II.

The “Core Doctrine”

The `core doctrine' of nationalism can be stated in the following propositions: l) The world is divided into nations, each with its own character, history, and destiny; 2) The source of political power resides solely in the nation; 3) An individual's primary loyalty is to his or her nation; 4) To be free, every individual must identify with a nation; 5) Every nation requires full self-expression and autonomy; 6) World order and justice require a world of free nations.

These are the tenets of an underlying doctrine espoused by every kind of nationalist from the founding fathers—Rousseau, Herder, Burke, Jefferson, Fichte, Mazzini— to post-colonial and contemporary nationalists. They provide the basis and impetus for all kinds of nationalist activity and institutions, and cover moral, social, cultural, as well as political, domains. They also provide the foundations on which particular nationalisms seek to build their nations through the use of “secondary” motifs and theories, derived from and suited to the contexts and situations of given nationalisms; examples of the latter include the Sun Language theory of Turkish origins espoused by Kemal Ataturk, the Emperor-worship central to the nationalism in Meiji Japan, and the idea of a fusion of “races” in Mexican nationalism.

This “core doctrine” has been the object of both moral and intellectual assaults. Elie Kedourie excoriated nationalism for its subversive antinomianism and its irrational millennial yearnings for terrestrial perfectibility, which led nationalists to preach virtue through terror and, in ethnically mixed areas, to bring untold misery and suffering by uprooting or massacring populations in their efforts to make states congruent with nations. He also attacked the doctrine's intellectual incoherence and contradictions, a theme taken up by Michael Freeden for whom nationalism is at best a “thin-centred” ideology with a restricted core of concepts, and at worst not a distinct ideology at all, but a parasitic “fill-in” for developed, mainstream ideologies like liberalism and socialism.

Neither of these negative portraits does justice to the multi-faceted nature of nationalism. While nationalists have often trampled on the rights and interests of other nations and have been responsible for many atrocities, nationalism's first proposition explicitly recognizes the existence and commensurability of other nations, and in such “concerts of nations” as Mazzini's Young Europe or the post-colonial Third World, this recognition was translated into practice. Besides, unlike a pessimistic, deity-dependant millenarianism, nationalism is an earthy, practical, human-centred programme of auto-emancipation, building old-new nations on the ruins of ancien régimes.