This is one of the reasons why it is so important to understand what a nation is: this tendency of humanity to divide itself into distinct, and often conflicting, groups.
Distinctive of nationalism is the belief that the nation is the only goal worthy of pursuit — an assertion that often leads to the belief that the nation demands unquestioned and uncompromising loyalty. When such a belief about the nation becomes predominant, it can threaten individual liberty. Moreover, nationalism often asserts that other nations are implacable enemies to one’s own nation; it injects hatred of what is perceived to be foreign.
However, these historical antecedents are never merely just facts, because key to the existence of the nation are memories that are shared among each of those many individuals who are members of the nation about the past of their nation, including about those earlier societies.
Every nation has its own understanding of its distinctive past that is conveyed through stories, myths, and history. Whether historically accurate or not, these memories contribute to the understanding of the present that distinguishes one nation from another. This component of time — when an understanding of the past forms part of the present — is characteristic of the nation and is called “temporal depth.”
These memories also form a part of the conception that one has of oneself. The child learns, for example, to speak the language of his or her nation and what it means to be a member of that nation as expressed through its customs and laws. These traditions become incorporated into the individual’s understanding of the self.
Those who worship the Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu distinguish themselves from those who do not. Those who speak one language understand themselves to be different from those who speak a different language. The nation is a social relation of collective self-consciousness.
This distinguishing, shared self-awareness is expressed in and influenced by the everyday conduct of the individuals who make up the social relation of the nation, for example the clothes one wears, the song one sings, the language one speaks, or the religion on observes. It is sustained by various institutions, such as the Jerusalem Temple for ancient Israel, or the shrine at Ise for Japan, or the Parliament for England, that bear those traditions around which the social relation of the nation is formed. Those institutions provide a structure for the nation. Thus the nation is formed around shared, self-designating beliefs that have such a structure.
Parents transmit to their own offspring not only their “flesh and blood,” but also their own cultural inheritance — their language, customs, and so forth — of the larger group, of the nation. This cultural inheritance is usually viewed by the parents as being quite precious to their existence. This inter-generational transmission of one’s culture may be part of the reason for the tendency to view the nation as a form of kinship, because what is being transmitted is a part of one’s self to one’s descendants. However, there is another reason for this tendency.
As discussed, birth within the territory is also recognized to be the criterion for membership in the nation. There is thus a commingling of recognition of two lines of descent: descent in the territory of the nation and descent from parents who are members of the nation. This criterion of birth, are the traceable relations formed as a result, is why the nation is a form of kinship.
Because of this characteristic of birth, both the ethnic group and the nation are often perceived as being “natural” relations. Despite this perception, both of these forms of kinship incorporate other cultural traditions, such as language and religion, as boundaries of the social relation. While it is sometimes difficult to distinguish clearly an ethnic group from a nation, ethnicity tends to emphasize beliefs in descent from a supposed common ancestor or ancestors, as if the ethnic group were an extended family, while the focus of the nation is territorial descent. Important to realize is that kinship is an ambiguous relation, as it is a consequence of the perception of being related. Usually any nation contains within it numerous ethnic groups.
The obvious example of a community is the family, where one is always related to other members of the family, irrespective of disagreements between those members.
However, no community is free from conflict. Even within the family, there are jealousies and resentments. In the village — often appealed to as a romantic example of a community — there exist many different kinds of attachments as cause for conflict. There are friendships and animosities, groupings distinguished by economic activities and their corresponding interests, for example farmers and traders, and usually competing families.
Such a limitation on the recognition of, and the love for, what is understood to be one’s own is a consequence of the preoccupation with the continuation of the self, both its biological and cultural components. The love that one has for one’s nation is designated by the term “patriotism.”
When one divides the world into two irreconcilable and warring camps — one’s own nation in opposition to all other nations — where the latter are viewed as one’s implacable enemies, then, in contrast to patriotism, there is the ideology of nationalism. Nationalism repudiates civility and the differences that it tolerates by attempting to eliminate all differing views and interests for the sake of one vision of what the nation has been and should be.
The state may be loosely defined as a structure that, through institutions, exercises sovereignty over a territory using laws that relate the individuals within that territory to one another as members of the state.
Furthermore, nations have existed in the absence of a state, as did Poland during the 19th century and as does Kurdistan today.
Furthermore, the effectiveness of ruling is dependent upon the standardization of communication, language and script, throughout the area under the authority of the state.
However, the consolidation of a relatively uniform territory and culture of a national community is rarely exclusively the result of a particular policy or set of policies being adopted and propagated by the ruling center of the state over a formless population. On the contrary, acceptance of such policies often requires an appeal by the ruling center to pre-existing traditions, whether to language, religion, or legal code. Thus, the particular policy that the ruling center chooses to propagate is rarely one capriciously chosen as if it were invented out of thin air, even if that policy represents an audacious transformation of a previously existing tradition.
The nation seeks a state out of the necessity to protect and preserve the lives of its members; that is, so that the nation, through its representatives and institutions, can act to secure its protection and preservation in the world. If the national state fails to fulfill this purpose (through military defeat or other means), then it risks the possibility of breaking up, because the attachments of the members of the nation to that nation may be withdrawn. New loyalties may then emerge, thereby undermining the existence of the nation.
Where is the meaning located such that it is found? It is located within the consciousness of each of many individuals who recognize and accept the meaning of the handshake as a tradition signifying the acknowledgement between two individuals. Secondly, what is the material out of which the social relation of the custom of the handshake is formed? It is made up of living human beings who make actual the custom by performing it.
The material of the form of the social relation, living human beings, is to be contrasted with that of the tool. The material out of which the tool is formed is inanimate matter. If a hammer is not used, it still remains a tool because it has been established materially out of iron and wood. The tool survives as an object separate from the human beings who live with it. In contrast to the tool, the existence of the social relation of the custom of greeting is dependent upon its performance, which, in turn, requires the recognition and acceptance of the meaning of the handshake.
Like the custom of the handshake, where the individuals find the custom of greeting and keep it alive by performing it, the nation is constituted and sustained by individuals who participate in, and by so doing affirm, territorially bounded traditions.
When an individual is born, he or she must fit himself or herself into the already existing nation, which continues to exist when that individual dies.
However, if these traditions are no longer accepted and, thus, not reaffirmed by each generation, then that book of national history or monument or emblem remains merely that and nothing more.
The Roman emblem SPQR — an acronym representing “Senate, People, and Republic” — is of interest only to historians of ancient Rome, or to the visitors of a museum who view the emblem as an artifact of a society that no longer exists. Similarly, the Assyrian, Hittite, and Latin languages, because they are no longer spoken, are “dead.”
In contrast to these examples, documents such as the American Declaration of Independence, or monuments such as the Lincoln memorial in Washington DC, or the Arc de Triomphe in Paris are not “dead” artifacts of past societies.
They are in a sense “alive” because the traditions they represent are sustained by continuing to be acknowledged.
In this latter instance, since the tradition of the monarchy and the institutions that sustained it were no longer acknowledged, they lost their legitimacy. In political theory, this loss of legitimacy is known as the “withdrawal of consent.”
Some scholars of nations and nationalism have made much of the fact that traditions undergo modification, drawing attention to examples of various, often radical transformations of how the past is selectively appropriated, such that they speak of the “invention” of tradition.
For example, there have been times when the well-being of the nation has been thought to require restrictions on free trade through tariff on imports, as opposed with the mercantilism of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the economic protectionism between WW1 and WW2. Religious beliefs have at times been obstacles to economic activity, as when Christianity prohibited the charging of interest on borrowed money.
During a war, an outburst of patriotism may compromise the beliefs of the monotheistic religions in the brotherhood of humanity.
The importance of a tradition becoming materially “embodied,” in this case law being written down in a book, is that it increases the likelihood of that tradition becoming stable, hence continuing over time.
Traditions can take physical shape in the form of buildings, for example the Temple in Jerusalem or Canterbury Cathedral. When this happens, there is a greater likelihood that the social relation formed around that materially embodied tradition will achieve the stability necessary for a national culture to emerge.
Also at the local level throughout England, by the time of Henry II, the institution of the jury (initially a body of neighbors summoned by some public official to give up on oath a true answer to some question, but by the early 13th century the means by which to be judged by one’s peers) had become the norm, thereby involving the common man in judicial procedures. The result of these and other development was that the king, as representative of the nation and its laws, and his agents (the traveling judges) were seen as the protectors of the property and rights of the individual and the public order, that is the “king’s peace,” throughout the land.
What matters here is that there were established both a tradition of public, territorially unifying law — a law of the land — in the collective self-consciousness of the English, and institutions, however occasionally beleaguered, that sustained that tradition.
The point of indulging this speculation is to indicate that many, seemingly accidental factors may contribute to such a development; and, thus, to underscore how misguided it is to insist on one, primary cause for the development of the nation.
The English word “nation” is derived from the Latin noun natio, that means “to be born from”.
By the term “home,” we usually mean that the physical structure of the house has in some way become pervaded by the spirit or power or even moral qualities of its inhabitants. It is as if the house, when it becomes a home, has become a part of the family.
The boundaries of a territory are never merely geographical; they indicate the spatial limit to many of those traditions that are passed from one generation to the next. It was not uncommon, for example, for the territorial boundaries of the ancient Greek city-states to be designated by the respective sanctuaries of their god or gods. Thus, the individuals who dwell within a territory do not merely interact with one another; they participate in territorially bounded traditions that, in turn, influence their conduct: the god or gods they worship or the language they speak or the laws they accept.
This cultural inheritance must not be viewed as something external to the individual, like a coat to be put on and taken off. It forms part of the image that you have, not only of yourself, but also of those other individuals who are related to you by virtue of inheriting those territorially bounded traditions.
The individual participant in the social relation recognizes as being related not only those in the present who share in those territorial traditions, but also those in the past who performed activities in that territory.
Indeed, in so far as your existence as a member of a nation (and, thus, elements of your self-understanding) is in fact dependent upon those activities of past generations that have secured the land necessary for life, then what is involved in this metaphor is not merely metaphorical.
It is likely that the significance attributed to the attachment to the spatial location of the home also has a behavioral component. The boundaries or spatial limits of the home provide the enclosed structure that is seemingly necessary for familiarity to develop. Humans seek the familiar because what is familiar is also habitual; and, as such, the structured familiarity of the home provides comfort as it limits the anxiety-provoking multitude of possibilities of action that present themselves for consideration to human beings.
As you return to your national homeland from a foreign country, you may experience a feeling of relief. You immerse yourself again in the familiarity of your own language and customs. That is one reason why those familiar pattern of activity — inherited traditions — that structure our conduct and which we call “culture” are so important to the individual.
When one fashions or possesses a physical object, that object is considered to be one’s own because, through these activities, one has put a part of oneself into it.
The most obvious example of this process is the relation of the parents to the child. As the child contains a part of the parents, the child is considered by the parents to be an extension of themselves, and, as such, to be their own.
These are structures upon which your life and the lives of those who are related to you depend; where aspects of yourself have been imparted to those structures in ways that have not been imparted to other structures.
When a family has lived in the same house or town for generations and when one’s parents are buried in the immediate area of the home. Part of oneself — those who have imparted life to you — has literally been put into the inanimate land.
Many of the customs and laws of those territorial ancestors may have been different; their religion have been different; and certainly the territorial scope of their societies may have been different. Those perceived territorial ancestors might even not have understood themselves as members of the nation of which you are a member.
Democracy promotes a belief in the equality of the members of the nation, thereby contributing mightily to the sense of the nation as a community.
These myths, that is, beliefs with no empirical foundation, accomplish this by formulating, in different ways, a connection between historically actual societies to a perceived order of the universe (the act of the gods). By so doing, the uniqueness of a territorial community is justified, thereby distinguishing it from other territorial relations.
Our use of the term “nation” appears to imply such a cohesiveness and stability that distinguish nations from seemingly more amorphous pre-modern societies which may be classified as “ethnic groups.”
The spread of the world religions in antiquity indicates that extensive relations throughout a vast population and across great distances can indeed be formed in the absence of mass-produced books, newspapers, railways, and markets for industrial goods.
The significance of Roman Catholicism for sustaining the territorial relation of Poland is clear, once one recognizes that Germany to its west was Lutheran and Russia to its east was Orthodox.
By 1832, only 3.2% of the population in England was entitled to vote for parliament and only 1.5% in France was enfranchised.
As the American tradition has developed, there has arisen a myth of the founding fathers of the nation that obscures any number of differences between them about the implications of these statements of equality and rights, for example whether self-rule was to be federal or national. Some of these controversies arising from these ambiguities were uneasily settled by the American Civil War, in favor of — as is often the result of war — an increased national unity. However, new myths emerged, such as the belief in the “manifest destiny” of the American people to establish the boundaries of the nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
In the formation and continuation of all nations, including those of the modern world, there are appeals to ideas, such as a trans-generational territorial kinship or “truth” or “unalienable rights.” Such ideas, while not capable of empirical verification, provide justification for the bounded social order. The most obvious example of a set of ideas that cannot be empirically verified is religion.
It is only with monotheism that, at least doctrinally, the existence of other gods is denied as they are judged to be false idols.
It tends to be through religion that the individual formulates the purpose of his or her existence; often the relation of his or her society to other societies; and, thus, the place of the individual and his or her society in the perceived order of the universe. However, in the formulation of this purpose, the relation between the nation and religion becomes complicated when that religion is monotheistic. This is because the belief is one, universal god asserts the unity of humanity, and not the distinctiveness of the nation.
Many nations acknowledge past, critical moments and heroic sacrifices in defence of the nation by having a “tomb of the unknown soldier.” These tombs are monuments to the nameless territorial ancestors and heroes of the nation who, because they gave their lives protecting the nation in war, are believed to be deserving of veneration.
In opposition to such accommodations, early Christianity rightly ridiculed the worship of the Roman Caesars as gods. It objected to this pagan elevation of the living human to the divine, an earlier version of which was the worship of the dead Greek hero. Yet, throughout the history of late-antique and medieval Christianity, a variation of this elevation can be observed in the “cult of the saints.” The cult of the saints often represented an accommodation of monotheism to the nation.
When the king or hero of a nation becomes a saint, the nation is joined to the eternal order of the universe, thereby contributing to the justification of its territorially bounded, cultural distinctiveness.
The word is from the Latin paganus that, for the Romans, meant belonging to the countryside or to a village, hence a peasant. As the early Christians tended to live in cities, the term “pagan” came to mean someone who, because he or she lived in the countryside, was presumed not to be Christian; and perhaps the rural population remained more faithful to the polytheistic nature deities.
Characteristic of paganism was that “each people is given its own divine power to take care of its destiny.”
In the aftermath of Fascism and Communism, the term “paganism” has sometimes been used to refer to the deification of the state, where nothing is held to be more important than the state.This is a reasonable usage, signifying the horrors unleashed by upon humanity when, because the state is elevated above all other concerns and, thus, is worshipped as if it were a god, the humane truths of monotheism — particularly that all of humanity is created in the image of god — are repudiated.
Nevertheless, are not the pagan ideas of the gods of the land and ancestors implicitly conveyed in today’s conceptions of a fatherland and motherland? In so far as the nation is a bounded territorial community of nativity, is it not a bearer of these pagan ideas within monotheistic civilization? After all, much of European history was a history of one Christian nation engaged in war with another Christian nation, each defending its own perceived, unique relation to the divine. And, indeed, many Christian lands have their respective national saints.
A conception of time as directional, exhibiting progress, but one that nonetheless continued to contain returns to past moments that were perceived to have established various forms of national distinctiveness.
A conception of the end of time when the rupture between this world and the other world would be overcome, thereby re-establishing Eden.
Christianity is doctrinally a universal religion whose homeland is not of this world. One would thus expect Christianity to be at odds with the nation. Indeed, Christianity recognizes a distinction between this world, that of Caesar, and the other world, that of God.
However, the scholarly rejection of these racialist views has not put an end to considerations about the divisions of humanity.
The structure of the Indo-European culture had three levels, each of which had a specific function. The function of the first level was that of ruling and the administration of the sacred, represented by kind and priest. The function of the second level was that of force, represented by the warrior. The third was that of production, represented by cultivators and laborers.
Moreover, the cultural structure of 3 levels may be a consequence of the requirements necessary for any society to exist — specifically, the need for order (including a justification for that order); the need for protection from external threats; and the provision of goods required to sustain life.
Nonetheless, even those who wish humanity well must be skeptical about the extent to which such developments will undermine human divisiveness. This is so because, so far, cultural developments like the universal monotheistic religions, international trade, and communication that spans the globe have by no means undermined the divisions within humanity. Moreover, these cultural developments have not even undermined deep divisions, national or otherwise, within a particular civilization.
Why should different cultural traditions exist at all? Why do they appear so prevalent and persistent throughout history? And why have they been repeatedly expressed through terms of kinship?
One explanation has been economic competition; namely, that the scarcity of resources to satisfy ever-expanding and seemingly often conflicting human desires (including not only those of immediate physical satisfaction, but also more complex aims like prestige) has resulted in human banding together into groups, which, in turn, compete with one another for those resources.
Aristotle also observed that humans have the ability to “foresee with the mind.” This orientation to the future results in humans organizing themselves into seemingly qualitatively different forms of social relations in the attempt to address different problems, including those problems that are in the process of being created. Thus, Aristotle thought that the household and the city are distinguished from one another according to different purposes in response to different problems: for the family, the biological problem of the generation and sustenance of life itself; for the city, the cultural problem of not just living, but how best to live, of living well.
Specific to humanity is the capacity to divide oneself into subject and object, to think about oneself, to reflect upon one’s own condition; and, thereby, not only to engage in a struggle for existence, but also raise the problem of what is the proper way to live. This is the capacity for self-consciousness. However, this capacity for self-reflection bears with it an awareness of humanity’s deficiencies in relation to both its current and future environment.
In response to this openness and the anxiety that it provokes, the mind seeks out and establish varieties of order that provide structure to experience. These varieties of order — traditions — are expressed in different forms of relations. These, in turn, are formed around different meanings about life that arise out of the contemplation of experience.
Humans create wide-ranging social relations that structure their conduct, thereby reducing the anxiety of the uncertainty of how to act arising from the lack of such a behaviorally determining instinctual apparatus.
These conduct-structuring social relations provide patterns of familiarity; and they, too, are inherited through a cultural heritage.
Because humans subject the biological drive to procreate to evaluation, it becomes susceptible to variability, as expressed in the many different forms of human mating — not only to monogamy, but also polygamy, promiscuity (for example, prostitution, adultery), and separation of the male and female after mating (as in divorce). Such variability, even when confined to biologically compelling sexual relations, within a species is characteristically human. Indeed, humans may reject altogether both what may otherwise be understood as a behavioral drive to create and the social relations derivative of that drive, the family. “There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.”
This capability is evident from those human relations such as trade for goods over long distances, and those many religions for which an event in the distant past, for example, the crucifixion of Jesus, is seen as relevant for one’s conduct in the present. This capability is also evident in the creation of the nation, the territorial expansiveness of which is beyond the spatial area of the smell, touch, and sight of any one individual, although pictorial representations, maps, of the nation imaginatively extend one’s vision. The ability to form such relations indicates that the human mind exhibits capacities of imagination that enable it to lay claim to spatially distant locations as being in some way one’s own, to lay claim to events in the past as relevant to one’s present, to lay claim to a vision of the future as a concern of that present, and to lay claim to the images of a past, present, and future of another individual as being one’s own.
When images about things in the past, present, or expected in the future held in the mind of one individual are shared by another, they become the criteria by which individuals may evaluate one another. The result of such evaluation classification is that one individual is recognized to be in some way either similar to another, such that a “we” is established, or different from another such that an “other” is asserted.
Thus, for efficient economic relations, national or religious properties asserting the similarity or dissimilarity of one individual as perceived by another should be irrelevant as criteria for entering into a contractual exchange of goods and services. Such an impersonality of the ideal economic relationship presupposes a degree of tolerance in so far as those other evaluative criteria are either suspended or viewed as irrelevant for the purpose of this kind of relationship. Free trade enshrines the doctrine of “live and let live.”
The world religions are religions of belief. One can become a Christian, Muslim, or Buddhist by accepting their respective doctrines. In contrast, the quality recognized in a fellow member of a nation centers on birth, usually birth in its territory.
One reason for the persistence and importance of nations, offered in the previous chapters, is that humans are preoccupied with vitality, above all, its origins. As a consequence of this preoccupation, they form relations around those origins, of which the most obvious example is the family.
The task of politics is not to repudiate these different orientations of human conduct. To champion uncompromisingly one of those orientations at the expense of the other only invites a totalitarian enchantment with one of their ideological expressions, whether nationalism or fundamentalism. The task of politics, through the reasoned exercise of the virtue of civility arising out of concern for the unavoidably ambiguous common good of one’s society, is to adjudicate artfully between the demands that these orientations place on human life.