http://indymedia.org.il
Culture vs. Nationalism
author: Bryan Atinsky (bryan@indymedia.org.il)
I couldn't help but notice that the topic of this disussion fits closely with the subject of a book by the great Twentieth Century political theoritician and activist, Rudolf Rocker (1873-1958).
The book is titled "Nationalism and Culture".
The book, first published in English in 1937 got great reviews from the likes of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein:
For instance, Bertrand Russell wrote of the book:
"...an important contribution to political philosophy, both on account of its penetrating and widely informative analysis of many famous writers, and on account of the brilliant criticism of state-worship. I hope it will be widely read in all those countires where disinterested thinking is not yet illegal."
Though I have a copy of the book on my shelf, it is actually possible to read the entire book on the internet: http://www.anarchosyndicalism.org/rocker/nc.htm
Anyway, here is an excerpt from the book, on the relation of culture to nation/nationalism.
It may be a bit long, but it really touches in a substantial way on what has been discussed in the above comments, and I believe will add a lot to further the discussion:
ALL nationalism is reactionary in its nature, for it strives to enforce on the separate parts of the great human family a definite character according to a preconceived idea. In this respect, too, it shows the interrelationship of nationalistic ideology with the creed of every revealed religion. Nationalism creates artificial separations and partitions within that organic unity which finds its expression in the genus Man, while at the same time it strives for a fictitious unity sprung only from a wish-concept; and its advocates would like to tune all members of a definite human group to one note in order to distinguish it from other groups still more obviously. In this respect, so-called "cultural nationalism" does not differ at all from political nationalism, for whose political purposes as a rule it serves as a fig-leaf. The two cannot be spiritually separated; they merely represent two different aspects of the same endeavour.
Cultural nationalism appears in its purest form when people are subjected to a foreign rule, and for this reason cannot pursue their own plans for political power. In this event, "national thought" prefers to busy itself with the culture-building activities of the people and tries to keep the national consciousness alive by recollections of vanished glory and past greatness. Such comparisons between a past which has already become legend and a slavish present make the people doubly sensitive to the injustice suffered; for nothing affects the spirit of man more powerfully than tradition. But if such groups of people succeed sooner or later in shaking off the foreign yoke and themselves appear as a national power, then the cultural phase of their effort steps only too definitely into the background, giving place to the sober reality of their political objectives. In the recent history of the various national organisms in Europe created after the war are found telling witnesses for this.
In Germany, also, the national strivings both before and after the "wars of liberation" were strongly influenced by romanticism, whose advocates tried to make the traditions of a vanished age live again among the people and to make the past appear to them in a glorified light. When, later, the last hopes which the German patriots had rested on liberation from the foreign yoke had burst like over-blown bubbles, their spirits sought refuge in the moonlit magic night and the fairy world of dreamy longing conjured up for them by romanticism, in order to forget the gray reality of life and its shameful disappointments.
In culture-nationalism, as a rule, two distinct sentiments merge, which really have nothing in common: for home sentiment is not patriotism, is not love of the state, not love which has its roots in the abstract idea of the nation. It needs no laboured explanation to prove that the spot of land on which a man has spent the years of his youth is deeply intergrown with his profoundest feeling. The impressions of childhood and early youth which are the most permanent and have the most lasting effect upon his soul. Home is, so to speak, man's outer garment; he is most intimately acquainted with its every fold and seam. This home sentiment brings in later years some yearning after a past long buried under ruins; and it is this which enables the romantic to look so deeply within.
With so-called "national consciousness" this home sentiment has no relationship; although both are often thrown into the same pot and, after the manner of counterfeiters, given out as of the same value. In fact, true home sentiment is destroyed at its birth by "national consciousness," which always strives to regulate and force into a prescribed form every impres-sion man receives from the inexhaustible variety of the homeland. This is the unavoidable result of those mechanical efforts at unification which are in reality only the aspirations of the nationalistic states.
The attempt to replace man's natural attachment to the home by a dutiful love of the state -- a structure which owes its creation to all sorts of accidents and in which, with brutal force, elements have been welded together that have no necessary connection -- is one of the most grotesque phenomena of our time. The so-called "national consciousness" is nothing but a belief propagated by considerations of political power which have replaced the religious fanaticism of past centuries and have today come to be the greatest obstacle to cultural development. The love of home has nothing in common with the veneration of an abstract patriotic concept. Love of home knows no "will to power"; it is free from that hollow and dangerous attitude of superiority to the neighbour which is one of the strongest characteristics of every kind of nationalism. Love of home does not engage in practical politics nor does it seek in any way to support the state. It is purely an inner feeling as freely manifested as man's enjoyment of nature, of which home is a part. When thus viewed, the home feeling compares with the governmentally ordered love of the nation as does a natural growth with an artificial substitute. (pp.213-14)
Rocker, Rudolph
1998 (1937) Nationalism and Culture. Buffalo, NY: Black Rose Books.