Ovi Magazine Issue #24: Nationalism - Published: 2013-01-31

Theme
I was born in 1942, and have degrees in philosophy and political science from Columbia
University and the New School for Social Research, and there is very little that I am not interested
in. I have studied all of the social sciences, only to find out that they were not “scientific”
in the strong sense. But I did come away with a lack of piety about those disciplines.
For example, I do not believe in economists, but I do relish economic history. I have taught
over time at a dozen colleges, in New York and London, but got attached to none, and
worked often as a social worker or in some other region of social services.
But, in addition to being ineluctable, being
a member of a nation is incoherent if one’s folk
is part of a larger political group, because others
have their own folkways. In preliterate societies
folkways are all-important, because the ways of the
folk exist in the hearts and minds of the currently
living members of the group. This tends to make
them relatively unable to be absorbed into larger
groups. With modernity there is a much greater
possibility of assimilation when the folkways
have been nominalized, and persecution is not
widespread.
One’s birth status is all important only when
there is no more inclusive groups that rivals it. And
there are many of such competing groups. Some
are: universal religions; imperialism;
defeat in war; success in war; and
political assimilation.
In what follows I shall
consider two dimensions of
Nationalism, from the bottom,
so to speak, and from the top.
The first is the pure case of
nationalism, in which a defined and
small group of people decided to live
alone among
themselves,
and to
eschew relations with outsiders to the extent this
is possible.
Such an attitude, best stated in the words “Shinn
Fein,” “ourselves alone,” in the Irish tongue, which
betrays an attitude of mistrust of foreigners of all
descriptions. The only likely candidates for such
an attitude are island dwellers, perhaps mountain
folk, and sometimes areas of the world where no
one desires to visit.
The first topic I will address will be the
problem of the pure case of nationalism, which are
commonly small nations and isolated nations, and
typically, island nations.
The list of such nations is not long, and
many of them are island nations, but some
are just on the fringes of continents and not
particularly far out of the reach of strangers.
Certain examples are not true examples,
such as Tasmania, which
belongs to Australia,
and Greenland, which
has no permanent
population and, in
any case, belongs
to Denmark.
19