7 Days 24 November 1971
Jingoism, Chauvinism, Nationalism: all branches of the same
poisonous roots? Tom Nairn analyses the scoundrel’s last refuge
Patriotism pretends to be natural and
everlasting: a permanent aspect of healthy
“human nature”. It is nothing of the kind.
The patriotism we know is a cultural
formation with a distinct lineage, belonging
to one period of human history. As that
period ends, so will the ideology of
patriotism.
False consciousness — here as elsewhere
— can impose itself because it seems to
express certain truths of human existence.
In this case the unremarkable truth that
people from different localities, or with
different speech and customs, have always
tended to mistrust one another. In a world
of scarcity, the “foreign” was always more
a threat than a reason for curiosity and
interest. Originally of course this had
nothing to do with “nations” in our sense:
it applied even to neighbouring valleys and
villages, or to different streets in the same
town.
“For the Public Good”
Much political history is the story of how, in
class-divided societies, the rulers have channelled
and exploited this inchoate popular feeling in their
own interest (or, as they often put it, “in the
interest of society as a whole”). The simplest way
to neutralize the internal antagonisms of class
struggle and social discontent has always been to
direct the hatred outwards on to a (real or
imagined) external enemy. Hence, the natural
divisions of humanity (territorial, cultural, racial,
etc.) have invariably been/exploited to contain and
repress its artificial divisions within societies (class,
caste, etc.).
But the peak of achievement in this respect,
modern “patriotism”, could not be attained until
society itself had developed a long way. It was not
until after the French Revolution (1789) and the
English Industrial Revolution (1780-1830) that
such false consciousness was finally crystallized
into something like the form we know. Even then,
the process was completed only by the decisive
social experience of European imperialism,
between 1870 and 1945.
The New Lay Religion
During this century and a half, in fact, the
internal menace of class strife became far greater.
Modern industrial capitalism was gathering round
itself huge urban masses with no old or settled
social loyalties — hence, a new and stronger (if
somewhat synthetic) form of social allegiance was
urgently required to keep them mystified and in
their place. Such was the need which patriotism
was invented to satisfy: it gathered up the old
débris of instinctive prejudice, local emotion and
decaying religious faith, and hammered them into
the new “lay religion” of the nation. The
instrument for doing this was the new, more
powerful and efficient machinery of the
nineteenth century State. The way this instrument
functioned was chiefly by war, or the threat of
war, against the other emerging modern
nation-states. Then finally, as the imperialist
struggle among these states to ravage the rest of
the world grew in intensity after 1870, it furnished
a number of perfect (and real) external enemies
for patriotism to focus upon.
Creature of the Jungle
Forged in this way as a creature of the
imperialist jungle, “patriotism” is inherited by us
Patriotism
as one of a related complex of ideas. It is
important to see them as a whole.
The primary term of the series is “nationalism”,
which denotes the territorial and cultural basis of
the nineteenth-century European state system, and
implies acceptance of nation-state units as the
“natural”, just form of society. This idea was an
organic part of the Nineteenth-century liberal
world-view. “Patriotism” then refers to the
subjectivity of this world-view — the belief that
“nation comes first”, that a primary allegiance is
owed one’s “country” and co-nationals as against
“foreigners”. “Chauvinism” by contrast denotes
patriotism in an extreme or pathological form: the
aggressive belief that national loyalty is not just
primary but absolute, that one’s nation is
intrinsically superior to others and so justified in
maltreating them. Clearly chauvinism (sometimes
called “Jingoism” in England) is very close to
racism, since this superiority is bound to be
founded on inherited “human nature” in a
quasi-biological sense.
More concretely, what this archaic terminology
conceals today is that there is no longer such a
thing as good, decent, reasonable patriotism in
Europe. Imperialism and fascism between them
poisoned the tree of European nationality at the
root. The distinctively “national” consciousness
and cultures of present-day Europe are only the
tenacious but rotting remnants of the growth.
Since May 1968 the stench has been overpowering.
Antics o f a super-patriot
To function properly, patiotism depends upon
both popular and intellectual or “high” culture, as
well as upon the organisation and force of the
State. It depends, especially, upon the
maintenance of national unity between popular
and “high” culture at key points.
The origin of the term “chauvinism” is
interesting in this respect. Originally French, it was
first used there in the 1830s, and denoted the
antics of a Napoleonic super-patriot called Nicolas
Chauvin. Accounts of Chauvin agree he came from
Rochefort and was wounded seventeen times in
Napoleon’s wars, but are otherwise suspiciously
vague: the most concrete description (in Larousse)
awards this folk-hero “three amputated fingers, a
broken shoulder, and a hideously mutilated
forehead”, for which the nation paid him off with
“a sabre of honour, a red ribbon, and a
two-hundred franc pension”.
Chauvinism got into its stride with the French
invasion of Algeria in 1830. Next year the
Cogniard brothers play La Cocarde Tricolore:
Episode de la Guerre d'Alger appeared in Paris,
where it won instant and enormous success. The
Cogniards dominated the Parisian popular theatre
for 40 years. “Everyone knows”, wrote Théophile
Gautier, “ that the Cogniard vaudevilles were the
main agent in moralising the workers, and kept the
savings banks going.”
Rape the Girls
The hero of the play is “La Cocarde” (the
cockade), a scarred Napoleonic veteran glad to be
back at work again, and the piece itself is much
like a Carry On film of over a century ago. Comic
natives abound, and a Frenchman is worth any five
of them. “Jean Chauvin”, a naïve young lieutenant
with his heart in the right place (“son of Nicolas”,
as it were) serves alongside La Cocarde. The main
problem, successfully solved, is how to get first
into the Bey of Algiers’ harem and rape the girls.
On the way there, over innumerable dead Arabs,
the characters constantly erupt into tearful songs
about “France” (although the greatest single hit
was Jean Chauvin’s solo about the dire effects of
eating camel-meat).
However absurd the chauvinism of melodramas
appeared at the time) it helped foster a
mainstream of patriotic culture. In England the
music halls somewhat later played a very similar
role to the vaudevilles: “Jingoism” comes from an
1878 music hall anti-Russian song, “We don’t want
to fight, but by Jingo! if we do . . .” An 1882
definition of Jingoism stated it was “ the idea that
no State can be in a healthy condition that is not
occasionally pitching into its neighbour” (OED)
but in the era of general imperialism “ normal”
patriotism was not far from this sentiment.
“Extremes” serve to define the “norm” in the
cultural field as a whole.
High culture too formed patriotism — in
England e.g. through the influence of figures like
Carlyle, Ruskin (whose Inaugural Address at
Oxford in 1870 inspired the imperialist mission of
Rhodes), Tennyson,, and Kipling. Here also the
Deutsche Dogge und Englische Bulldogge
Romantic Reaction
The most important single date in the history of
patriotism is probably 1848. This was the final
watershed between the older, more rationalist, and
more internationalist culture of bourgeois Europe
(the culture of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment) and the newer culture of
patriotism. Although impaired and in retreat since
the Napoleonic wars and the rise of chauvinism,
the former was not wholly defeated until after the
failure of the revolutions in 1848. Only then did
the “romantic” reaction against the Enlightenment
triumph completely. “Cosmopolitan” became a
term of abuse. It became an article of bourgeois
faith the true internationalism was only possible
on the basis of fully realised nationalism. Whereas
the Enlightenment had been “abstract”, the
romantic ideology of patriotism was “particular”
and national; where the Enlightenment had looked
to a rational future, romanticism looked to a
rational future, romanticism looked to the past, to
the “folk”, to instinctive roots and attachments.
Marx’s and Engels’ Views
1848 was also the year of The Communist
Manifesto, and the important formative
experiences of Marx and Engels (both theoretical
and political) took place in the years leading up to
it. Marx’s work of this time was, in one sense, the
last and greatest expression of the Enlightenment
(i.e. the Critique o f Hegel’s Philosophy o f Right,
the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, and the
Manifesto). No sooner had the Enlightenment
yielded its ultimate fruit than the long era of its
antithesis arrived — the descent into romantic
patriotism and imperialism which marked the
second half of the nineteenth-century. However
far Marxism looked beyond this era, to a future
now only beginning, it was undeniably ill-adapted
to it.
Marx’s socialism certainly gave a new
interpretation to internationalism, and inspired the
struggles of the First and Second Internationals
against patriotism. Yet the dominant trend of the
era was the eclipse of socialism by nationalism, as
the latter provided the basic conditions within
which the working class grew and organised itself
— the fragmented world of claustrophobic national
cultures. In 1914, consequently, internationalism
was unable to prevent the final disaster of the
patriotic epoch, the World War.
Fossilised Nostalgia
In both east and west Europe, in fact, a
fossilised patriotism remains the norm. No eastern
State-bureaucrat’s speech is complete without a
salute to the right of national self-determination
(whose actual meaning was shown in
Czechoslovakia), or a smiling reference to the
forthcoming national folklore festival (the only
possible form of bureaucratic-communist culture).
In the west de Gaulle’s Europe des patries still
proves an effective obstacle to the Common
Market’s “supra-national” ambition. Why else
would the communist and other left movements
there have spent the last 20 years nervously
knocking at the tradesman’s entrance to the
nation-states, and mumbling their stories (all too
often true) about their “roots”, “native
traditions” , rights to belong, etc? The bourgeoisie
fears nothing like an “international conspiracy”.
Alas, how hard it is for Marxists to conceal the
fatal odour of cosmopolitanism, still clinging to
them after so much patriotic desinfectant, as the
butler eyes them up and down!
In 1848 Marx thought that the world-wide
market formed by capitalism would soon give “a
cosmopolitan character to production and
consumption in every country”, and take away
from industry “the national ground on which it
stood” (Manifesto). In this “universal
interdependence”, the old “local and national
seclusion and self-sufficiency.. . National
one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness” would
rapidly become impossible. To emphasise the
point, he even said that “from the numerous
national and local literatures, there arises a world
literature”. The gap between this perspective and
the century of patriotic narrow-mindedness after
1848 is only too evident.
Material Cosmopolitanism
Nevertheless, the material basis of inter­
dependence is now indeed rapidly forming, and is
shown in developments like the multi-national
corporations and the European Common Market.
Traditional “great nation” nationalism becomes
more like the toy nationalism of (e.g.) Scotland or
Croatia every day. Still anchored to the
bourgeois-national cultural wreckage salvaged from
the Second World War, the ancient patriotism
remains the official ideology of the rulers and the
intellectuals, but is being undermined. In Britain,
it is true that many factors in recent history lend
unusual strength and resistance to patriotism: last
summer’s debate on Common Market entry
provided a lucid diagram of this contradiction at
work here. Still, it is the opinion of that pundit of
patriot culture F. R. Leavis that “any national
identity worth preserving is rapidly disappearing —
a process that ‘entering Europe’ will beyond
question accelerate” (Times, 2 November, 1971).
Dr. Leavis’s gloom should only add to our delight
in this disappearance: even through the mouth of a
Leavis, the truth of the Communist Manifesto will
out.
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