THE LIMITS. OF NATIONALISM. T HE spirit of nationalism, said Lord
Hugh Cecil in an eloquent letter in Monday's Times, is " the main source of all the sufferings and mischiefs which the people of Europe arc now enduring." It caused the war and it has inflamed the quarrels which still, three years after the Armistice, keep Central and Eastern Europe in a state of confusion. Lord Hugh Cecil would be almost inclined to say, with Dr. Johnson, that " patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Patriotism, as lie would express it, is the scoundrel's " convenient cudgel to batter critics dumb," because love of country is supposed to justify the most revolting crimes. He drew an idyllic picture of what might be :- " If one can imagine some beneficent magician who would weave a spell by which all the peoples of Europe should cease to hate alien nationalities, even if it cost them the love of their own, how enormous would be the benefit to human happiness! The poor would be lifted out of misery, the rich would trade tranquilly with their wealth, armies would be disbanded, taxes would be removed, there would be no more an Irish difficulty, whatever is embittering in the Reparation question would be done away. all the territories of the old Austro-Hungarian
Empire, with Poland and Lithuania and the Balkan States, would be lands flowing with milk and honey, the peaceful abode of prosperous men."
Lord Hugh Cecil's protest against the excesses of nationalism is well grounded. It is true that in the past century " people went almost mad about nationality," and that nationalism, " like other human passions," ought to be brought under due control. We cannot, however, help wondering whether the world would profit by the suppression of nationality, if such a thing were possible. Nationalism is a relatively modern phenomenon. In the early middle ages Western Europe, under the Church and the Empire, was more or less homogeneous. Men saw nothing obviously wrong in the spectacle of a German Emperor ruling Lombardy, or a Norman King reigning with Byzantine pomp in Sicily, or an Angevin controlling England and Western France from the Cheviots to the Pyrenees. These potentates had political enemies, but they were not opposed on nationalist grounds. English- men and Gascons, Normans and Angevins alike, cheerfully accepted our Henry the Second as their common ruler and bore with the exactions of his alien officials. Simon de Montfort, who was long regarded as the maker of Parlia- ment, the most typical of English institutions, was a foreigner by birth and training, but he excited little or no ill-will on that account. And if we go further back to the age of the Antonines, when Rome reigned securely over the known world, we find a similar absence of nationalism. Were, then, those periods of history so much happier than our own ? We question whether any honest mediaevalist would maintain that thirteenth-century Europe was a 'better place to live in than the Europe which we know. Gibbon did not claim for the age of the Antonines any special virtues. The Roman Empire was tranquil and prosperous. But " this long peace and the uniform government of the Romans introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the Empire. The minds of men were gradually reduced to the same level, the fire of genius was extinguished and even the military spirit evaporated."
And, again :— " This diminutive stature of mankind, if we pursue the metaphor [quoted from Longinus], was daily sinking below the old standard, and the Roman world was indeed peopled by a race of pygmies ; when the fiercer giants of the north broke in and mended the puny breed."
Rome would have been better for a little of the nationalist spirit. The middle ages, in the absence of nationalism, were not free from wars and insurrections. Sectarian hatreds worked ills as great as those arising from racial feuds.
The Moslem religion, from its first rise until our own day, has professed a complete disregard of nationality. One Moslem is, in theory, as good as another, whatever his race, rank, or colour. Islam, again in theory, is one com- munity, transcending political and racial divisions. In practice, as we know, the doctrine is subject to limitations. Arabs and Turks, Baghdadis and Punjabi Moslems, the people of the Hedjaz and their Wahhabi neighbours, the Shiahs of Persia and the Sunnis of Turkey, do not always consort happily together. The history of Turkey abounds in wars against other Moslem countries. When the Hedjaz revolted against the Turks, the Turkish garrison of Mecca bombarded the most sacred shrine of the Moslem world. But if we overlook these episodes and credit Islam with the unity that it ought in theory to possess, can we say that it has brought peace and prosperity to Western Asia and Northern Africa and that it has encouraged human progress ? No one would make such claims for Islam. It is no doubt true that the development of nationalism amonoa the Turks has made them even more barbarous— if that were possible—than they were before in their_ treatment of subject-races. But the nationalist movement among the Arabs has done more for Syria, the Hedjaz, and Mesopotamia in a few years than the nominal unity under Turkish rule had done for them in generations. Consider, too, the Bolsheviks. They are the apostles of internationalism. They denounce the national spirit, and they affirm that Russia interests them merely as the first country to undergo the international revolution. Their avowed object is to promote chaos all the world over until the international " proletariat " lords it over such of the international " bourgeois " as remain alive. We must confess that we are not attracted by their pro- gramme. They may be free from nationalist passions— although, when they are in difficulties, they are careful to appeal to Russian national sentiment against the foreign " capitalist " governments—but their own pas- sions are still fiercer and more cruel. The world would not gain in happiness by forgetting its national divisions and joining the Third International. Class war is even more detestable and more ruinous than war between two countries.
On the whole, then, we should be slow to look to the exorcising of the nationalist spirit as a cure for all present ills. The Friend of Humanity is too often a humbug when he is not an arrant knave, like the despots in Moscow. Patriotism is in essence a respectable quality, implying some self-denial. Those who pride themselves on their superiority to the foibles of human nature and who show it by always taking the side of -a foreign country against their own are usually moved by vanity rather than by charity. We have to recognize, moreover, that nationalism, the slow growth of several centuries of evolution, is far too deeply rooted in the modern mind to be argued out of existence. Every right-thinking man is proud of his own country and of his own people and desires their prosperity. All that can be done is to deprecate an excess of patriotism. It is not necessary for a good patriot to hate all other countries but his own, or to strive for isolation. The term " Sinn Fein "—" Ourselves Alone "—connotes the kind of nationalism that is most undesirable and, indeed, impossible in the modern world. If the war has taught anything, it is that the different countries are bound together by an infinite number of cultural and commercial ties which cannot be severed without inflicting injury on all. No nation nowadays can live for itself alone, without paying any regard to its neighbours' interests and feelings. Prac- tical considerations are steadily limiting more and more the conception of nationality. That, indeed, is the basic purpose of the League of Nations. The best patriot nowadays is he who can reconcile the true interests of his country with the welfare of other countries. It is neither necessary nor desirable to discredit true patriotism, but it is gradually being recognized that, as Miss Cavell said, " patriotism is not enough."
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