America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  Chosen Peoples

  Underlying the nationalism not only of the American Right, but of American culture in general, is a belief that America has been specially “chosen” and is therefore, in Madeleine Albright’s words, the “indispensable nation”—whether chosen by God, by “destiny,” by “history,” or simply marked out for greatness and leadership by the supposed possession of the greatest, most successful, oldest and most developed form of democracy. In Woodrow Wilson’s words, in World War I “America had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world.” This messianism will be explored in the next chapter.52

  One reason for the persistence of this belief in America is that in the mid-twentieth century it was actually true. When the popular evangelist Billy Sunday declared at the outbreak of war with Germany in 1917 that “America is placed in a position where the fate of the world depends largely on our conduct. If we lose our heads, down goes civilization,” he was engaging in nationalist hyperbole. In the 1940s and early 1950s, this was no exaggeration.53

  This sense of America not just as an unfulfilled dream or vision, but also as a country with a national mission, is absolutely central to the American national identity, and also forms the core of America’s faith in its own “exceptionalism.”54 It was inscribed on the Republic’s Great Seal at America’s birth as a united nation: Novus Ordo Seclorum (A New Order for the Ages).

  Today this belief does indeed make Americans exceptional in the developed world. In the past, however, this was emphatically not the case: “From time immemorial, nations have conceived of themselves as superior and as endowed with a mission to dominate other peoples or to lead the rest of the world into paths of light.” A great many nations throughout history—perhaps even the great majority—have had a sense of themselves as especially “chosen” by God, or destiny, for great and special “tasks,” and have often used remarkably similar language to describe this sense of mission.55 Indeed, some of the most articulate proponents of America’s universal mission are British subjects, repeating very much the same lines that their fathers and grandfathers used to employ about the British empire.56 In the words of Hermann Melville (1819–1891):

  We Americans are the peculiar chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are pioneers of the world; the advance guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a path into the New World that is ours.57

  As the leading religious historian Conrad Cherry writes, “the development of the theme of chosen people in both Germany and the United States between 1880 and 1920 illustrates the protean character of the myth of religious nationalism. It has proven itself able to assume the identity of multiple biblical and non-biblical images without loss of its mythic power.” The difference today is of course that in Germany this myth was killed off completely (at least in its nationalist form) by the horrors of 1933–1945, and to a very considerable degree this was true in the rest of Western Europe as well. In the United States this myth is still very much alive.58

  The Protestant form of this myth was to be found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holland, Sweden, and Britain before it migrated to the United States. In Milton’s words of the mid-seventeenth century, “let England not forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live.” As in America, this usually involved the explicit identification of the country concerned with biblical Israel. Such Protestant and biblical imagery pervaded British imperial rhetoric, including on the part of the not very religious (indeed, Masonic) Rudyard Kipling. It always strangely blended themes of Christianization, liberation, and development with racial superiority and celebration of victorious force.

  Present in all the great powers in modern history has also been an American-style sense of themselves as “universal nations,” summing up the best in mankind, and also embracing the whole of mankind with their universally applicable values. This allowed them in turn to claim that theirs was a positive nationalism or patriotism, while those of other nations were negative, because they were morally stunted and concerned only with the interests of their own nation.

  Germans before 1914 believed that “Germany may heal the world” with its own particular mixture of legal order, technological progress, and spirit of organic, rooted “culture” and “community” (gemeinschaft). These values were opposed by German thinkers to the allegedly decadent, shallow “civilization” and atomized, rootless “society” (gesellschaft) of England, France, or the United States, and to the “barbarism” of Russia. In the words of Johann Gottlieb Fichte a century earlier: “The German alone therefore can be a patriot; he alone can for the sake of his nation encompass the whole of mankind; contrasted with him from now on, the patriotism of every other nation must be egoistic, narrow, and hostile to the rest of mankind.”59

  Russia too had its own sense of universal mission and nationhood under the tsars, closely linked as in some other cases to religion; the belief in Russia as the heir to the Christian Empire of Rome and Constantinople. Konstantin Aksakov wrote that “the Russian people is not a nation, it is a humanity; it only appears to be a people only because it is surrounded by peoples with exclusively national essences, and its humanity is therefore represented as nationality.”60 Dostoyevsky wrote that Russians were “the only God-bearing people on earth, destined to regenerate and save the world.” This spirit was later to flow into Soviet Communism, which envisaged the Russian language and selected aspects of Russian culture as forming essential building blocks of a new socialist nation that would in turn set a pattern for all mankind.

  The most interesting parallel to the American sense of universal national mission is to be found in the history of France. Indeed, to a pragmatic and empirical latter day British subject, the long-running alienation between the United States and France often resembles two brothers quarrelling over a shared inheritance.61 For the French state too, like the American, has claimed for most of the past 200 years to represent the heritage of the Enlightenment with regard to liberty, democracy, and progress, and to have the right to spread these ideals to other nations. This belief dates from the French Revolution, but is built on the older conviction of Royal France in the 17th and 18th centuries that it was La Grande Nation, with a cultural mission to lead Europe. Indeed, the ultimate roots can be traced still further back, to medieval Catholic and protonational images of France as “the eldest daughter of the Church.”

  For many years after the revolution, France was seen as a “glorious mother who is not ours alone and must deliver every nation to liberty.”62 As Thomas Jefferson put it: “Every man has two countries—his own and France”; words that could well be applied, culturally speaking, to much of the world today with reference to the United States.63 Or in the very American words of General de Gaulle, inscribed on the base of his statue on the Champs Elysees: “There exists an immemorial covenant between the grandeur of France and the freedom of the world.”64 As in the United States, this particular belief can also be made into a domestic political weapon. Thus in January 2004, the former Socialist minister Jack Lang, attacking the conservative government for excessive friendliness to China, declared that “the [French] National Assembly has embodied for two centuries the fight for the rights of man”—a sentiment entirely characteristic of the U.S. Congress, and in both cases, equally surprising to the Vietnamese, among many others.65

  General de Gaulle shared a long-standing French belief that France was intended by Providence to enjoy “an eminent and exceptional destiny.” This belief still exists, albeit to a considerably reduced extent, in the French elites, though as the poll cited at the beginning of this chapter suggests, at the start of the twenty-first century mass nationalism is very much less in France than in the United States. According to Edgar Quinet, only France had “the instinct of civilization, the need to take the ini
tiative in a general way to bring about progress in modern society…It is this disinterested though imperious need…which makes French unity, which gives sense to its history and a soul to the country.”66

  Such feelings still exist to a degree not only in France, but in Western Europe more widely, but with a crucial difference from their nature in the contemporary United States. This lies in the fact that since World War II they have, on the whole, separated themselves from the self-images of particular nations and attached themselves to the “European Project” as a whole, as expressed through the European Union (EU) and its predecessor bodies.

  In its overt commitment to spread democracy, human rights, and development, the EU resembles to some extent the United States, and has taken on some of the former mission civilisatrice of its former imperial member states—though this may now be collapsing as a result of the economic recession that began in 2008 and a basic lack of commitment to this project among ordinary Europeans. For the elites who still believe in this project, unlike in the United States, an absolutely central part of this mission is precisely to overcome and transcend nationalism and individual nationalist missions. This was, after all, the most important reason why the “European Project” was started in the first place, to ensure that there would be no repetition of the catastrophic national conflicts that had wrecked Europe in the past: “Europeans have done something that no one has ever done before: create a zone of peace where war is ruled out, absolutely out. Europeans are convinced that this model is valid for other parts of the world.”67

  France too has sunk in the EU and the “European Project” the greater part of its old sentiments of mission civilisatrice, and of its great power ambitions. This has been both because of sheer weakness and because, as far as large-scale unilateral intervention in the non-European world is concerned, these sentiments had in any case been largely bled out by the wars of 1946–1954 in Indochina and 1954–1963 in Algeria. As the French and British intervention in the Libyan civil war of 2011 demonstrated, these countries still possess the will to use independent military force in support of their national interests and ideas of civilization, but only if the costs in human life are small or nonexistent.

  Thesis and Antithesis

  There is, however, another way in which France provides some very interesting parallels with a feature of American nationalism that is a core subject of this book: namely its historical separation into very different and frequently opposed ideological and cultural streams. Because of the political and ideological convulsions that repeatedly gripped France between 1789 and 1958, these have been more clearly defined and radical than in the United States, but in some ways they are rather similar.

  Since 1789 France, like the United States, has possessed what could be called a national ideology or creed, a civic nationalist thesis about itself that France has presented to its own citizens and to the world—albeit one that, unlike in the United States, was for a long time not shared by all Frenchmen. This is the tradition of the core values of the French Revolution, later incorporated to greater or lesser extents in Bonapartism and the French republics: popular sovereignty (even when expressed through a form of plebiscitary monarchy or other leadership), the “Rights of Man,” equality before the law, secularism, and “career open to the talents.”68

  These principles thus became central to the dominant strand of French nationalism, to France’s official sense of universal mission, and to a concept of French identity and citizenship at home that was rooted in loyalty to the French state, and not in ethnicity or religion. As a result, France was for a long time the most open society in Europe (except for Russia) when it came to the assimilation of foreigners.69 This, however, was intended to be assimilation, not mere tolerance: because aliens could become French, they were expected to become French.

  France was the first country in Europe by many years to emancipate its Jewish minority, but with the explicit intention, voiced by Napoleon, that they would thereby merge into the mass of the French people—a very different approach from that of Britain, for example. In recent decades this tension has reappeared with regard to France’s Muslim minority, as symbolized by the highly controversial decision of 2003 to ban Muslim girls from wearing headscarves in schools, on the principle of the role of the state education system in preserving the secular and assimilatory values of the Republic.70 French civic nationalism therefore is assimilationist, but not pluralist. As we shall see, this is also true of some strains in American civic nationalism.

  Like the United States, France has also harbored political tendencies, cultures, and ideologies that run counter to this French “thesis.” These were most obviously represented in the long refusal of conservative and Catholic forces in the nineteenth century to accept the French Republic and the values on which it was based. However, as in the United States, continuities of political allegiance are not the central feature of this “antithesis.” The last watered-down remnants of French monarchism flowed gently enough into loyalty to de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic, and the Catholic Church too has long since made its peace with the Republic and democracy. Moreover, for long historical periods, even the French extreme Right has largely merged with the center-rightist mainstream.

  It would therefore be wrong to draw any kind of straight political line between the antirevolutionary royalist Chouans of the Vendee in the 1790s and the National Front of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the early twenty-first century. Indeed, as Hans Rogger has emphasized, because historically and internationally the Right has tended to be composed of communities or movements of sentiment rather than of formal ideology, “differences on the Right are even more pronounced than those on the Left, and it is this which makes it so difficult to generalize about the Right, to arrive at universally valid definitions.”71

  Rather, one can trace certain continuities of sentiment that have taken different political forms in different generations. These tendencies have stressed a French national identity based not on secular ideology, but on a more-or-less closed ethnic cultural identity. For a long time this meant adherence to Catholicism: for several decades beginning in the later nineteenth century and culminating in Vichy, it was anti-Semitic; today it means being white, speaking good French, and not being a Muslim. It has generally been extremely hostile to the administrative, business, and cultural elites of Paris, and indeed to Paris itself, with its multiethnic population and modern culture (even when the leaders and ideologists of this tendency have been Parisian intellectuals).

  In America, as Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations has written: “The belief that the essence of American nationality lies in dedication to universal principles is constantly at war with the idea that Americanism belongs exclusively to the American people and must be defended against alien influences rather than shared with mankind.”72

  This belief has also been quintessentially true of France.73 Like every other tendency of its kind, these traditions in both the United States and France have seen themselves as representing the pays reel, the true, authentic, immemorial nation, against the pays legale of the administrative and cultural elites—a prejudice endlessly appealed to by right-wing American politicians in their diatribes against Washington.74 Like its conservative nationalist analogues elsewhere in Europe, this French tendency is strongly hostile in spirit towards the EU, and toward globalization—both seen as projects of the cosmopolitan elites and hostile to the interests of ordinary, “true” Frenchmen. The natural home of this tendency in the past was the traditional aristocracy and sections of the petty bourgeoisie and peasantry. Today, it embraces many workers, often ex-Communists.

  And just as the roots of France’s sense of transnational mission can be seen to originate long before the Revolution, so the roots of this tendency can also be traced back to provincial resistance not only against the Revolution, but against previous attempts at royal centralization, standardization, conscription, and taxation. Here too is a parallel with the world of the “antithesis
” in the United States.

  The strong distrust of government characteristic of so many Americans—and so powerfully manifested in the Tea Parties—has been generally attributed, following Frederick Jackson Turner, to the individualist tradition of the American frontier. and this is of course correct. However, this distrust also embodies elements of the old European peasant distrust for state authority, which had generally appeared to peasants in old Europe—as in much of the “developing world” to this day—in the form of corrupt tax collectors, savage policemen, brutal conscripting sergeants, and looting, raping armies (even those of one’s own state), all of them speaking in alien languages or dialects. One way of looking at the violently individualistic and antistatist inhabitants of parts of America is to see them as traditional European peasants who ran away into the forests and mountains to escape the demands of the state. They just ran a bit further.

  These “antithetical” tendencies in France have had a natural tendency to rise to the surface in times of economic depression, and when France is defeated, humiliated, or is felt to be in decline. This occurred after France’s defeat by Prussia in 1870–1871, and culminated in the Dreyfus case.75 In 1872 Sully Prudhomme repudiated his former internationalism in verse: “I wrote with Schiller:/’I am a citizen of the world’…/But I have repented at last/Of my perverted love./From now on my love will be/For my country alone./For those men whom I betrayed/Through love of the human race.”76

  This swing to the antithesis happened again in a much more disastrous way with the mass rally to Marshal Petain and his Vichy regime after France’s defeat in 1940. The last time it has threatened or transformed the state came in the 1950s, with defeat in Indochina and quagmire in Algeria. But as the popularity of Le Pen’s movement indicates, it is by no means certain that some combination of economic depression, immigration, and terrorism could not raise it to truly dangerous heights once again in the future.