Democrat April-May 2000 (Number 43)
The National Question
A contribution to the discussion by Arthur Smelt - Nationalism
From time immemorial, mankind has seen the need to
band together in groups in order to survive.
The herd became superseded by the clan, clans merged
into tribes and tribes become nations leading to the nation state
that we know today. There are of course many parts of the world where
tribal life still exists.
Thousands, or possibly hundreds of thousands of years
of clan and tribal existence, have left mankind with a powerful innate
instinct to group together, the imperatives of which have become more
complex with time.
A nation can be described as a community of people
of common descent, history, language, common territory, a community
of economic life and certain peculiarities of social psychology as
expressed in the specific features of the culture, which distinguishes
it from other peoples.
There are however, many instances where a nation
state may comprise a number of different nationalities who may well
retain their individuality. Switzerland, for example is a country
where German, French, Italian and Romansh languages are spoken. Within
the nation state, there are also divisions as to class, religion,
provincialism, customs and as exists in a number of countries, the
North/South divide.
Nationality is the status of belonging to a particular
nation, whereas nationalism is a patriotic feeling of national independence.
By invoking patriotic fervour, nation states have successfully defended
themselves from oppression and external attack.
Nationalism is often mistakenly interpreted as a
form of irrational adulation, that everything which is "ours" is wonderful.
The idea, covert or overt, of self superiority and the inferiority
of other peoples or nationalities, is undesirable and dangerous. This
is chauvinism or racism. Such attitudes can serve to obscure shortcomings
and failures within the nation and can hinder the establishment of
healthy ties and relationships with other peoples.
Protection of our nation state however, is not to
promote chauvinism or the worst kind of reactionary attitudes, but
to ensure that people of the nation are not deprived of the right
to decide their own affairs, the right to self determination in the
light of what is best for the nation as a whole. The right to elect
and dismiss governments and not to have laws, rules and regulations
imposed by a far away bureaucracy out of touch with the nuances which
surround us. In the name of democracy we insist on the right to determine
the course of economic policy appropriate to the people of this country.
We should have the right to intervene as in the case of Rover and
Longbridge, to save tens of thousands of jobs and avoid the disastrous
consequences which follows large scale unemployment.
In defending the nation state, we are pitting ourselves
against a bureaucratic dictatorship which calls itself European Union,
the proponents of which try to present it as democratic, humanitarian
and working for the benefit of everyone. They extol cosmopolitanism
as progress, as a way of abandoning national differences. In reality
cosmopolitanism serves big power aims to impose on individual nations
worldwide, its domination, its commercial interests, its language
and way of life.
By decrying the nation state as out of date and denigrating
those who defend it, the architects of EU aim, by hook or by crook,
to entrap the people of Europe inextricably into a union which will
benefit powerful corporatism, transnationalism and globalism. The
laws being enacted without our knowledge or consultation, are in effect
a legal straightjacket which in the final analysis will be used to
discourage dissent. You have been warned.