The Defects of Nationalism
- Fruf
- Aug 25, 2020
- 6 min read
Updated: Jan 23, 2023
1. Nations do not deserve their people’s pride:
Every nationalist is, and expects others to be, proud of their country. But most nations have little to be proud of. Why should anyone take pride in a US with large inequalities and entrenched racism? An Israel that throws out the Palestinians and grabs their land? An India hugely divided on religion and caste lines? Or a Brazil that is rapidly destroying the world’s largest rainforests? The countries of the world are so miserable that they do not deserve their people's pride.
2. Attachment to territory:
A nation consists of its people, its culture, its history and its territory. Most nations consider some territory as their ‘homeland’. If it is with that nation they will defend it and if not they will fight to liberate or reclaim it. A great example is the Zionist idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Well, all claims of an ancestral homeland are debunked by the fact that all humans alike originated in Africa.
Nations assume that they have a right over a portion of the world. But no individual or identity group can claim ‘ownership’ over territory; the earth and its land belong to no one.
3. Constraint on freedom:
Nationalism by nature is incompatible with freedom. No nation would let its people to venture near sensitive borders. Or to criticize and insult it in the open. States of emergency are another trouble which individual freedom can be taken away if the ‘nation’ comes under threat. Freedoms are supposed to be absolute and not to be curtailed by nationalists. The name of the nation is a great tool for political repression, so nationalist regimes tend to be less free in general.
4. No scope for dissent:
Nationalism is an extremely one-way issue; there is no room for dissent. Anyone opposing nationalism is anti-national and is arrested or curbed using nationalistic laws. It is a situation like McCarthyism in the US, in which Senator Joseph McCarthy launched an extreme anti-communist attack and anyone opposing him was deemed to be a communist sympathizer.
When there is nationalism there can be nothing but nationalism.
Nationalists cannot see the world organized in anything but nations. Most political ideologies include some nationalism, and ‘anti-nationalism’ is not a powerful influence in itself. The ubiquity of nationalism ensures that no counter-ideology can emerge and gain acceptance. And it also ensures that the entire population is indoctrinated with nationalism without anyone realizing. Nations have become accepted by the people as a dogma; they are considered the natural state of the world.
As mentioned earlier, each nation has a desire to grow in size and power. Moreover nations will never compromise on territory so long as they remain attached to it. The insatiable ‘will to power’ of the nations ultimately results in war. Nations are inherently selfish (see 12), so they are frequently involved in disputes. Nationalists are also unwilling to compromise or concede, which leads to escalation of disputes into direct conflict. Nationalism has been the cause of most modern-day wars leading to the loss of over 200 million humans.
6. Attachment to history:
Nation-states are fundamentally attached to their pasts. Every region in the world has had some period of relative prosperity and dominance, and present-day nationalists invoke the nation’s ‘glorious past’. In fact, there are so many nationalists promising to ‘make the nation great again’ that people forget that political boundaries have changed. What a nationalist may call their nation today was earlier a lot of fragmented empires and kingdoms. Nationalists invoke a ‘shared history’ stretching back centuries, but nations are relatively recent creations. Anything before their creation cannot be considered a part of their history. Moreover looking back to some ‘good old days’ is not going to change the present. History-based nationalism is like living in a shack and being proud of it because in its place there once stood a palace.
7. Nationalism is an economic disaster for the world:
Nations inherently have a desire for economic growth but are also extremely selfish towards it. They try to protect their own industries and keep out ‘others’ using government regulations. They impose taxes on imports and keep immigrants out and impose sanctions and tariffs on nations they find unfriendly, all of which lead to loss of potential, restrictions on freedom for both consumers and businesses, and are the greatest hurdle to world economic growth. An integrated and free world economy is in the interest of all humans, but the world is increasingly being gripped by neo-mercantilism and excessive restrictions from nationalists. From an outsider’s perspective humans are erecting walls among themselves that impede their own progress.
8. Nations are imaginary and artificial:
What is a nation? Going by the definition earlier it is nothing but a group of people with a sense of a shared culture and history claiming a patch of land. A nationality like all social identities is an entirely artificial construct. Events have shown that it take little history or culture to create a nation. The only thing holding them together is their common national identification. Nations are nothing but imagined communities, with no basis for their identity. They exist only in the minds of people.
Central to nationalist ideology is the idea that the nation is above the individual and his/her rights. Mazzini said that the duty to one’s country was more important than one’s rights, and Kennedy famously said “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” And the problem is that people allow their own rights to be taken away by nationalists. If the nations of the world are so miserable (see 1), then why do people give away their rights in its name? Does a nation that takes away its people's rights deserve their pride?
10. Nations impede human progress:
The organization of the world into nations has split up the world’s human, financial and technical resources. Therefore there is a direct impact on human scientific and social progress. Competition may sometimes benefit the world, but collaboration beats it any day. The division of the world has slowed down the advancement of science. As for social development it can be considered humanity’s failure that there are still people who go hungry even though there is enough food in the world, that there are still people without running water on this planet, that millions of people still die of diseases that can be cured and prevented. A large part of the blame for this goes to the division of the world into nations. There is enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not if the world is divided and those who need it cannot get it while those who have it cannot give it.
11. The government is the nation:
If the will of the nation is above the will of the people, who decides the will of the nation?
Whoever is the government also becomes the nation.
Far too much tyranny has been done ‘in the national interest’ as it was in the government’s interest. Far too many people have been jailed for ‘national security’, because they were a threat to the government’s security. Far too many activities are deemed to be ‘anti-national’ because they are anti-government. Many rulers invoke the nation’s name simply to advance their own motives. Besides that, the government has the status of representing the national consciousness. What Kennedy really meant was “Ask not what I can do for you; ask what you can do for me.”
12. Nations are selfish and divisive:
Nationalism is identification with a subset of humanity and the desire for that subset (and only that subset) to grow, develop and dominate. There is complete apathy for those outside it and for humanity as a whole—because the nationalists only desire the good of their nation. This is the reason behind the impediment of progress mentioned in (10) above. This selfishness creates deep divisions in humanity and makes people narrow-minded.
13. Nationalism robs people of their humanity:
This is the most worrying defect, one that makes nationalism as dehumanizing as any social evil. Nationality creates a distinction of ‘us’ and ‘them’ in human beings. The sense of humanity is lost when fellow humans from another nation are treated as the ‘other’. In other words, nationalism expects one to be in fraternity with a whole lot of unrelated people as ‘we’ and to treat the ‘others’ as outsiders. When nationalists call on people to shun ‘their’ products and buy what is ‘ours’, and even go to the extent of destroying foreign products, they forget that a lot of people have put in long hours of work to get those products to them. When they fight at borders over territory, they cannot see through their blind nationalism that there is a high human cost for immaterial gain. When they talk of making the nation great again, they are telling humans to live in the illusions of the past and disregard current problems. People will go to any lengths to troll an anti-nationalist in the name of freedom but will willingly give up that freedom to nationalist rulers. To sum it up, nationalism leaves humanity bitterly divided, degenerated and dehumanized.