V.

Nationalism as Culture and Religion

We generally compare nationalism, usually unfavourably, with other political ideologies. However this tells us only half the story. Nationalism is also a form of culture and of religion.

For nationalists, the nation is always a form of public culture. There are two aspects to this formulation. The first is the need to rediscover and educate the members in the national culture. Since for nationalists every culture, to be authentic, must be unique, the aim must be to cultivate national identity through history, language, literature, the arts, and the love of nature, so that the individual will feel in his or her heart the beauty and warmth of the nation. In this way, the members will come to share a common devotion to the nation, and become united in their collective goals. The second aspect concerns the means of such national re-education. It is not a private affair, a concern of the individual or family. As Ernest Gellner insisted, national re-education must be public, standardized, mass-based, and compulsory. It must be systemic, and support mass numeracy and literacy through a hierarchy of specialist personnel. As much was clear already to Rousseau, in his advice to the Poles: “It is the national institutions that form the genius, the character, the tastes and the mores of a people... which inspire in it this burning love of the fatherland'. Hence, public education is always directed at the people, and as such is “popular”, if not vernacular. It is also always political. Public culture is a form of “political culture” in which the nation is politicized and its symbols become political symbols, summoning the members (or citizens, in a national state) to love their nation, obey its laws, and defend its homeland.

Beyond a public form of culture, nationalism may also be grasped as a form of political religion, a surrogate religion, to be sure, one that is secular, in the sense of being in and of this world, but that is at the same time transcendent, because it is trans-historical and cross-cultural. In the eyes of nationalists, the nation, as Benedict Anderson points out, is always “good”; like the clouds hiding the blue heavens above, disfigurements only conceal for a time its essential purity. We can go further. For nationalism, the nation is a sacred category, separated and forbidden: in the terminology of Émile Durkheim, a sacred communion of the people; and nationalism becomes the political religion of that people. It is a religion not only in the functional sense, fulfilling the same needs through similar methods as traditional religions. Nationalisms freely borrow from the arsenal of motifs, symbols, and liturgies of the world religions, even when they rework them for cultural, territorial and political ends foreign to the earlier religions. Similarly, nationalisms reinterpret the soteriological meanings of traditional religions, to locate salvation not in some supra-empirical order or unseen world, but in the longue durée of terrestrial national posterity and its vision of heroic destiny, reserved for the new elect of the chosen nation. To this end, nationalism takes up the earlier beliefs in divine election, as well as the reverence for sacred sites, and attaches them to the nation in its ancestral homeland, investing it with the charismatic qualities formerly reserved for saints and heroes.

The same character of a political religion of the people is revealed in its myths of golden ages and destiny through mass sacrifice. In the myth-memories of the golden age nationalists discern once again the true goodness of the nation; hence the many images of a long-lost glory and beauty, with which the national ideal decks itself out. Even more potent are the monuments and rituals of heroic sacrifice. On one level, this is a vicarious atonement: the hero or heroine lives and dies to absolve the nation of its weakness and failure, and remind its denationalised and hence denatured citizens of their national duty. On another level, the sacrifice is made by each and every individual, for in a crisis the nation may demand mass death. To assuage such colossal grief and suffering, mass sacrifice must be linked to national destiny: through the Glorious Dead, the nation must be enabled to pursue its unique historical destiny, so that the fallen heroes shall not have died in vain nor the survivors be numbed by the horror of oblivion. In the solemn rites of mass remembrance, among the flags and massed bands at the Cenotaph or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the true nature of the sacred communion of the people stands revealed and with it the nation as a community of history and destiny encompassing the dead, the living, and yet unborn.