And in the case at hand, it doesn't help that the US government seems to consider it fair game to have all data of foreign users of US web services handed out to them, in secret and without the users having a say in this.
Well, all the other first world countries learned the hard way, first-hand how bad nationalism can get.
Japan's politicians visiting Yasukuni, and Korean citizens mass-protesting "the japanese" as an abstract concept....
The problem is that it's usually those living in large imperialistic countries that say so (how we should all be "above and beyond countries"), while their countries royally fuck smaller countries.
As long as there are people willing to live in their land, with their own way of life, and no submit to some large foreign power, nationalism is good (and I mean a feel of belonging and love for your country, not offensive/militaristic nationalism and bigotry).
If you feel like just "passing by" from your country -- ie. if you feel it more like a hotel than a home--, then you're doing it a disservice. That might work if your country is a military and economic behemoth with nothing to fear (e.g the US), but not for a poor country were people strive to make it better. Of course some people only think about what's best for themselves. I wouldn't like to live in a society filled with with those kind of people.
>Interestingly, I found the USA to be the most nationalist 1st-world country there is. By far.
It is. But it's not just nationalism that causes these things (like industrial espionage). Simple, the US government is also a power elite, as is the leaders of big US industries. And those tend to favor their own kind (for profit, of course).
So, the top dogs in Washington can give top information to say GE, but it's not like they're doing out of "love for the country". They could probably not care less about the US citizens...
In Europe, nationalism is a real problem. Within the european union, every state fight to bring more benefit to its own nation rather than looking for the whole union to get better.
This is pretty much the case in the United States too, except we call this phenomena "pork barrel legislation" where Congressmen allocate parts of the federal budget for funding infrastructure or other projects in their district at the expense of everyone else.
For example, California residents pay way more in Federal income and corporate taxes than they receive in federal funding for schools, infrastructure, etc. Alaska, for example, is quite the opposite and receives a lot more federal money than it pays in federal taxes. This is all due to political dealing in Congress.
Why, exactly? Without nationalism how can there be any tradition of local governance? And without that how can local culture survive? Or is your point hat local culture shouldn't survive and that the Hopi child should be governed by the same cultural norms as the Swedish?
Nationalism says that people in your nation are special, that, in effect, rights pertain to them that are not granted to other nations - it is incompatible with morality.
On your Hopi/Swedish point, the question here is whether the Hopi child deserves government by the same standards and access to the same opportunities as the Swede. Yes. Yes, she does.
That's vastly different.
Children among the Hopi are raised to believe literally that the Kacina dancers are literally gods from somewhere else who have come to work miracles on the village. Once every 3 years, the children ages 7-9 are gathered together for induction into the religious community of the village. This induction involves ritual beating and betrayal (showing that what they have been taught all their lives is a carefully constructed lie), and thus induction into the religious community is also a somewhat temporary and violent initiation into atheism as well. However this tearing down of belief in relatively visceral and violent ways is considered necessary for passing on the Hopi understanding of religion.
The problem I have with this sort of international humanism is that it leaves no room for cultures like that. I mean Think of the Children!!! They are being abused!!! and so we go out of our way to impose our own culture on everyone else in the way of proving that nationalism and ethnocentricity must go.
[1] see Gill, Sam D. 1996 "Disenchantment: A Religious Abduction." In Readings in Ritual Studies, edited by Ronald L. Grimes, 230-39. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.
I don't think religion has any bearing on whether something is acceptable or not. The Hopi may beat their children for religious reasons, but plenty of parents beat their children for non-religious reasons. What matters in the question of whether this should be allowed is not the reason why they do it, but the consequences of doing it. Laws regulate actions based on their consequences, not based on their motive.
The fundamental question is how much deference we give to culture generally and who is making these decisions. Do we want white folks telling Hopi they can't have what remains of their culture anymore? Do we want folks from China and India telling white Americans what should constitute free speech?
My view is that if we don't allow for local culture and decisions about such things to be made at the local and cultural level then we lose our basic humanity. For cannibalism or ritual sacrifice, if it is internal to a population group, I think that this is for that group to work out. If it is between groups, well then that's cause for war.....
A lot of things in culture are really structurally variable. For example is it a human right to be able to choose not to ever have children? Does this mean that cultures that expect retirees to be cared for by their children are violating human rights and every culture must have something like social security? Now, if you agree that's a cultural issue, then something like same-sex marriage also must be a cultural issue too.
(Religion, in my view, isn't about God. Religion is about community.)
That said, I don't for a second believe that there's any reason for us to accept that all cultures are worth saving, or that some cultural norms should not be actively fought. However I see that as an entirely orthogonal issue to the first.
> That said, I don't for a second believe that there's any reason for us to accept that all cultures are worth saving, or that some cultural norms should not be actively fought.
The question is who has the right to fight them and how. It's one thing to critique another culture. It's something else to go out to try to force them to see the error of their ways. The problem is that the latter is usually just an exercise of nationalism if we define nationalism as hating other national/cultural groups.
The question is, how sure should an outsider be of the context of an action? Or is this better left for the members of the culture to navigate and evolve as meets their needs? I side generally with the latter unless it involves conflict between cultural groups. That's different and poses different problems.
Is it more abusive to subject children to a single coming-of-age ritual designed to teach them to think, or to allow children to transition to adulthood physically unharmed yet full of ideas designed to hold them back from full enjoyment of their faculties?
It seems that the Hopi would be entirely justified in saying that all other Americans are guilty of child abuse.
Which brings me back to my point. Who gets to make the rules?
Isn't the greatest justice served and the greatest abuses of power prevented by keeping these decisions as local as possible?
That's federalism, not nationalism.
Nationalism is "Deutschland Uber Alles"
If anything, the worst crime of which history will accuse America is of taking excellent stated ideals and subverting them for the purpose of oppression - thus discrediting the original excellent ideals.
Hanlon's razor. But the difference here is, in this case it is impossible to not be incompetent. Just as it is impossible to deliver what you intend for the world without being incompetent in the sense of being 'non-oppressive'.
But isn't everyone special in this regard?
> On your Hopi/Swedish point, the question here is whether the Hopi child deserves government by the same standards and access to the same opportunities as the Swede.
So no more of the ritual beating as a part of rites of passage into the religious community of the village for Hopis? We don't even have to ask why they do it? We can just say "it's abhorrant and not up to our standards" and that settles it?
I'm more than five years old, so I accept that I'm not as special as I once thought. Nationalism is similarly infantile.
And you're not responding to my argument about the Hopi, just repeating your own; I didn't even address your point about them at all.
Edit: Whoops, that was sloppy of me. In fact I didn't address your Hopi/Swede point because I hadn't seen it yet. I'm not sure what I think about it (except that in principle it's a good idea to disabuse kids of their childhood beliefs, if not by beating them).
I'm not prepared to treat that as I would child abuse in larger society, though.
I think there is very deep wisdom in the Hopi practice, and it is part of a process that leads to very nuanced views on religion among the Hopi, remember that disbelieving is the prerequisite for participation.
The overall point though is to value one's own culture and heritage, and accept that we humans are cultural animals, that without culture we aren't even human, and then expect others to do the same.
It's one thing for Americans to sympathize with the victims of the Boston Bombings more than they sympathize with the victims of drone strikes in Yemen or Pakistan. I think that's fine. Nationality matters. However, I also think it is wrong to assume that Yemenis and Pakistanis should not also sympathize with their countrymen and women who are killed in such attacks more than they sympathize with Americans killed in 9/11, the Boston Bombings, etc. I also think that if we accept and understand that we can build a better future. That's what I mean by everyone being special in that regard, and one not so tied to the wrong sorts of nationalism.
That is exactly the problem with nationalism.
I suspect you're probably saying that it's understandable for Americans only to feel the reality of this kind of cruelty when it affects "their own", and my response is that it may be understandable, but then so are the mechanisms of cancer.
We have social obligations first to those nearer us and later those further away. We owe our parents more than we owe strangers. If we are in a crowded theater and fire breaks out, we have a greater obligation to save our own kids' than our neighbor's, but we have a greater obligation to save our neighbor's kids than a stranger's. So obligations start at the family and household level and spread out in concentric circles of community. This is healthy and it is more or less the way humanity has always worked. The outer two levels might generally be classified as the ethnos and lastly everyone else.
Where I hesitate is where you say "in many cases outright denying the existence of" because that's a problem, but not because we owe no more to our own than to others.
The problem is also wider than mere denial of the existence of innocent drone strike victims, but this idea that because we believe we have justified reasons for engaging in drone strikes, everyone should just understand that. A healthier attitude would be to expect and value the fact that Yemenis and Pakistanis will value their family and community members more than Americans, and where too many people off base is that they don't expect or value that. They think the Pakistanis should be grateful that we are killing bad guys and that's where the problem lies. Attitudes like that make it impossible to build bridges between our peoples, to understand and respect eachother.
The alternative is to say that communities shouldn't matter. Why should the Pakistani not have American liberties? But then why should African Americans not be protected by European hate speech laws? Why should American Muslims not be protected against people insulting their religion?
In the end, I think that community (as a series of concentric circles) is important and as much governance needs to be as local as at all possible. This means tolerating all kinds of things we might believe are abuses of rights in our own culture while trusting that other people have the ability to make things work in a basically just way.
I'm not even sure we're talking about the same thing, and I'm anything but certain we disagree on any point of substance.
Nationalism itself did not come to prominence until the latter half of the 18th century (the term itself was not even coined until this time), and a lot of the modern nation states that people came to identify with were artificial constructions created largely as a result of the gradual evolution of local governance and culture coupled with the outgrowth of popular political involvement and the growing prominence of national media where culture started becoming more uniform across what we recognise as modern states often because of limitations of language.
Nationalism is not a requisite for local governance or local culture to survive at all - both pre-dated nationalism for millennia.
The "nation state" is a somewhat new model to some extent. The older models were more fluid, but the idea of loyalty to one's nation (not necessarily the same as one's state) can be found going back into antiquity, and you can find similar patterns just about everywhere, whether early Ireland, Scandinavia, the Goths during their time in the Roman Empire, India, China, and so forth. The difference is that traditionally loyalty to one's nation was separate to loyalty to one's government.
You can see in racial stereotypes much the same thing going on actually. The old division is between people who "act and talk like we do" vs "everyone else."
[1] Compare the colors of the Varnas to the colors of the Gunas and the colors of the classes in the Scandinavian poem Rigsthula and you see that the three colors in common are white, red, and black which represent spirituality, war, and labor of the earth respectively. Also note that if you compare functions to the labels of classes in Solonic Athens, the bottom three match-- Hippeis to Ksatria, Vassyia to Zeugmatis, and Sudra to Thetis), while the designations of the upper three match between India and Ireland. There are also long-standing spacial associations with these which can be found across Ireland, India, Scandinavia, and the Greco-Roman world. On this I conclude that the 5-fold division of a king and four castes was brought by the Sanscrit speakers fully as a ritual division of space and implemented in ceremonial divisions of society.
> Without nationalism how can there be any tradition of local governance? And without that how can local culture survive? Or is your point hat local culture shouldn't survive and that the Hopi child should be governed by the same cultural norms as the Swedish?
Whether or not one agrees with your claim that pre-nation state forms of group loyalty or tribalism were equivalent to nationalism, you here yourself divorce the existence of traditions of local governance from your interpretation of nationalism ("The difference is that traditionally loyalty to one's nation was separate to loyalty to one's government.")
The point is that culture and governance are not implicitly linked, and did not used to be. Contrary to your implication in the quoted part that the lack of nationalism would be a treat to survival of local culture, on the contrary, the rise of modern nationalism has had a substantial effect in threatening many cultures. A lot of nation states have explicitly set out to eradicate alternative cultures. Witness the Turkish state long held insistence that there were no such thing as Kurds, for example - just "mountain Turks" - and the number of states that at various times have outlawed the teaching of minority languages (including, again, Turkey) or even mentioning the minority (I knew a Turkish journalist in Norway as an asylum seeker because he had received death threats from the Turkish government because he was writing about the plight of the Kurds).
In Norway too, since you bring up Scandinavia and I'm Norwegian, a lot of modern culture are constructs of modern nationalism: Our two official languages are both artificial and recent - one constructed as an amalgamation of dialects spoken around the country, and one constructed largely from Danish, and are increasingly pushing local dialects aside. Around Oslo, for example, many kids are not even aware that their speech has elements of old distinct dialects, and no effort is made to preserve them (note that I am not arguing that they should be preserved - I don't particular care about the preservation of such dialects).
Unlike in most English speaking languages, the government even dictates the vocabulary and the rules of the language.
Most of the mythos and trappings of the Norwegian national identify date from ~1800 onwards, especially as constructions of the Norwegian national romanticism movement from the 1840's onwards.
This modern Norwegian culture that arose as a result is largely the result of a local elite that stimulated and utilised this nationalism as a means of asserting power and/or making their local seats more prominent in the face of a government in Copenhagen that had for hundreds of years let Norway remain a under-developed backwater.
First in trying to gain independence in 1814 when Denmark-Norway was sufficiently weakened by having been on the losing side of the Napoleonic Wars, and they managed to get recognition for our constitution, and then again to build popular support for full independence from Sweden after we were handed over to Sweden as a "price" to the Swedes for supporting the victors.
Norwegian nationalism then on one and preserved some local traditions, but it homogenised them, distorted them, and discarded any elements that did not fit in, and created a mythos of a historical Norwegian nation that was in some respects pure fiction - if you look at Norwegian representations of the viking era, you might be forgiven to think that vikings were all Norwegian, for example, (Danish and Swedish vikings gets the occasional mention, but not much considering the major empires they built) and that this was our defining characteristic. Yet the viking era was culturally largely forgotten and ignored for hundreds of years - Norway was a country of farmers and fishermen, even during the viking era.
The lyrics to our national anthem even is one long national romantic representation of a myth of some thousand year tradition of a unified Norwegian nation.
So not only is nationalism not a pre-requisite for protecting culture - it has been a major driver for steamrollering older local cultures over the last century in particular.
But even if you want to apply your interpretation of pre-nation state proto-nationalism of sorts, Norway is a prime example of how this actively suppresses rather than preserved local culture: Norway was christened, as many other countries, through violence. King Olav the Holy travelled the country and introduced legislation based on establishing Christianity as a state religion through threats and use of force, actively encouraging the eradication of ancient traditions
Personally I see the loss of local dialects in Europe (which is happening many places to various degrees, sometimes with government help, sometimes without) with a great degree of sadness. It used to be that you could walk from Amsterdam to Munich and never encounter a line where the dialects on one side were unintellible to those on the others, because the various sound shifts existed as gradients rather than hard boundaries (raising the question of whether Dutch, Low German, and High German were just dialects of the same language).
> Norwegian nationalism then on one and preserved some local traditions, but it homogenised them, distorted them, and discarded any elements that did not fit in, and created a mythos of a historical Norwegian nation that was in some respects pure fiction - if you look at Norwegian representations of the viking era, you might be forgiven to think that vikings were all Norwegian, for example, (Danish and Swedish vikings gets the occasional mention, but not much considering the major empires they built) and that this was our defining characteristic. Yet the viking era was culturally largely forgotten and ignored for hundreds of years - Norway was a country of farmers and fishermen, even during the viking era.
FWIW most of the Icelandic material mostly mentions Norwegians as Vikings too but that probably mostly has to do with geography.
> But even if you want to apply your interpretation of pre-nation state proto-nationalism of sorts, Norway is a prime example of how this actively suppresses rather than preserved local culture: Norway was christened, as many other countries, through violence. King Olav the Holy travelled the country and introduced legislation based on establishing Christianity as a state religion through threats and use of force, actively encouraging the eradication of ancient traditions
Those are good points. Thank you for sharing them. Perhaps the question is how we define a cultural community worth preserving. What you describe is not something I like. Again, I think the old idea was one of concentric circles, centered on the household (while Aristotle was the first to articulate it, my sense as a global traveller is that it is a very pervasive traditional model).
So the question is what we do about it ;-)