Nationalism as a Quasi-Religion

Abstract

In comparison with Humanism and Marxism, Nationalism is by far the more complex phenomenon to encompass. The American historian, Carlton J. H. Hayes, a pioneer in the study of nationalism, called attention decades ago to the enormous problems facing any scholar attempting to analyse and appraise the phenomenon of patriotism and national sentiment to be found in every country throughout the world. In Hayes’s view, nationalism expresses not only the aspirations — political, ethnic, cultural, religious — of a people, but it evokes and lives from deep-seated and powerful emotions, so that to understand nationalism demands, in addition to a knowledge of history and the history of ideas, philosophy, social psychology, anthropology and linguistics.¹ It is, however, not only the vast scope of the topic and the countless forms nationalism has assumed that is troublesome at the outset; there is the more subtle problem of finding a way to draw the line between what we may call the legitimate and ‘natural’ patriotism through which people affirm and take pride in having a national identity — ‘this is my own, my native land’, says the poet — and the modern phenomenon of an ‘artificial’ nationalism which stems from an ideal conception of a nation — its having a ‘mission’ in world history, for example — which is re-enforced through education and propaganda aimed at engaging the loyalty of great masses of people.²