The history of modern nationalism begins with the French revolution and the rise of the self-conscious nation-state. The curious and ironical feature about this is that the tremendous fervour which was aroused among the revolutionaries for the new nationalist theology was the thing which helped Napoleon to extend his conquests far and wide over Europe. By 1811 he had the intention of setting up a new Holy Roman Empire, with its capital in Paris and its second city in Rome, and of consolidating it through a most elaborate system of legitimacy and nobility. But he completely left out of account the fact of nationalism. In the process of winning the empire he had aroused the nationalistic feelings of the people against whom he had committed aggression, and suddenly his whole internationalist dream was smashed by the rise of nationalism in Germany, in Austria, in Russia. The very thing which had helped him to win his victories turned against him and finally destroyed him.
Nationalism played an incredibly important part in the history of the nineteenth century. It is interesting to see that Karl Marx, who was after all a man of extraordinary intelligence and ability, seems to have greatly under-estimated its power. In this respect, this extremely astute and penetrating mind was much less realistic than the otherwise rather woolly-minded Giuseppe Mazzini, who built up a kind of idealistic theology of nationalism but at any rate saw the enormous power latent in it. Marx seems really to have supposed that national patriotism would very soon be replaced by class patriotism. History has shown that he was entirely wrong, and he would be profoundly surprised to find that today the ideology of Communism is the principal instrument of Russian nationalism.
Nationalistic fervour still persists and has recently overtaken a number of new converts. All the ex-colonial nations exhibit an ardour of nationalism which is certainly equal to the ardour which was displayed one hundred and fifty years ago in Europe. It is an ardour which is proportionate to their hatred of the ex-colonial powers but wholly out of proportion to their capacity to be efficient, modern nation-states. This is one of the tragedies of the situation today; we find an immense desire for national independence and a tremendous, almost quasi-religious fervour with regard to it which are quite unrelated to economic and cultural facts. This is certainly going to lead in many cases to a sense of frustration, to social chaos, and probably to various forms of dictatorship.
With nationalist feeling still as strong as it ever was, we would even be justified in saying that nationalism is the prevailing religion of the twentieth century, as it was during most of the nineteenth. It looks as though it is going to remain the prevailing religion for a long time. It is as though we had reverted from the monotheism which arose in Judea and was developed under Christendom to a religion of a particularly disastrous kind—a divisive religion that places absolute value in fragmentary parts of humanity and positively condemns those who accept it to chronic strife with their neighbours. In 1862 Lord Acton said about nationalism that it does not aim at liberty or prosperity; it aims solely at making the nation, which is a kind of abstract idea, the norm and mould of the political state. He added that the results of this would be not merely material but also moral ruin, and I think this was a remarkably astute prophecy.
We must bear continuously in mind that everything that is happening now, such as the explosive increase in population and the advancing technicalization of every aspect of human life, is happening in the context of nationalism. Consequently, it all takes on a very dangerous quality, precisely because it is taking place in the context of what appears to be the strongest quasi-religious fervour of our period, and in a world order which by definition commits those who believe in its theology to war with one another and to continual preparation for war.
This war ethos has been reduced to a kind of absurdity, as innumerable people, including those who are now preparing for war, are never tired of pointing out. War has reached a point where there can be no victors and where the only purpose which can be achieved by entering upon it is the complete destruction of the combatants and probably the destruction of large areas of not only civilization but life itself. Everybody knows this, and yet all the people in decision-making positions in the world today—and there are not very many of them—are so completely the prisoners of the theological-nationalistic system that they find themselves under a compulsion to go on willy-nilly preparing for something which they know must be disastrous. One has this extraordinary and paradoxical spectacle of unprecedented skill and knowledge and devotion and work and money being poured out on projects which can lead not to life, liberty, and happiness, but only to misery, to servitude, and to death.
The rationalization of this is in all cases the old Roman adage, ‘si vis pacem para bellum’ (if you want peace prepare for war). Unfortunately, everybody has been acting on this adage for the last two thousand years or so, with the result that, as Pitirim Sorokin of Harvard has pointed out in his most elaborately documented book, most of the great nations of the world have spent from forty to sixty years of each century in war. Preparations for war have always led to war, and there seems to be no particular reason to suppose that the present armaments race can lead anywhere else.
One of the most alarming things that has happened under the present dispensation is that this piling-up of armaments has come to play a vital part in Western economies, particularly in the American economy, which depends completely on the expenditure by the government of approximately forty billion dollars a year on the manufacture of armaments. It seems to me one of the most tragic things which has happened, that this preparation for something which can only be a preparation for death has become the basis of Western prosperity. This is not a new phenomenon; the recovery from the Great Depression of the thirties was not complete until rearmament had begun in a systematic way. In England an enormous housing programme was put into effect in the late thirties but this did not completely eliminate unemployment; nor did the very elaborate pump-priming of the New Deal eliminate it in the United States.
It was only in response to Hitler’s menace, when armaments began to be manufactured on a very large scale, that the unemployment bogey was finally banished. It is a dreadful, grotesque paradox that the prosperity of the West was due to the phenomenon of Hitler. And today we see the same thing: the fear of Russian competition, which entails the putting out of vast sums of money for armament, is the cornerstone and foundation of the prosperity which we are enjoying at present. There is a kind of vested interest in the preservation of this system and it will take a great deal of thought and courage to break away and to find some alternative means for keeping the economy going.
How easy is it going to be to get this change on the way? There is one school of thought which says that war is inevitable, that this is our fate. But what is the definition of fate? I don’t think we can speak in such old-fashioned terms of some sort of external influence which foresees what is going to happen to us and creates a kind of plan to which we have to conform. The sociological idea of fate is very close to that which was elaborated by Tolstoy in War and Peace, the idea that historical events are determined not by the choices of individuals or small groups, but by the summation of innumerable small decisions taken by countless anonymous human beings, which add up to a general tendency in one direction.
At present, however, owing to the remarkable concentration of power in the modern world, this is not true; on both sides of the iron curtain there are relatively few decision-making persons. We see now that something like two-thirds of the entire assets of the American manufacturing economy is in the hands of five hundred corporations and that, among these five hundred, a smaller number actually possess the decision-making power. Members of this corporate élite are to be found in decision-making positions at the head of the pyramid of rule in this country, where we see a sort of triumvirate of power: the highest political powers plus the highest military powers plus the highest economic powers represent an extraordinary concentration of force and economic power which makes it possible for us to imagine a way out of our difficulty.
It is quite clearly very dangerous when power gets into the hands of very few people. As Lord Acton said, ‘Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ But in another way the concentration of power is encouraging because it means that the problem of war is not out of our hands;
