Welcome back. We continue to look at nations and nationalism and now we're going to focus specifically on nationalism itself. We're going to start to understand the different varieties, not the varieties, sorry, the typologies of nationalism that are out there.
So the first is the cultural nationalism. Cultural nationalism is the idea that the nation builds on an ethnic foundation. Remember when we distinguish between ethnicity and we distinguish between a nation? Well, the idea is the ethnic group. builds what becomes the nation.
Now for Herder, the nation builds on ethnic foundations that he considers natural and durable. So this is Herder over here, by the way, looking at us. And Herder believed that those ethnic foundations that occurred were naturally occurring amongst groups of people and that they were durable, that in fact they lasted over time. People ingratiated themselves to those sorts of ideas, they wanted to replicate them, so whether it was language or culture or religion or food or clothing etc.
So those were durable over time and that was the basis on which community and those ethnic foundations were very important for that. And of course they were produced organically and they crystallized and they remained stable because people accepted them and wanted to be a part of that group and so they did that. Now on the other hand when we look at Anthony Smith He argues that in fact what happens is historical ethnicity is crucial in this regard, but it is transformed once you start to build modern societies.
That the notion of nation and cultural nationalism that Herder had is not particularly plausible in the same way. Consider for example, we live in Canada now and we say, okay, well, what are the cultural aspects of Canada? Could I get everybody's hand to go up if I were to say, well, Canada's national sport is hockey? Some of you might go, actually, in civics class, we learned that the technical national sport of Canada is, in fact, lacrosse, right?
But also, think about the fact that now, hockey is dominated by Americans, and up until the Raptors won, it was basically Canadians who invented basketball, but it basically exists in the United States, with American basketball players dominating in the American NBA, and the American Hockey League being much bigger than... what it is in Canada, although the Leafs are still the most lucrative franchise. But that said, when we adapt it to modernity, cultural nationalism is going to take on a different flavor and it's not going to be as, in a sense, robust, but also not as narrow in the way that Herter thought of a natural, durable ethnic basis. Now the other important thing is that cultural nationalism is often used as a justification for a national liberation struggle. The idea there is because our cultural community is stuck now inside a state structure, and that state of course may not be our state.
It might be one run by other people who have other priorities or people that are not like us. Then you get the idea that we need to be able to liberate ourselves and create our own state in this regard. And we saw this, and we're going to talk about this when we look at World War I and World War II, where states of people that were pulled into or people of different nationalities were pulled into states, suddenly said, no, I don't want to be a part of that state.
I want to make rules for myself. I want our people to make the rules for us. And we want to be separate and autonomous and politically autonomous. And in the modern age, in particular, cultural nationalism has meant that we have a push for what we would call exclusive nationalism, that there are people that are not a part of our culture. Now, this is not new, for example, right?
In the United States, for example, a few decades ago, actually before his death it would have to be, the American political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote about how there was a cultural conflict and cultural nationalism that was going to emerge, which he thought problematic, because there weren't enough people integrating to speak English, that there were more and more people of diverse, different... ethnic backgrounds, religious backgrounds, etc. And in particular, Hispanic Americans bringing both their language and their culture and their food and their religion as well.
And the idea that America was a national country of a certain type of cultural nationalism posed in this regard a sense of exclusive nationalism. So this, of course, if we start to say that, okay, well, the national state or what makes nationalism work for us... is if it's only these, these, and these characteristics, you can see where exclusive nationalism is headed.
And again, we'll hit that road a little bit later as well. Now, another aspect of this sort of cultural nationalism on the question, as we go forward here, is that cultural nationalism We might ask ourselves, well, okay, we just said that Herber said that the ethnic is the basis for the nation, and now we're saying it's cultural nationalism. Why not just call it ethnic nationalism? Well, the issue with ethnic nationalism and why we don't call it cultural is because, in a sense, ethnicity is often taken to be a substitute for race, right? So we often say, okay, well, that ethnic community, we're really meaning, in a sense, race community, right?
Have you ever heard somebody say, oh, ethnic people? What does that mean, right? Do they mean like people that speak different romance languages?
So is that like Italians, French, and, you know, other in English, but they're all versions of a romance? No, it tends to be for a substitute for race. Oh, ethnic refers to that.
Now that, of course, is if somebody is sort of in prejudice and racial stuff, but ethnicity often gets linked into other ideas that make it, you know, race. For example, when we talk about ethnic cleansing and things like that. The other aspect is is that the key subjective component in this regard is not in a sense identifiable with like outward characteristics of say what ethnicity would be.
It's actually about the subjective components. What sorts of beliefs, what sorts of cultural aspects does one consider important? Now as a consequence, culture becomes in a sense very selective. Which culture, which parts of the culture, which aspects of the culture, which elements of the culture is that national system going to appreciate, right? Sometimes, for example, people who are cultural nationalists, they'll say things like, well, no, no, I believe in cultural nationalism, but I'm not a racist, or I believe in cultural nationalism, but I'm not this, or I'm not that, right?
Well, they're being selective. And then you say, well, okay, so do you believe in this religion? No, no, no, no, no. I mean, if you're a part of our cultural nation, you believe in this religion. So this becomes a bit of the problem, right?
I mean, ethnicity is more of these sort of sense of... Oftentimes, even though it's not true, this objective features of what we look like makes us a part of an ethnic group itself, whereas culture becomes these selective social traits, social norms, social things like languages and clothing, etc. that we put into the mix. And in fact, where that sort of all comes to head is this quote by the scholar Kwame A. Appiah. And Appiah says, look, history, quote, history may have made us what we are.
But the choice of a slice of the past in a period before your birth as your history is always exactly a choice. So at the end of the day, the people that are choosing a certain form of a cultural nationalism that they think matters are choosing what from the history of that culture, from the history of that nation, of that ethnic group, they want to bring forward and say, we're going to portray this as being our culture. And what we've seen is cultural nationalism has, in fact, been quite resurgent.
in the past couple of years in all sorts of countries, right? Now, this is an exclusive cultural nationalism. For example, this is clearly from the USA where, you know, people are saying that it's related to religion.
It's related to immigration status. It's related to how you got here. It's related to whether or not you're taking jobs, you're here for economic reasons, or you're going to stick around for a while. We can suggest all those things.
But at the end of the day, the cultural nationalism is about what language do you speak? What do you look like? What aspects of it you take? I mean, if you ask the Americans that say, no, you know, I'm not an immigrant.
And you're like, why? Well, my family's been here for five generations. Yes, but your sixth generation was not here, was it?
No, but that doesn't matter, right? So they're taking a part of it and saying, well, five generations forward means that way. Or if you have somebody that says, okay, well. you know, I'm not really an American, I hold this, this, and this view, but, you know, I'm not into nationalism, like, well, you believe in this, this, and this, and you believe that liberal democracy at the end of the day, or democratic systems are the way to go, and no other system is really as viable or legitimate, I mean, you're accepting some of the cultural aspects of it, even if you're saying, well, there's other systems out there. So what cultural nationalism is at the end of the day is a selection of cultural aspects, as Appiah says, that we then claim as our own and say.
This is what makes us a nation is these cultural aspects. So with that, I'm going to thank you for engaging on this issue, and we will catch you at the next video.