A convincing, or at least plausible, route to a third way lies through the nineteenth-century programme of combining the communitarian values of socialism with insistence on individual moral responsibility. For the movement known as ‘Christian socialism’ in the Anglican tradition, or ‘the social gospel’ in some Protestant traditions, and ‘Catholic syndicalism’ or ‘social Catholicism’ in the Catholic Church, the 1840s were a decisive decade. Wherever industrialization and urbanization flung unevangelized workers together, committed priests and bishops founded new parishes. The Anglican priest F. D. Maurice canvassed the term ‘Christian socialism’ – and was driven out of his job in the University of London for his pains. In Paris, meanwhile, the Catholic Sisters of Charity exercised a practical mission among the poor. Archbishop Affre died at the barricades in the revolution of 1848, waving an ineffectual olive branch.
After Leo XIII made the Church’s peace with the modern world, it was easier for Catholic priests to take part in workers’ political movements, with encouragement from bishops who hoped to ‘save’ workers from communism. Inexorably, however, Catholic political groups and trade unions multiplied under lay leadership. Some became mass movements and electorally successful parties. Social Catholicism, however, was still a minority interest in the Church. Not until the 1960s did it conquer orthodoxy, under the leadership of Pope John XXIII. In his encyclical of 1961, Mater et Magistra, he outlined a vision of the state that would enhance freedom by assuming social responsibilities and ‘enabling the individual to exercise personal rights’. He approved a role for the state in health, education, housing, work, and subsidizing creative and constructive leisure. Subsidiarity is not the only current political buzzword from Catholic social theory: ‘common good’ is another. As secular socialist parties fade, politics in a Christian tradition may be due for revival.54
Nationalism (and Its American Variant)
Most of the thinking that strengthened state power in the nineteenth century – Hegel’s idealism, Schopenhauer’s ‘will’, Rousseau’s ‘general will’, and the superman imagery of Nietzsche – now seems foolish or foul. In the late twentieth century, the state began to ebb – at least in respect of economic controls. Five trends were responsible: pooled sovereignty in an ever closer-knit world; the resistance of citizens and historic communities to intrusive government; the rise of new, non-territorial allegiances, especially in cyber-ghettoes of the Internet; the indifference of many religious and philanthropic organizations to state boundaries in the spirit, one might say, of ‘médecins sans frontières’; and, as we shall see in the next chapter, new political and economic ideas that linked prosperity with circumscribed government. One nineteenth-century source of intellectual support for the legitimacy of states has, however, proved amazingly robust: the idea of nationalism.
Even the most impassioned nationalists disagree about what a nation is, and no two analysts’ lists of nations ever quite match. Herder, who is usually credited with starting the modern tradition of nationalist thought, spoke of ‘peoples’ for want of a means of distinguishing them from nations in the German of his day. More recent nationalists have used ‘nation’ as a synonym for various entities: states, historic communities, races. Herder’s concept was that a people who shared the same language, historic experience, and sense of identity constituted an indissoluble unit, linked (to quote the Finnish nationalist A. I. Arwidsson) by ‘ties of mind and soul mightier and firmer than every external bond’.55 Hegel saw the Volk as an ideal – a transcendent, immutable reality. Though validated – in some advocates’ claims – by history and science, nationalism was usually couched in mystical or romantic language apparently ill-adapted to practical ends. Infected by romantic yearning for the unattainable, it was doomed to self-frustration. Indeed, like the passion of the lover on Keats’s Grecian urn, it would have been killed by consummation. German nationalism throve on unfulfilled ambitions to unite all German-speakers in a single Reich. That of Serbs was nourished by inexhaustible grievances. Even in France – the land of ‘chauvinism’, which proclaimed, more or less, ‘My country, right or wrong’ – nationalism would have been weakened if the French had ever attained frontiers that satisfied their rulers.
Because nationalism was a state of romantic yearning rather than a coherent political programme, music expressed it best. Má Vlast by Bedřich Smetana in the Czech lands or Finlandia by Jean Sibelius have outlasted their era as no nationalist literature has done. Verdi’s longing, lilting slaves’ chorus in Nabucco probably did more, in the long run, to make Italians feel for a ‘fatherland, so lovely and so lost’ than all the urgings of statesmen and journalists. Nationalism belonged to the values of ‘sensation, not thought’, proclaimed by romantic poets. Nationalist rhetoric throbbed with mysticism. ‘The voice of God’ told Giuseppe Mazzini – the republican fighter for Italian unification – that the nation supplied individuals with the framework of potential moral perfection. Simón Bolívar supposedly experienced a ‘delirium’ on Mount Chimborazo, when ‘the God of Colombia possessed me’ ignited ‘by strange and superior fire’.56
Nationalists insisted that everyone must belong to a nation of this kind, and that every nation had, collectively, to assert its identity, pursue its destiny, and defend its rights. None of this made much sense. Nationalism is obviously false: there is no innate spiritual bond between people who happen to share elements of common background or language; their community is simply what they choose to make of it. One of the most assiduous students of nationalism concluded that ‘nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent though long-delayed political destiny, are a myth … Nationalism often obliterates pre-existing cultures.’57 Even if a nation were a coherent category, belonging to it would not necessarily confer any obligations. Still, it was a kind of nonsense people were disposed to believe; some still are.
For an idea so incoherent, nationalism had astounding effects. It played a part in justifying most of the wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and inspiring people to fight in them in combination with the doctrine of ‘national self-determination’. It reshaped Europe after the First World War, and the entire world after the retreat of European empires. Nationalism ought to be irrelevant today, in a world of globalization and internationalization. Some politicians, however, clinging to supreme power in their own states, and some electorates, reaching for the comfort of old identities, have rediscovered it. Impatience with internationalization, immigration, and multiculturalism has made nationalist parties popular again in Europe, threatening cultural pluralism and clouding the prospects of European unification. We should not be surprised. Agglutinative processes that draw or drive people into ever larger empires or confederations always provoke fissile reactions. Hence, in late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century Europe, secessionists have sought or erected states of their own, shattering Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, splitting Serbia and Czechoslovakia, putting Spain, Belgium, and the United Kingdom in jeopardy, and even raising questions about the futures of Italy, Finland, France, and Germany.58 In other parts of the world, new-kid nationalisms, not always well founded historically, have shaken or shattered superstates that were the residue of decolonization. Iraq, Syria, and Libya look fragile. Secession from Indonesia, Somalia, and Sudan respectively has not stabilized East Timor, Somaliland, or South Sudan.
In practice, states that misrepresent themselves as national seem doomed to compete with each other. They must be assertive in self-justification or self-differentiation, or aggressive in defiance of real or feared aggression by other states. In the opening years of the nineteenth century French and Russian boots stamped across Germany. Fear and resentment provoked nationalist bravado: claims that, like all history’s best victims, Germans were really superior to their conquerors. Germany, in many Germans’ opinion, had to unite, organize, and fight back. Nationalist philosophers formulated the programme. In the early years of the nineteenth century the first rector of the Uni
versity of Berlin, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, proclaimed German identity eternal and unchanging in his Addresses to the German Nation. ‘To have character and be German’ were ‘undoubtedly one and the same thing’. The Volksgeist – the ‘spirit of the nation’ – was essentially good and insuperably civilizing. Hegel thought that the Germans had replaced the Greeks and Romans as the final phase in ‘the historical development of Spirit … The German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim is the realization of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination of freedom.’59 This sounds very grand and a bit scary. There was no good reason behind it except for intellectual fashion.
Nationalists’ rhetoric never faced a basic problem: who belonged to the German nation? The poet Ernst Moritz Arndt was among many who proposed a linguistic definition: ‘Germany is there wherever the German language resounds and sings to God in heaven.’60 The hyperbole did not satisfy advocates of racial definitions, which, as we shall see, became increasingly popular in the course of the century. Many – at times, perhaps, most – Germans came to think that Jews and Slavs were indelibly alien, even when they spoke German with eloquence and elegance. Yet it was equally common to assume that the German state had the right to rule wherever German was spoken, even if only by a minority. The implications were explosive: centuries of migration had sprinkled German-speaking minorities along the Danube and into the southern Volga valley; Germanophone communities had seeped across all borders, including those of France and Belgium. Nationalism was an idea that incited violence; the nation-state was an idea that guaranteed it.61
Britain had even less coherence as a nation than Germany. But that did not frustrate formulators of doctrines of British (or often, in effect, English) superiority from coming up with equally illusory ideas. Thomas Babington Macaulay – who, as a statesman, helped design the British Raj and, as an historian, helped forge the myth of British history as a story of progress – belonged, in his own estimation, to ‘the greatest and most highly civilized people that ever the world saw’.62 As he sat in his study in November 1848, he measured his country’s superiority in terms of the blood revolutionaries shed elsewhere in the Europe of his day, ‘the houses dented with bullets, the gutters foaming with blood’. He was haunted by nightmares of a Europe engulfed, like the declining Roman Empire, in a new barbarism, inflicted by under-civilized masses. At the same time, he was confident of the reality of progress and the long-term perfectibility of man. Britain’s destiny was to pioneer progress and approach perfectibility: the whole of British history, as Macaulay saw it, had been leading up to such a consummation, ever since the Anglo-Saxons had brought a tradition of liberty, born in the Germanic woods, to Britannia, where liberty blended with the civilizing influences of the Roman Empire and Christian religion. Britain’s neighbours were simply laggard along the road of progress. Britain had pre-enacted the struggles between constitutionalism and absolutism that convulsed other countries at the time. Britons had settled them, a century and a half before, in favour of ‘the popular element in the English polity’. Seventeenth-century revolutions had established that the right of kings to rule differed not one jot ‘from the right by which freeholders chose knights of the shire or from the right by which judges granted writs of habeas corpus’.63 Macaulay made a further error, which his US followers have often repeated: he assumed that political systems induce economic outcomes. Constitutionalism, he thought, had made Britain the ‘workshop of the world’, the ‘mother-country’ of the world’s most extensive empire, and the cynosure of the world. Towards the end of the century, Cecil Rhodes offered a different but widely shared analysis, echoed in countless volumes of inspiringly imperialist schoolboy stories and pulp fictions: ‘The British race is sound to the core and … dry rot and dust are strangers to it.’64
One could multiply examples like those of Britain and Germany for other European countries, but in the long run the world’s most impactful nationalism was that of the United States – a place where nationalist theorists had to work exceptionally hard to knead or pound that essentially plural land of heterogeneous immigrants into a mixture with a plausibly national character, and see it, in Israel Zangwill’s words, as ‘God’s Crucible’.65
Ideas sometimes take a long time to get out of heads and into the world. Even while the United States was experiencing a founding revolution, some Americans began to imagine a single union filling the whole hemisphere, but it seemed a vision impossible to realize in practice. At first, it seemed hardly more realistic to hope to extend westwards across a continent that exploration had revealed as untraversibly immense. Colonial projectors had confidently claimed strips of territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific because they had been incapable of grasping the real dimensions of America. Such illusions were no longer tenable by 1793, when Alexander Mackenzie crossed North America, in latitudes still under British sovereignty: thereafter the fledgling republic had to hurry to reach across the continent. The Louisiana Purchase made it a theoretical possibility; a transcontinental expedition in 1803 sketched out a route. First, however, Mexicans and Indians had to be swept out of the way. During the decades of feverish hostility and war against Mexico in the 1830s and 1840s, the journalist John L. O’Sullivan heard a divine summons ‘to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions’. Manifest destiny would embrace the breadth of the hemisphere from sea to shining sea in a single republican ‘empire’: people were happy to call it that in the early years of the United States. It was the idea from which America’s future as a superpower sprang. According to the United States Journal in 1845, ‘We, the American people, are the most independent, intelligent, moral and happy people on the face of the earth.’ The self-congratulation resembled that of Germans and British.
A hostile environment remained to be traversed. Because the North American Midwest never experienced the long period of glaciation that preceded the forests and shaped the soil elsewhere, the so-called Great American Desert occupied most of the region between the exploitable lands of the Mississippi basin and the Pacific-side territories. Virtually nothing humanly digestible grew there; except in small patches, tough soils would not yield to pre-industrial dibblers and ploughs. To James Fenimore Cooper, it seemed a place without a future, ‘a vast country, incapable of sustaining a dense population’. Then steel ploughs began to bite into the sod. Rifled guns freed up land for colonization by driving off the natives and killing off the buffalo. Balloon-framed, ‘Chicago-built’ cities rose in treeless places thanks to machined planks and cheap nails. From labour-lite grain elevators, introduced in 1850, railroads carried grain to giant flour mills that processed it into marketable wares. Wheat, a form of humanly edible grass, took over from the grasses the buffalo grazed. The most underexploited of North America’s resources – space – was put to productive use, sucking up migrants. The prairie became the granary of the world and an arena of cities, the United States a demographic giant. The wealth generated helped to put and keep the country economically ahead of all rivals. The United States and, to a lesser extent, Canada became continent-wide countries and real world powers, with power over the price of food.66
US exceptionalism complemented US nationalism. Neither was complete without the other. Exceptionalism appealed to nineteenth-century enquirers, puzzling over why demographic, economic, and military growth in the United States exceeded that of other countries. But the idea of a unique country, beyond comparison with others, started earlier in America, with the ‘pioneer spirit’ – shining-faced enthusiasm for a promised land for chosen people. Nineteenth-century experience matched some of the hope and hype. The United States became, successively, a model republic, an exemplary democracy, a burgeoning empire, a magnet for migrants, a precocious industrializer, and a great power.
The Catholic reformer, Fr Isaac Hecker, formulated an extreme form of exceptionalism. Religious cant had always lurked in the undergrowth of the idea: Puritan ambitions for a City on a H
ill, Mormon fantasies about land hallowed by Jesus’s footfall. Hecker gave exceptionalism a Catholic twist. He argued that because progressive enrichment of divine grace accompanied modern progress, Christian perfection was more easily attainable in the United States than elsewhere. Leo XIII condemned this ‘Americanism’ as an arrogant attempt to devise a special form of Catholicism for the United States, painting the Church red, white, and blue. It undermined Americans’ awareness of dependence on God and made the Church redundant as a guide for the soul.
The pope’s suspicions were understandable. Two related heresies have helped shaped US self-images: I call them the Lone Ranger heresy and the Donald Duck heresy. According to the first, American heroes, from Natty Bumppo to Rambo, are outsiders, whom society needs but who do not need society: they do what a man’s gotta do, saving society from the margins, with a loner’s indifference to shootouts and showdowns. The Donald Duck heresy, meanwhile, sanctifies impulses as evidence of natural goodness, or of that over-valued American virtue of ‘authenticity’, feeding the self-righteous convictions that so often got Donald into trouble.67 The American dream of individual liberation is only justifiable if one believes in the goodness of man – or, in Donald’s case, of duck. Donald is at bottom warm, friendly, and well-disposed, despite embodying the vices of individualist excess – irrational self-reliance, opinionated noisiness, trigger-happy gun-toting, fits of temper, and irritating self-belief. The same vices, and the same sort of obedience to impulse, makes American policymakers, for instance, bomb people from time to time, but always with good intentions. The feel-good society, where personal guilt dissolves and self-satisfaction stalks, is among the other consequences. Therapy replaces confession. Self-discovery smothers self-reproach. US-watchers frequently notice myopic patriotism, morbid religiosity, and conflictive insistence on one’s rights. The virtues we think of as characteristically American – civic-mindedness, neighbourly values, genuine love of freedom and democracy – are human virtues, intensely celebrated in America. In any case, if the United States was ever exceptional, it is so no longer, as the rest of the world strives to imitate its success.68
Out of Our Minds Page 39