The Wrath of Ages: Nationalism's Primordial Roots

I have used the word nationalism in this book in its widest sense, and also in several senses. I have done so because what is called nationalism is an expression of the primordial attachments of an individual to a group, possessing both positive and destructive powers, and this is a phenomenon which existed long before the group to which such passionate loyalty was attached became the modern nation-state. . . . The nationalist has his heart in his work. . . . He acts from the roots of being, of human society, from a given earth and clan-primordial attachments.

SECULARIZING NATIONALISM

Nationalism certainly did not begin in the nineteenth century, or even the eighteenth. But something very important did happen to nationalism in the late eighteenth century, in what was then the most important country in the world: France. That something was the separation of nationalism from religion. This was such a striking novelty that it gave some observers-then and now-the illusion that nationalism was a new creation, whereas it was something very old in reality, branching out in a new way.

For centuries, French nationalists had been happy with their Most Christian Kings, and their status as Eldest Daughter of the Church. Since the fifteenth century, France's patron saint, Joan of Arc, resembled a goddess in the minds of French nationalists. But by the late 18th century French intellectuals in general and French nationalists in particular turned away from the Church. The role of the Enlightenment in all this has long been recognized. As far as all the upper levels of society were concerned, Voltaire had made religion look ridiculous, and the French dread of ever being associated with le ridicule is proverbial. But the reasons for the alienation of French nationalists from the Church have received less consideration. French nationalists, by the 1760s, hated the Church because they associated it with defeat in war. In the Seven Years War (1756-1763) France, allied with Catholic Austria, had been decisively defeated by Protestant Prussia, allied with Protestant England. The Catholic monarchy and its Catholic ally had allowed the French nation to be humiliated. The detested alliance and the associated humiliation were incarnated in the person of the foreign Queen: the hated Austrian, Marie Antoinette. Well before the French Revolution, French nationalists promoted the expulsion of the Jesuits from France as an act of liberation from Catholic internationalism. French nationalism had advanced from "chosen people" to "deified nation" and held out that example to others. The French Revolution begins with a declaration of cosmic nationalist absolutism: see the Sieyès passage quoted earlier.

The supreme example of the "deified nation" in history is Nazi Germany. William Pfaff would not agree with me on this. For him, as for several other writers, Nazism was not a nationalist movement; it only sounded like one. He writes: "While Nazism exploited national sentiment and the resentments of the 'national movement' in Weimar Germany, making dramatic use of a theater and rhetoric of nationalism, it was fundamentally an internationalist ideology based on racialist theory."

This is a good example of distortion through the exaltation of theory over practice, and through conceptual compartmentalization of emotional forces which were in practice inseparable. You cannot legitimately find that Nazism is something "fundamentally" distinct from the sentiments and resentments of the main body of Nazis and of their supporters. Nazism was a product of the deeply humiliated nationalism of a major military power. Hitler did not just "exploit" that feeling; he passionately shared it and was its voice. Nor can racism and nationalism be separated in the Nazi culture. That culture was basically Völkisch, and the adjective means both nationalist and racist; the two were felt to be the same thing. If you were not racist and anti-Semitic, you did not count as a German nationalist.

German nationalist-racists did, as Pfaff points out, accept the existence of other Aryan peoples, and had places for them in their vision of a postwar world. But these were subordinate places. There were Aryans and there were top Aryans. Germans who thought in Aryan terms never had any doubt about who the top Aryans were. The Nazis in their halcyon days had a song that everyone knows about:

Today, Germany belongs to us.

Tomorrow, the whole world.

I do not think that when the Nazis sang that song they meant by "us" a pan-Aryan assemblage in which Germans shared power with Scandinavians and other peoples of approved genetic lineages. I think that, when the German Nazis said "us," they meant themselves. That is what people usually do mean when they say "us."

Triumphalist nationalism usually moves in a penumbra of pseudo-internationalism. In the nineteenth century, the expansion of British and French national power was known as imperialism (then a term with mainly approving connotations). The French Revolutionaries called their own expansion and exploitation of other countries "fraternity." Nazi "pan-Aryanism" was of a similar order: nationalism was at the heart of all.

NATIONALISM AS IDEOLOGY

Pfaff not only dismisses (initially) the idea of nationalism as "a primordial historical phenomenon," he also denies it the status of an ideology. This denial will confuse his readers, as what he is talking about in the passage I first quoted is clearly an ideological phenomenon. Yet Pfaff says immediately after that passage: "Nationalism is not an ideology because it has no universality. It is impossible to be a nationalist as such, only a German or Croatian or American nationalist."