Notes on Nationalism: George Orwell (Penguin Modern)

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Perhaps the most notable exception is Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who often defends nationalism as essential for the progress of humanity ( Fichte, 2008). Notwithstanding these passages, Fichte certainly sounds like an ardent nationalist. Moreover, nations are always understood as bounded and limited communities. No nation, however ambitious, understands itself as universal. Unlike certain religious communities, the nation does not aspire to or imagine itself as encompassing humankind. Finally, the nation is primarily a group in which membership is inherited, even when it is open to outsiders. Newborns are not without nationality until they reach the age of reason; one receives a nationality at birth even if one later opts to renounce it or to try to obtain another.

Notes on Nationalism is a well-known essay written by George Orwell. Orwell wrote the essay in May 1945, in a journal called Polemic, after the Second World War had ended. In the essay, Orwell describes his idea of nationalism as: 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. Yet another variant considers the territorial state to be the best explanation for the advent of nationalist ideology. Bluntly put, political changes are what call for a new political ideology. Nationalism emerges within the past few centuries because it is intimately linked to the modern state. The latter is not a collection of fiefdoms or local power structures but a stable administrative structure, centered in a capital, ruling over well-defined territories ( Giddens, 1985). 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. Again, cases such as medieval England or ancient Israel are designed to show that while premodern nations might be exceptional, modernism is wrong to assert that nationalism invents the concept of the nation and all instances of it. In a way, we might say that critics of modernity imagine nations like democracy: Most democracies are quite young, and the success of the idea is recent, but that does not show that democracy is a modern invention.

nationalists also put themselves into a category or ‘unit’, but exempt this from values like good and bad.

Orwell's claim that only Scottish nationalists think that using the Lowland Scottish language is important [a] has been criticised by speakers of the language. [2] Nationalism, however, cannot be reduced to sentiment or a character trait. The standard view is that it is an ideology, whatever else it might be ( Billig, 1995; Eriksen, 2002; Kedourie, 1960; Smith, 1991, 1998, 2010). 3 Despite a wide variety of nationalisms and nationalist thinkers, we can still identify a few core propositions that were shared by seminal thinkers as well as by nationalist movements. We can refer to this as “core” or “classical nationalism.” Nationalism.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, September 2, 2020, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nationalism/.For authors who defend economic modernism, it is the invention of peripheral elites who need a new form of mobilization to outcompete richer and more powerful elites ( Hechter, 1975; Nairn, 1977). Similarly, for those who consider nationalism as a form of political messianism, it is the invention of the marginal and frustrated among the educated and the skilled ( Kedourie, 1960, 1971). Yet, conceiving nationalism as a rational strategy for weaker parties cannot be reconciled with the claim that nationalism emerges as the state’s official ideology to reinforce militarization or with the view that it is devised by elites for the sake of modernization and industrialization ( Gellner, 1964, 1983; Tilly, 1975). One is left wondering whether nationalism is the ideology of the downtrodden who seek liberation or the ideology of the ruling class who seek consolidation. The battle of Raphia and the subsequent popular Egyptian revolt against Hellenistic rule is a textbook case drawn from the premodern world ( Gat, 2012, pp. 118–119). Similar examples abound in Gat’s account. ii) Anti-Semitism. There is little evidence about this at present, because the Nazi persecutions have made it necessary for any thinking person to side with the Jews against their oppressors. Anyone educated enough to have heard the word ‘antisemitism’ claims as a matter of course to be free of it, and anti-Jewish remarks are carefully eliminated from all classes of literature. Actually antisemitism appears to be widespread, even among intellectuals, and the general conspiracy of silence probably helps exacerbate it. People of Left opinions are not immune to it, and their attitude is sometimes affected by the fact that Trotskyists and Anarchists tend to be Jews. But antisemitism comes more naturally to people of Conservative tendency, who suspect Jews of weakening national morale and diluting the national culture. Neo-Tories and political Catholics are always liable to succumb to antisemitism, at least intermittently. Sraders, Anne. “What is Nationalism? Its History And What It Means in 2018. The Street, 2018, https://www.thestreet.com/politics/what-is-nationalism-14642847. The proliferation of variants reveals deep disagreement; irreconcilable modernisms cast doubt on the promise of modernism. For example, while modernists agree that the nation is a recent creation, they cannot agree on who created it. If nationalism invented nations, who invented nationalism?

He says that it can be positive, i.e. for something, such as one's country. Orwell says Celtic nationalism and Zionism are examples of this sort of nationalism. [1] On the other hand, it can be negative, i.e. against something, such as another group. Orwell says Anti-Soviet Trotskyism ans Antisemitism are examples of this sort. [1] Whether it is possible to get rid of [nationalistic tendencies], I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them” Notes on Nationalism These debates are not merely about dates. Behind the answer to the question “when did nationalism first emerge?” we find questions like “what is nationalism?” “what is its function?” and “which conditions made it possible or inevitable?” Even among those who agree on an approximate timeline or place for its emergence, we find a range of competing explanations on what produced nationalism: new economic conditions, political transformations, or the power of new ideas.

The Points of ‘Nationalism’

Uri, Antonia (22 November 2018). "The Scots leid is for aa, nae jist for nationalists". The National (in Scots) . Retrieved 22 September 2020. While nationalism and patriotism are sometimes treated as synonymous, there are good reasons to differentiate them. First, patriotism is far older than nationalism. While modernists all believe that nationalism is recent, none contest Greek patriotism during the Medic Wars ( Kohn, 1944). This chronological difference depends upon a more basic one: Nationalism and patriotism belong to different categories. Typically, patriotism is viewed as a love for or loyalty to one’s community, whether an emotion or character trait ( Kedourie, 1960; Kleinig et al., 2015; MacIntyre, 1984; Oldenquist, 1982). 1 Either way, patriotism is neither an ideology nor a form of politics. Understood as an emotion or a character trait, we can grasp the futility of asking when it first appeared: We do not ask when courage was invented or which society discovered love. 2 A fourth variant considers nationalism to be the response to the discontentment brought by modernity. Powerfully articulated by Elie Kedourie, this view presents nationalism as a civic religion, complete with a narrative of the fall, a path to redemption, and exhortations to sacrifice and purification. This creed was birthed by disillusioned marginal German intellectuals and then exported worldwide ( Kedourie, 1960, 1971). 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. iv) Class Feeling. Among upper-class and middle-class intellectuals, only in the transposed form — i. e. as a belief in the superiority of the proletariat. Here again, inside the intelligentsia, the pressure of public opinion is overwhelming. Nationalistic loyalty towards the proletariat, and most vicious theoretical hatred of the bourgeoisie, can and often do co-exist with ordinary snobbishness in everyday life.

Modernists also raise important methodological objections for their critics. For one, they accuse them of assuming that there is more continuity than the evidence supports ( Breuilly, 1996). A leitmotiv is that we have little idea what ordinary or plain persons believed in the premodern world given that they have left behind few writings. The writings of literate elites cannot be presumed to represent widespread beliefs or sentiments. 10 Furthermore, even when we do have some insight into what plain persons thought thanks to partial or fragmentary testimony, we must be careful to avoid reading the past through contemporary lenses. 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. Authors like Azar Gat would be unhappy with this label. Nevertheless, his overall argument is far more critical of modernism than anything else. Indeed, insisting on the antiquity of the national state seems like a form of perennialism ( Gat, 2012). The Eastern or ethnic nation is defined by descent, or rather the presumed shared descent of its members. Here members understand themselves as ancestrally related, possessing an identity that is inherited and unchosen on the model of the family. The idea of the ethnic nation is often compared to the family as in Walker Connor’s well-known claim that it is perceived as “the family fully extended” ( Connor, 1994, p. 202). PACIFIST: Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.Collective humiliation and powerlessness are to be explained by national disunity, loss of identity, and autonomy. Like ancient Hebrews explaining their political subjugation in terms of their sinful ways, the nationalist blames contemporary discontentment on a failure to honor and safeguard one’s unique and distinct nation. The solution is national revival: The nation must be reunited, autonomy restored, and national identity restored to its authentic self. Gregory Claeys. "Orwell's 'Notes on Nationalism' and Nineteen Eighty-Four", in: Thomas Horan, ed. Critical Insights: Nineteen Eighty-Four (The Salem Press, 2016), pp. 71-82, connects the text with Nineteen Eighty-Four. 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.