The American Nation

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, July 14, 2021

 

There’s a certain type of intellect that rebels at the idea of nations and nationalism. George Orwell comes to mind. For rather understandable reasons — like being on the side of the communists in the Spanish Civil War, and then watching Hitler march all over Europe — he hated nationalism and wrote very witheringly of what it did to the minds of nationalists. He viewed figures such as G. K. Chesterton as those who “transferred” their nationalism onto a nation not their own, which caused Chesterton to say things about France that he could never quite bring himself to say about his own England, whose faults he knew.

 

But Orwell’s essay “Notes on Nationalism” is surprisingly unsatisfactory.

 

Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

 

He contrasts it with patriotism, which he maintains is always defensive and defensible. All sins related to one’s country are nationalist sins, and all noble deeds become patriotic. His definition of nationalism turns out to be nothing more or less than a collection of all the sins of self-interest, and self-seeking, but transferred from the individual to a collective. The problems of this definition are revealed in his own essay once he turns away from World War II–era Japan and tries to look at Welsh or Irish nationalism.

 

While he can spy that these nationalisms sometimes take up a mythology of greatness, he simply can’t bear to understand that a nationalist movement might seek the goal of political independence even when he understands that the new state will be much less powerful on the world stage than the one he is in. And that he might seek to wield power in this new state in order to stop injustices that are the result of ongoing administration by the incumbent non-nationals.

 

Bret Devereaux, a professor of ancient history at North Carolina State University, is another mind that rebels against nationalism. Ahead of the Fourth of July he wrote a lovely and long essay, “My Country Isn’t a Nation.” He proposes a definition of nation, as a people, and then tries to vindicate the claim that the United States is a really an “un-nation” that cannot be made to fit the idea of a nation, and that rejects it in key respects. Instead of an American people, we just have American citizens — he proposes.

 

But his definition of a nation is too strict, and too ludicrously literal. In an odd way it is this anti-nationalist who ends up being a prisoner of German romantics. In trying to disqualify the United States he ends up disqualifying all nations. He writes:

 

The idea of the “nation” has always been fixed around the notion of a common birth or more correctly the myth of common birth. There are other elements in defining a nation of course: the group typically needs to be large, inhabit a shared, recognizable territory, and share common elements of culture (especially language) and a common history. But it is no accident that the common birth, the natio of nation, is central. A nation, precisely because it is supposed to share a common culture and history, is an entity that is imagined to extend both into the past and into the future, recreating itself, generation to generation; it is through the common birth that the common culture and history are supposedly shared. After all, a common history assumes some commonality stretching back to a prior generation. [Devereaux’s emphasis]

 

He also takes in hand the objection that nations and nation-states are not “natural” or “organic.”

 

The nation in this sense is not a social or political form that exists in the wild, but is instead a thing that humans can invent and is usually the product of state-building rather than an organic cultural expression (for instance, the uniformity of French is a product of the government in Paris’ efforts to make it so, not an organic feature of the “French people”). Nations and nationalism and especially nation-states are relatively recent things; we are discussing people who until quite recently did not see themselves as having a common origin or destiny and who now claim their ancestors to have been of common stock typically in contradiction to the views of those very ancestors.

 

This has become a very common objection, but on inspection it is almost quite silly, for reasons we’ll come to in a moment. Devereaux applies the same strict rules about territory and language.

 

Because the American nation isn’t defined by an exclusive ethnic core of people whose place of origin was within the current territorial boundaries of the American state, it is not a nation, for him. In fact, many of our ancestors were in conflict with each other. Therefore, we can’t have a shared history or a shared story. He writes that “to be an American means that someone, somewhere in your heritage (likely many someones) broke the chain of connection between you and whatever mythical notional nation you may have otherwise been part of (mind you, not all Americans’ ancestors were given a choice in that rupture).”

 

If a nation must be defined this way, Devereaux is right; there are no “American people” and no American nation.

 

But then there are no Hungarians, English, or French people, either.

 

Devereaux’s strictness is debilitating. Let’s take one example. Holding to Devereaux’s definitions, there cannot be an Irish people or an Irish nation. Not all of the ancestors of those living in Ireland share in the Irish people’s ancient past, and many of them viewed themselves as in conflict with each other. The Viking invaders who eventually settled and founded what is now Dublin were not around during the golden age of the Irish in the early Middle Ages, when Irish-speaking monks were founding monasteries around Europe. Vikings were destroying those monasteries, in fact. Later came the Normans, whose role in Irish history was to weaken the power of the traditional Gaelic elites, ahead of further English incursion. Perhaps the physical descendants of the Gael can’t even lay claim to their own ancestry, because the Normans imparted parts of their language to the Irish. Modern French has “garçon” for boy; Irish has “gasur.” Or “chambre” for room, which in Irish became “seomra.”

 

So, is there no Irish nation? Well, of course there is. The descendants of those in the Viking settlements became intermarried with the ancient inhabitants and adopted and adapted to their ways, while leaving a trace of themselves on the island. The Hiberno-Normans were also Gaelicized over time, and then over time, as new conflicts became pertinent, their Catholic faith tended to place them beside the traditional Gael against those arriving from Tudor England.

 

The existence of Breton language or Cornish does not mean that there is no such thing as French or English nations — nor would Frenchness or Englishness cease to exist if new research or archaeology or DNA tests changed the relative admixture of Gaul and Frank, or Pict and Norman.

 

Devereaux places emphasis on “myth” and “invention,” but this is what people do when they come together, and it is not less real because it took human will or effort. My family has myth and lore attached to it — stories that have been embellished as they have been retold in the generations. But that my children are partly physically descended from their mother does not impeach their connection to the family lore that exists on my side. Pointing out that our Slovak, Italian, and Irish ancestors didn’t know each other does not mean that my family does not exist. That is, people who break the chain of national connection in one generation form new bonds in the next, because they are people. Those bonds become stronger over time as previous divisions are melted away — either by shared language and the further development of custom, by intermarriage, or just by the process of sharing a territory together. Even the most romantic of romantic nationalists are capable of admitting the diverse sources of the national stock. Thomas Davis proclaimed of Ireland, “This country of ours is no sandbank, thrown up by some recent caprice of earth. It is an ancient land, honoured in the archives of civilisation, traceable into antiquity by its piety, its valour, and its sufferings. Every great European race has sent its stream to the river of Irish mind.”

 

National identities, like other identities, can be various. They can be overlapping, or subject to total absorption. A Frenchman who marries into a family in Brittany may not himself have had ancestors who spoke Breton, but perhaps his grandchildren will speak it. They will have a Breton identity and a French national one. A Hungarian Jew will not be “Hungarian” in the exact same way as ethnic Magyars. Most Hungarian Jews will wish to retain their Jewish identity by virtue of their faith. But, by virtue of their place in a Hungarian city and as Hungarian speakers, they will in certain senses participate in Hungarian national identity as well. And we should not be anxious to define “nation” so strictly that we discourage these overlapping and admixed arrangements.

 

And the same is true of Americans. The fact that we have no dominant common ancestors, and that some of us can trace our ancestry to people who were in conflict with each other, is not an impediment to becoming a people and living as one. This doesn’t obliterate our sub-national, ethnic, and racial identities — or it doesn’t have to obliterate them. There is much I cannot really know directly of the African-American experience, but the idea that I share nothing with Jackie Robinson or Dave Chappelle, or with my Filipino neighbors, beyond “citizenship” is silly. We share this land, we have a common language, we share and contribute to a common culture, even as we have our parochial interests and our conflicts. My ancestors were not here during the Founding. The freedom of my ancestors’ co-religionists in Quebec was listed among the grievances that impelled the political founding of this nation. But that grievance has faded away over time. And so the affection of people like mine, our ability to internalize George Washington as the Founder of “our nation” and “one of us,” grows. We share in the faults, burdens, triumphs, and glories of a shared American people.