counterfactuals, Jacksonian revisionism, Andrew, Ross, and, of course, Kagan and Co….
Noah raises a fair question, but I think it is one that I have already more or less answered when I wrote:
In some sense, these things are theirs, ours, and as I have said before nation-states can create much larger countries on the ruins of local and regional identities that then appear to citizens who have never known anything else to be all part of the same country.
Certainly, I would have been on Cleveland’s side in opposing the annexation of Hawaii, just as I would have been on the side of the opponents of annexing the Philippines, but that doesn’t mean that the patriots we’re talking about could blithely overlook attacks on U.S. citizens on territory that belonged to the United States, and which had belonged to the United States for almost half a century.
I know I’m hugely late with this question but here we go anyhow. The archetypal “Just War” is supposed to be World War II. We were attacked, without warning, by an aggressive power bent on domination of an entire region through brute force, a power that had already launched unprovoked wars against numerous neighbors, allied with another power with a similar track record and similar ambitions who was already at war with many of our historic friends and allies, and on top of all that the enemy was really, really evil.
There is, of course, a school of thought that says we should have stayed out of World War II. But that school focuses on pre-war matters ranging from the Treaty of Versailles to Lend-Lease to America’s resource competition with the Empire of Japan, or it focuses on the danger and evil of Soviet Communism and points out how World War II ended with a victory for that evil as much as for freedom and democracy. But the general assumption is that Pearl Harbor ended the debate: whether or not we should have wound up in the position we were in, surely we had to respond to that unprovoked attack.
But, if we’re among patriots here – defined as those who defensively love and defend the land of their home, but do not subscribe to notions of national honor, are implicated in no national “project,” and are opposed to the idea of dominating or “improving” other nations and peoples – why should we have done so?
The attack, after all, was on naval installations in Hawaii. Hawaii was not a state; it was a territory. Moreover, it was a territory that was joined to the United States under circumstances of debatable legitimacy. Further, it was a territory whose annexation to the United States could only make sense in the context of either a mission to expand American territory without end (a classical imperial ambition) or a mission to dominate the Pacific Ocean and its trade (a modern imperial and nationalist ambition). And the United States Navy in the Pacific was similarly purposed. Hawaii, then, and the navy that defended it, were emphatically the sorts of things that patriots – as defined above – should have been against. And, not being nationalists, should have considered themselves uninvolved in any kind of obligation to defend on the grounds of honor or mutual involvement in the same national entity.
And so, my question: why should not the patriotic thing in 1941 have been to refuse to fight a global war to defend Hawaii?
Daniel Larison being on the way to Taiwan, someone else will have to take up pen-as-sword. I hope someone does, as this is not intended to be a snarky question; I really want to understand how patriotism, construed as Larison does, would actually function in a world of states and nations rather than small freeholds.
At the risk of repeating myself, this is the crucial difference between patriotism and nationalism: patriotism is love of one’s country and defensive, while nationalism is expressed typically through contempt and fear of other nations and a will to power over other nations. — Daniel
As Rod says, the ad would have been slightly easier to laugh at fifty years ago, but I can’t say I find it all that offensive even now. And as a fan of counterfactual histories and peculiar maps, I think it’s too bad that Absolut is apologizing instead of kicking off a series, each targeted to a particular country’s most implausible irredentist fantasies. — Ross
Well, I love Ross’ malicious good humor (and set of maps links!), and Daniel’s contempt for the will to power is always an important hedge against mass stupidity, but The Case of the Infamous Greater Mexico Ad seems to me one of those occasions for healing between the patriotic community and the nationalist community in the United States. Given the historical and contemporary circumstances, contempt and fear of Mexican irredentism matches up pretty well with the defensive love of one’s country. But as we all know, it’s possible for both American patriots and nationalists to welcome even very large numbers of Mexican immigrants interested in becoming American citizens. The real, unforgivable shame of this Absolut ad is how it plays so crassly off the opposing, ostensibly ‘pro-Mexican’ attitude that’s actually a big insult — to welcoming Americans, yes, but more to all Mexicans who stream northward to get the hell away from Mexico, not to reconquer the American west. And here Absolut wants to wring another peso out of the hombre who has to drown his sorrows in a dream — and wants him to drown them in Swedish vodka!
So on the one hand we have a perfect demonstration of the difference between love of one’s country, which often travels, and love of one’s nation, which often wants national boundaries themselves to travel; and on the other we have a nice proof of how love of market and profit leads not to the breakdown of patriotism or nationalism but to their conversion into commodities that bear little, if any, resemblance to the real thing.
Matt and Reihan have made some important points, but I want to press Reihan when he says:
…I think Will Wilkinson is right to suggest that patriotism and nationalism are very closely related if not the same. It so happens that patriotism has mostly positive connotations and that nationalism has mostly negative connotations.
So is patriotism really nationalism in more appealing clothing? Is the attachment to and love of country just nationalism in its passive state, or are they actually opposing sentiments? Why does patriotism have mostly positive connotations? Is it that it has not previously had to face a thoroughgoing critique, and has enjoyed an inappropriate respectability? Might it be the case instead that patriotism mostly has positive connotations because patriotism moves people to do generally admirable and morally justifiable things? Isn’t nationalism’s bad reputation the result of self-described nationalists committing the worst kinds of crimes, oppression and mass murder?
(1) As much as I hate to disagree with Matt Frost, I think Will Wilkinson is right to suggest that patriotism and nationalism are very closely related if not the same. It so happens that patriotism has mostly positive connotations and that nationalism has mostly negative connotations.
(2) I think of myself as a liberal nationalist, i.e., I see myself as belonging to a diverse English-speaking ethnocultural community rooted in an Anglo-Afro core but that has grown and changed in response to successive waves of immigration and intermarriage, and I have a particular affection for the folkways of this community. This isn’t to say my nation, which extends beyond the borders of the United States (note that I follow Canadian politics obsessively), is superior to others. Rather, it is familiar to me and I miss it when I’m away from it for too long. Michael Lind introduced me to this idea in his The Next American Nation, and I continue to think it is pretty sound. So while I accept that the United States will at some point vanish from the face of the Earth, I hope that something like my language and culture survives. My liberal nationalism is complicated by the fact that I have other overlapping commitments which are also important to me — I care very intensely about the neighborhoods I’ve lived in, the schools I’ve intended, and I identify to some extent with Muslims around the world. I have a fondness for Bangladesh, my parent’s native country, and I’m kind of a Francophile. I also love big cities, particularly cosmopolitan big cities. I doubt this mix of views is all that strange; in fact, I assume it is woefully pedestrian (i.e., StuffBrownPeopleLike.com).
From what I read of George Kateb via Larison, it seems like Kateb has taken the old “I’m a patriot, you’re a nationalist” chestnut and turned it into “I’m enlightened, you’re a patriot.” I think Daniel is right, and that Kateb is just abusing the word “patriotism” to score points against “nationalism.” He seems to leave some room for a defensively-inclined affinity for one’s home, which is what Daniel argues patriotism is about.
Will Wilkinson, in agreeing with Kateb, takes a stronger position that leaves less room for accommodation, and can’t be mistaken for a definitional dispute. Any particular affinity for one’s country as such is suspect, he claims, and he complains that patriotism (or nationalism, since he doesn’t distinguish between the two) led us into the Iraq war:
[Kateb] implies something that I believe to be correct: the proud and enthusiastic patriotism of Americans bears a large measure of responsibility for the immoral and failed war in Iraq. This administration’s war would have been impossible had our mindless love of country not made the public rather too ready.
Daniel responds:
The Iraq war was made possible by a propaganda campaign by the government, the exploitation of public fear and anger, the warmongering of nationalists and the twisting of patriotic sentiment into support for a war of aggression by casting the war dishonestly as one of self-defense. That the administration succeeded in this is not a measure of mindless love of country, but rather a fairly mindless foreign policy consensus that says that small states on the other side of the planet pose meaningful threats to the United States.
At the popular level, this is true enough. But what about the the self-described liberal hawks, who worked overtime to liquidate any potential claims that nationalism (or even patriotism) informed their pro-war stances? One particular non sequitur comes to mind: I remember reading a few bloggers who offered their own support for abortion rights as proof that their intentions in Iraq were pure of any parochial taint. It was commitment to the universal principles of liberty and modern autonomy, not atavistic revanchism, that led them to support the invasion of Iraq. In forsaking the narrow interests of their home countries, they seem to be following the advice Will offers here:
But when it comes to countries, it is better by far to give your heart to freedom, and to love countries themselves incidentally and faithlessly.
At the time, I put more stock in both the nationalist and internationalist cases for war than I should have. I wish now that I’d been as skeptical of the pro-war arguments as certain libertarians were — Will Wilkinson, for example. But just as patriotism can metastasize into nationalism, Will’s deracinated, post-national liberalism can become someone else’s crusade.
