Nationalism’s Undeserved Reputation

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Opening the Hebrew paper yesterday morning, two front-page stories caught my eye. The bigger one, beneath a banner headline, told of a devastating earthquake and tidal waves in Southeast Asia with at least 23,000 dead. The smaller one was about the murder, for unclear, possibly terrorist motives, of a woman in Jerusalem. I happened to know that woman. My wife and I were once friendly with her and ran into her recently at a wedding after many years of being out of touch.


Which story affected me most? The same one that would have affected you most, had it been you. The one about the woman.


Should one feel guilty for caring more about the death of a single person one wasn’t even in touch with than about the deaths of thousands?


Not unless one wants to feel guilty for being human, because it’s the most human of reactions.


Our relations with the world are hierarchical. We care more about the people we love than about the people we know but don’t love. We care more about the people we know but don’t love than about the people we don’t know at all. We care more about the people we don’t know at all but share a country with than about the people we don’t know at all but do not. That’s why, when I heard about the disaster in Southeast Asia, my first reaction was to not to mourn so many dead Sri Lankans, Thais, and Indians, but to wonder whether there might be any Israelis among them.


It’s also why we have families and tribes and ethnic groups and nations and churches and religions in this world. We all need to belong to communities we feel part of. We all feel incomplete when we don’t.


It’s also why we have nationalism, which has an undeservedly bad reputation these days.


Not that, looking back from the early 21st century, this bad reputation doesn’t come with some good reasons. Two terrible world wars, the horrors of fascism, the Holocaust, the Middle East conflict, the carnage in Bosnia – all products of nationalist conflicts and emotions. What, ask the intellectuals of our times, is nationalism but the root of all modern evils? By channeling the frustrations of the masses into grandiose fantasies of national glory, it sets people against people, country against country, army against army.


And yet this is a half-baked way of looking at it – and not only because nationalism, for all the havoc it has caused, has historically been responsible for a great deal of good. For the development and spread of democracy, for example.


Without nationalism there would have been no American Revolution, no French Revolution, no end to the great empires that tyrannized immense populations – the tsarist empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Empire. It was the concept of the nation-state, an embellishment upon the city-state of ancient Greece, that made the very idea of a democratic society possible, for only in a society with a common language, common interests, and a common identity could one imagine a common people deciding its own fate.


But that’s just one side of it. The other is that internationalism, which has as good a reputation these days as nationalism has a bad one, has wreaked every bit as much havoc.


What was communism if not an internationalist ideology that sought to impose, by violence, in the name of universally applicable rules, the same form of life on everyone on earth?


What is Islamic jihadism if not an internationalist ideology that seeks to do the same thing?


It was nationalism – Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian – that brought communism down. And it has been largely the failure of nationalism in the Arab world that has enabled jihadism to become as powerful as it is today. Arabs, too, need to belong to something greater than themselves. If this cannot be something called Lebanon, Syria, Algeria, or Iraq, because none of these countries has been able to develop a strong national identity and ethos, it is likely to be something that claims to be even greater than the nation-state – internationalist Islam, for example.


And if a virulent internationalism is the enemy of nationalism from above, a virulent tribalism is the enemy of nationalism from below. The genocide in Rwanda would never have taken place if the Tutsis and the Hutus had been able to create a Rwandan identity shared by both, instead of lapsing back into subnational warfare.


It is simplistic to argue that there are wars because there are different nation-states, just as it is simplistic to argue that there are wars because there are different religions or different ideologies. It would be closer to the truth to say that there are different nation-states, religions, and ideologies because communities of people feel the need to fight wars – or at least to differentiate themselves from other communities to which they do not belong and with which they do not identify.


Tribal, national, or international, there will always be such groupings. It just may be that the nation-state is, on the whole, the most conveniently sized of them; not too big for those who are part of it to feel ultimately insignificant and powerless, not too small to exclude our neighbors who live next door.


I still don’t know how many Israelis died in Southeast Asia. The last reports said that some 250 of them were missing. It’s not that I’m not sorry about the thousands of others, but those 250 matter to me more.


Not as much, though, as a woman killed in Jerusalem.



Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.


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