Political Ideologies and Nationalism

in the modern world we typically hold that there are four great political ideologies liberalism which prioritizes individual rights socialism which prioritizes socioeconomic equality conservatism which prioritizes tradition and nationalism which prioritizes the nation of the four nationalism is perhaps the most powerful it's also almost certainly the most neglected over the last few centuries nationalism has shaped the world to an extent far beyond what many realize many of its tenants are now simply taken for granted seen as self-evident truths that widely go unacknowledged and unquestioned in the 20th and 21st century nationalism has seen unprecedented political success after the fall of the Soviet Union it has arguably become the dominant ideology on Earth but what is it what is nationalism I could offer a famous definition it's a political principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent or I could point at famous examples of it but I think the best place to start with nationalism to gain a full appreciation for it is to roll the clock back to look at nationalism as it came into existence and evolved over time and shaped the world we're going to start with something concrete the nation you know what a nation is it has a flag a territory a people and an Anthem the United Nations is a coalition of Nations but the world didn't used to be covered in Nations nations in terms of world history are fairly new mostly cropping up in the 18th 19th and even the 20th [Applause] century while we mostly had before nations were political societies tied to individuals or families like Emperors or royal families those societ were tied to territories but the borders of those territories tended to be somewhat Loosely understood and open to interpretation for example I could talk about the history of China and trace it back to Antiquity and doing that makes sense in a way if I talk about what China was like 2,000 years ago you understand well enough what I mean but until modern times there was no conception of a country called China delineated by precise borders its own government and whose political leaders could come and go over time while China as a political entity still remained before the nation of China came into being it was fixed around the concept of dynasties people are the subjects of dynasties not citizens of a country called China there was no Sovereign political entity above the dynasty that would be there to hold the Chinese people together if the dynasty collapsed and that was more or less the case until fairly recently with other societies around the world we did have what you could call National nationalities the Greek nationality is a standout early example of that when people in ancient times around the aan peninsula recognize themselves and each other as Greek but they never came together to form the nation of Greece until modern times when they fought against the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s and made the country of Greece in 1830 instead the ancient Greeks were politically tied to city states that fought one another and only occasionally banded together when circumstances seemed to C for it the idea of nationality came into existence over time and typically happened by way of contrast the ancient Greeks for example called Outsiders Barbaro barbarians that's because the Greek's mocked language that sounded to them as crude it sounded like people were saying barbar by focusing on that foreignness it made the Greeks realize their own commonality their common language common culture and identity a sense of common identity also tended to develop through War for example when the English won a battle against the French in the Hundred Years War they responded by dancing in the streets of London and in France where national identity was less developed at the time the Hundred Years War confirmed and defined its nationhood by uniting against the English the French discovered themselves as a people as a historian put it in seeing the English close up they felt themselves to be France but even as these nationalities emerged over time we still didn't have Nations the idea of the nation as we understand the word now was a conscious one developed about 300 years later there was one country in particular that theorized about the nation and turned it into the ideology of nationalism in a way that we'd recognize today and that country was France this is that story in 18th century Europe industrialization was beginning populations were swelling and something like a middle class was developing people were growing wealthier and more literate communication and transportation technology was developing and regular people began to gather in cities communicate with one another and think philosophically about the world that was especially true in France and even more true in Paris which became the intellectual Hub of Europe in that culture many words in French either first appeared or were redefined Society hom land civilization public and even public opinion until that point in history people may have believed that they had some sort of regional significance maybe to their local communities but history and culture in the grander sense were mostly thought to be made by standout individuals the select few who made their mark on the world everyone else the overwhelming majority of people sort of just melted into the story undocumented unrecognized and unremembered but these new French terms portrayed a trend regular people started to think that they were the ones who truly mattered the ones who were truly shaping something even as large as France the elite few suddenly started to seem over represented overly powerful over time that led regular people to challenge an old political order one dominated by hierarchies and privilege they started to call it the old regime regime the Anan regime but that raises a question if the old social order was removed then what replaces it what Authority would hold people together basically what replaces a monarchy they increasingly arrived at an answer that political identity and political Authority comes from the people if it's French Authority then that Authority should come from the people of France the people who live on its territory make up its public and form its public opinion if political identity and political Authority comes from the people then you could express them together as a single political body one that you could argue should hold Sovereign political power a French word came into popular use that put name to That Body they called it the nation the nation elsewhere in Europe at the time typically referred to some sort of natural division of humanity so you're not actively creating something but you're pointing at something that already exists for example you could point out that the rich and poor are two divided Nations French people took that concept and slightly Twisted it they started talking about a new kind of nation one that didn't exist before by putting name to it they wied a new nation into existence this new nation they said was the French people on the whole and even more specifically it was the French people on the whole so long as they didn't have any legal privilege to be a member of this nation you had to live under under the same laws as everyone else and be represented by the same government as everyone else that meant that to these French thinkers anyone who heal privilege wasn't part of the nation for example a leading Revolutionary C said the nobility is not part of our society at all it may be a burden for the nation but it cannot be part of it that went for everyone else who held legal privilege in France including the clergy he said if the privileged order were removed the nation would not be something like less but something more which then left him with a Third Estate the representative body for the common mass of unprivileged French people who at the time were being disproportionately taxed he said the Third Estate then contains everything that pertains to the nation while nobody outside the Third Estate can be considered as part of the nation what is the Third Estate everything that set the French Revolution apart from the American Revolution the French declared that the people people could be embodied in a single political body the Third Estate technically only represented the unprivileged classes and the revolutionaries wanted to have one single body that could claim to be the representative of the entire French Community privileged or not so they abolished all the Estates and formed a new body that could do that called the National Assembly the National Assembly was capable of making one decision and therefore voicing one will which they argued was the will of the people which they also argued should be the Sovereign power in France again as CIS put it the nation exists before everything it is the object of everything its will is always legal it is the law itself the French called their singular National will the general will which was an idea taken from the philosopher John ja Russo's social contract which set out as he described it to find a new form of Association a new type of community that defends and protects the person and goods of each associate within that protection is made with a common force that unites each with all while everyone nonetheless obeys only themselves and remains as free as before to do that Russo envisions a community of people coming together as political equals so no one has a privilege and everyone follows the same laws this is a community based in consent everyone voluntarily surrenders themsel to the authority of it this is also a community that can be simply willed into being everyone just has to agree to form it the decisions expressed by that Community are called the general Will He said Each of Us puts his person and all his power in common under the Supreme direction of the general will and as a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole so the general will is the Supreme singular will of the community and for the community to be a just one and he said a free one everyone must be forced to follow it he said in order for the social compact not to be an empty formality it tacitly encompasses the following commitment which alone can give Force to the rest that whoever does refuse to obey the general will will be constrained to do so by the whole body which means nothing else but that he be forced to be free so in Russo's Society everyone voluntarily surrenders thems to the social contract therefore for making the decisions rendered by that contract just and equal but the political realities in Revolutionary France meant that the National Assembly getting Universal consent to its Authority and to its decrees was impossible but the ideas of the revolutionaries were popular and a conflict developed and pressure built on both sides the basic question was who has political Authority in France the privileged order or the nation represented by the National Assembly over time the National Assembly won that struggle by increasingly resting political and financial matters under its own control for example by being able to pass a law that declared all existing taxes which had not been consented to by the nation illegal popular revolution swept France it was thought that if everyone submitted to the authority of the nation France would finally become free and equal so the revolutionaries set out to accomplish exactly that they set out to to subordinate everything political in France to the nation they demanded the clergy bow their heads before the Majesty of the laws and they banned the right to organize around labor interests saying citizens who practice a particular profession must not be allowed to assemble for their supposed common interests there are no more group interests within the state there are only the private interests of individuals and the general interest the nobility too swore loyalty to the nation as it was described everyone offered up gave laid at the feet of the nation the king became increasingly marginalized as time went on as France went to war which they said was to spread their values of Liberty and equality the king felt forced to acques as Marie antoanet put it the king is not free he has to follow the general will and for our personal safety here he has to do what he is told as the nation continued to rise in status it became something that the king could betray France was becoming the French nation and the king became subservient to that Nation when he tried to veto laws from the assembly and when he was supported by Foreign monarchs he was finally deemed an enemy of the people an ideological line had been crossed the revolutionaries responded by storming the tuler palace the King was captured and judgment passed on his life as maximilan robes spear put it Louie must die because the home homand must live okay so we have this United French Nation taking power and you could probably see the idea of nationalism coming into shape but the reality wasn't so simple once in power the revolutionaries were in a weak position they were low on resources and felt threatened by foreign powers who are wary of the developments happening in France which brought in a geopolitical side to nationalism one that still holds true today at that point in history the city state was seen as being far too small and prone to being conquered on the other hand you had Empires which were coming to be seen as far too big holding too many diverse populations together too far from their power base which made them prone to an eventual collapse within that the nation state was coming to be seen as a happy medium big enough to be geopolitically competitive and also cohesive enough to endure through challenges and time people in nation states could feel bound to one another and relatable to one another by sharing a territory the Homeland sharing a Common Language like French and sharing a common culture and history for example the French had the Hundred Years War to commonly remember and Jon of AR to remember as a common French hero the problem is you have to teach people that they're members of a Nation it's not something that people just grow up inherently knowing and these ideas weren't being widely taught they were City oriented ideas at the time generally speaking the further you got from cities the less people identified with or even knew about a French Nation to the mass of peasants and therefore to most inhabitants of France the meaningful world and identity seldom extended Beyond The Village even as late as the mid 19th century a French Observer described the Countryside by saying every village is still a little world that differs from the neighboring world as mercury does from Uranus every village is a clan a sort of state with its own patriotism France was also linguistically diverse most subjects of the king didn't speak standard French and instead spoke a wide variety of languages and dialects which complicated claims at the time about France being a singular French nation which meant that the nation as the revolutionaries were pitching it didn't really exist yet the Revolutionary mirabo for example called France nothing but an unconstituted aggregate of disunited peoples it was a problem that had occurred to French thinkers in the decades before the Revolution and in the early 1770s John jaac Russo wrote down a solution for it he offered it in the form of advice to reformers in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth which was typically just called Poland Poland was under threat at the time by its neighbors and actually about to be carved up by them the clarity and the level of detail that Russo offered I think is startling he told them the problem was Poland was weak from Anarchy it was disorganized and internally divided because of that it was unstable and at the mercy of its neighbors whims to fix that rouso told Poland to infuse into the entire nation the spirit of its Confederates to establish the Republic in the Po's own Hearts so that it will live on in them despite anything their oppressors may do to do that Russo said Poland needed National institutions those National institutions would give form to the genius the character the tastes and the customs of the Polish people to the things that cause them to be themselves rather than another people give a different bent he says to the passions of the polls in doing so you will shape their minds and hearts in a national pattern that will set them apart from other people's in order to raise the patriotism of the poles to its highest possible level of intensity he says You must begin by giving the citizens of Poland a high opinion of themselves and and of their Fatherland take stories of Polish Glory he said and carve them in sacred characters upon each polish heart build monuments to those stories and establish Customs that praise The Virtuous citizens who had the honor to suffer for their country in the toils of the enemy while doing that he says to avoid any mention of the enemy because to mention them would be to honor them too much in short he told the polls to shed luster on all their patriotic virtues to keep their Minds constantly on the Fatherland to make it their Central preoccupation to hold it up constantly before their eyes that must be coupled with education to shape the souls of the citizens in a national pattern and so to direct their opinions their likes and dislikes to make them patriotic by inclination the newly born infant he says upon first opening his eyes must gaze upon the Fatherland and until his dying day should behold nothing else have them read polish literature have them learn its provinces its roads its towns its history and its laws let his heart and mind be full of every noble deed every illustrious man that was ever in Poland so that he can tell you about them at a moment's notice that nationalizing template Russo said would act as a key for the Polish state that would allow it to unlock a great Storehouse of energy on one hand what he's talking about here you could say is somewhat natural States and societies of types might build up myths about their own greatness what was new here was the intentionality and the thoroughness the imperative to educate and indoctrinate an entire society and to do that in the context of nationalism everyone was to be taught that they were a member of a nation and the nation was to be held up as an object of supreme importance something that defined what people believed and defined who they were inside Russo's Treatise became a major source of inspiration for the French revolutionaries so to make the French nation into a reality they set out to intentionally nationalize the people of France as one of the more radical leaders HRI grear put it all citizens were to be melted into the national mass in that they were somewhat successful they established the first comprehensive system of national education and tried to make Paris into the artistic capital of the world turning a Royal Palace into the first national museum the Lou National festivals were also planned through those festivals and those schools French was to be put forward as the only language used throughout the nation a musician was also tasked to compose a patriotic song to celebrate France's declaration of war against Austria the song produced began arise Children of the Fatherland the day of Glory has arrived it then urges the French to charge into battle and let the enemies impure blood water their fields the song produced was the the mares still the national anthem in France [Music] today but for the most part the revolutionaries plans didn't come to fruition France was unstable and economically collapsing the extremism of the French Revolution was divisive even among the revolutionaries as divisions Rose Terror became an instrument of order chaos ensued and order was only restored when Napoleon took power consolidating France under himself as its new emperor the project of nation building had largely failed in France but the idea had been demonstrated the word nationalism was coined in the late 1790s as observers tried to make sense out of what had just transpired in France France's unusual power and geopolitical connectedness meant that the ideas demonstrated in France traveled far and wide the Nationalist ideas that spread can be understood as resting on a few points the first is that the nation came to be seen as the world's natural unit especially in comparison to Empires or multinational States like Prussia which were starting to seem like artificial constructs the second is that the nation was to be the primary loyalty for individuals and the main framework for ties of solidarity mostly replacing ties to local regions and to religion the nation therefore needed to be able to formulate clear membership criteria and needed the ability to categorize minorities and possibly discriminate them finally a nation had to strive for political autonomy within a certain territory and needed a state of its own to guarantee it the aspiring Nations that emerged after 1789 typically claimed their cause was in the name of Freedom they wanted to make the transition from subjects into citizens the nation would be the new highest Authority and its leader leaders would typically act or at least claim to act not in their own interests but in the interests of the nation also as the French demonstrated this is something that could happen suddenly a people just had to declare themselves a people and declare their intention to form a nation the first major wave was based on the idea that colonized and enslaved peoples had a right to their own nation that idea swept through Latin America starting with sandang now Haiti and continuing through the Brazilian colon and through the wars of Liberation led by Simone Bolivar who recruited armies from indigenous and mixed race populations to establish new nations corresponding to the old Spanish provinces which formed Venezuela Colombia Bolivia Ecuador and Peru while similar events further south led to the creation of Chile Argentina Uruguay and Paraguay those revolutions weren't entirely based in nationalism they were based on an idea of the sovereign of the people which in itself was both liberal and National again this was most closely inspired by the French Revolution the American Revolution by contrast was more heavily based in federalism you can see the French mix of liberalism and nationalism in their Declaration of the rights of man which says that men are born and remain free and equal in rights but also that the basis of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation and that no group no individual can exercise any Authority that does not expressly derive from it so it was that mix of liberal and nationalist principles that started sweeping through the world first in Latin America then back in Europe namely in Greece and Italy where Italians demonstrated unification nationalism Italian nationalists wanted to unite the scattered Italian states the Italian jeppi mazini was the best known European nationalist of his age he believed that Nations could exist as rational political actors that could form coalitions like a United States of Europe that would Foster International Peace mazini said that required primarily emphasizing International loyalty your first duties he told Italians are to humanity you are men before you are citizens but he argued that you need to make a nation first before you participate internationally he said we must exist as a nation before associating ourselves with the Nations which compose Humanity roughly similar politics have since been articulated by thinkers like wdro Wilson and you could argue are perhaps even more roughly embodied in organizations like NATO bricks the European Union and the United Nations but despite mazzini's hopes conflict between nations often occurs territorial disputes between nations often occur Nations often go to war with one another and human diversity within any one given territory can cause nationalist Conflict for a number of reasons for example if you go back to John ja Russo's recommendations for Poland to nationalize its citizens what would happen to the people living in Poland's borders who don't want to identify as poles what if they don't speak Polish and what if they're in a region where most people around them are like them and not like other poles do they accept the Polish language and polish culture being imposed on them or do they fight for their own Nation separate from Poland or for that matter if Poland did become a nation what would happen to those who identify as poles but live somewhere outside of Poland's borders like Prussia at the time should they try to get Poland to Annex parts of Prussia to unite the poles as nationalism spread a history of similar conflicts spread with it that to many made hopes of achieving International Peace through nationalism seem naive it also created a new type of nationalism what you could call the nationalism of persecuted Nation alties Zionism is probably the most famous example of that a leading Zionist thinker Theodore Herzel legitimated his claim to a Jewish Nation by saying no one can deny the gravity of the Jews situation wherever they live in perceptible numbers they are more or less persecuted the persecution of people who seem foreign is a practice that goes back to Antiquity but Herzel framed the problem as specifically occurring on the level of Nations for example saying every nation in who midst Jews live is either covertly or openly anti-semitic because of that persecution it was argued that Jewish people needed their own nation which of course became Israel as the 19th and even the 20th century went on it became standard for Nations to try to strengthen themselves by implementing russan National programs to teach their citizens that they were members of a nation and to Foster National loyalty pride and solidarity for example at the end of the 19th century the United States of America implemented a national Pledge of Allegiance in its schools it goes I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all I can recite it from memory because I was taught it as a child because American politics also emphasize individual Freedom it's not something that I was forced to say if I wanted to opt out of saying the Pledge the authorities around me respected it okay so I want to Pivot our attention to a new type of nationalism but to do that I need to bring in some philosophy the nationalism I've been talking about so far meaningfully although not entirely came out of the Enlightenment Enlightenment thought can be understood as an emphasis on logic and rationality and of the belief that they produce knowledge which when accumulated adds to human progress Enlightenment thinkers observed humanity and concluded that there's a common Humanity shared by everyone which inspired the French revolutionaries to make a new French Nation where all French people had a certain amount of power and a certain amount of political dignity a key takeaway here is that Enlightenment principles are Universal in nature if you think about it the whole point of logic and rationality is to get us away from a subjective reality and bring us towards a universal reality when people agree to use logic and rationality they're agreeing to have the same intentions to follow the same set of rules and that way they can check one another they can find problems in each other's thinking and circle over time closer and closer to the truth it's the philosophy that science is built on science is something that anyone anywhere can take part in precisely because it's Universal now now we're going to bring in another type of philosophy Romanticism Romanticism by contrast appeals to emotion in its pure most essential form it's a revolt against received ethical and aesthetic standards it takes the standards of the day and turns them on their head and in doing that creates excitement typically by rejecting modern what are normally called civilized values and by leaning into Primal values values that make us on some instinctual level feel alive rouso is typically seen as its first major figure though not all his writing works as Romanticism he was most clearly one when he rejected what everyone else around him saw as progress for example when he asked has the restoration of the sciences and the Arts contributed to purifying or to corrupting morals and he concludes that it was the latter he said the effect is certain the depravity real our souls have been corrupted in proportion as our sciences and our Arts have advanced toward Perfection how did he arrive at that conclusion I actually don't think that it's the point the excitement in the shock of the conclusion especially to its perian audience at the time I think was the main point and an argument was produced to procure that excitement Romantics don't try to be Universal but instead appeal to the inward self to their inner convictions and their inner feelings that affects how they see others two Romantics friendly relations to others are only possible in so far as the others can be regarded as a projection of their own self that often leads to an emphasis on race or as we'll see an emphasis on the nation but Romanticism didn't begin in politics it was typically in art for example in paintings poems and literature but after the French Revolution Romantics were led into politics gradually through nationalism which of the major post-revolutionary principles offered the most visceral excitement it was the most vigorous the country that developed and embodied romantic nationalism more than anywhere was Germany Germany at the time was far from being the European power that we know now the German people were scattered downtrodden and economically behind it was far from clear that the re was such a thing as a German state or a German Nation if anywhere it seemed to be embodied most most in the Holy Roman Empire but that was a decentralized and unusually weak Authority a high-ranking imperial official put it this way in 1766 he asks what are the Germans and he answers himself we have been for centuries a puzzle of a political Constitution a prey of our neighbors an object of their scorn outstanding in the history of the world disunited among ourselves weak from our divisions strong enough to harm ourselves powerless to save ourselves eles insensitive to the honor of our name indifferent to the glory of our laws envious of our rulers distrusting one another inconsistent about principles coercive about enforcing them a great but also a despised people a potentially happy but actually a very lamentable people in the late 18th century Germans found a way to cope with that lack of national strength and unity by essentially getting in touch with Germany they traveled the countryes side in search of Germany's metaphorical interior they looked for Germany's rhythm in BS and folk songs they tried to capture the sensual power of its Landscapes through poetry they also philosophized about the German language calling attention to its unique character but then going even further claiming that words aren't just things that describe the world but allow you to feel the world from the inside that way of thinking found its clearest expression in the stern German drun movement the storm and stress movement but it wasn't nationalism yet it was Germans creating a romanticized sense of country or a romanticized sense of nationality it was making Germany into something subjective something interior it was creating a deeper relationship between subject and object a person and a place it was something that would allow Germans to say eventually this is who I am that feeling crystallized into nationalism for the first time after the French Revolution specifically after the French invaded German lands its clearest proponent was a man named Ernst morit ar ar explicitly called for the unification of Germans into a nation in doing that AR articulated a key feature of romantic nationalism which is that it leans into a sentiment that's felt or could be felt by its Nationals that's often a sentiment that flies in the face of the so-called civilized world the sentiment that that art leaned into was the shared hatred of the French it was a sentiment held personally by art as he recalled upon seeing the French occupy the Rin land here I learned to hate them as enemies and destroyers of my people and hardly do I see one more and my cheeks flush hot with blood he then tapped into that hatred as a means of arousing and unifying Germany for example in this poem what is the Fatherland of the German name me the great country where the German tongue sounds and sings songs in God's praise that's what it ought to be call that thine Valiant German that is the Fatherland of the German where anger Roots out foreign nonsense where every French man is called enemy where every German is called friend that is what it ought to be it ought to be the whole of Germany AR wanted the hatred of the French to be the main pillar of a new nationalism in Germany something that would have the cohering power of a religion as he put it let the unanimity of your hearts be your church let hatred of the French be your religion Let Freedom in Fatherland be your Saints to whom you pray so there's a strong element of collectivism here he's trying to get everyone to think and feel the same things to behave the same way nationalism by definition is a collectivist ideology a nation is a collective and nationalists behave politically by collectivizing with their Nation but some nationalisms allow for a significant amount of individualism while other nationalisms lean more heavily into collectivism the Germans ended up creating a highly collectivized form of nationalism most fully embodied by the Nazis the man who developed the philosophy of collectivism for the Germans was Johan gutle fisha like AR fish's nationalism matured once the French invaded Germany a key moment for him was seeing Napoleon ride through Berlin in 1806 fisha in response delivered a series of addresses to the German Nation a German Nation politically speaking didn't exist at the time but there was a common language that could be used to unite the German people so it was on that language that fisha focused fisha claimed that all the neol Latin languages around him like French were inferior since they were tied to Latin he claimed that they were dead languages he said to be frank they have no mother tongue at all he pointed out that Germans had their own original language which he called a living language he also claimed that it transformed the people who spoke it Germans he said by speaking a living language were vitalized people for example saying description and characterization in such a language is itself a directly vital and sensuous matter representing once more one's own entire life seizing it and intervening in it so all these German people are vitalized in the same way because they're speaking the same living language from there a metaphor to a body forms he says Germans separated are a malfunctioning body and to be strong and overcome their problems the German people need to come together and form a new whole body for fisha that process had the force of divinity behind it he said the animating breath of the spiritual world will take hold of our national B's inert bones and join them together so that they might gloriously exist in a new and trans figured life he argued that this wasn't something you do just for the good of the nation he said that if you join together with the national body's bones you gain a profound existential meaning a meaning that goes beyond your own finite life he said a man is certain that the cultivation he has achieved remains in his people so long as this people endures and that this cultivation itself becomes a lasting foundation for all further development and it's the universality he said of that particular law that binds people together he said it binds this throng into a natural consistent hole so in this system Germans gain meian life by being part of their nation that makes the existence of their Nation more important than any one particular National that means that Germans must be prepared to make sacrifices for their Nation to preserve their Nation fisha said a German must even be prepared to die so that it might live and he live in it the only life that he has ever wanted that created a doctrine of people and Fatherland the people give everything even their lives for the Fatherland and the Fatherland in turn is the people who are kind of orgiastic brought together as this imagined living body a set of ideas picked up and carried out by the Nazi party a little more than 100 years later in such a society the love of Fatherland must itself rule the state as the supreme ultimate and independent Authority no other force or principle can be allowed to conflict with it which fisha said was for the purpose of creating domestic peace fisha said to achieve this end the Natural Freedom of the individual has to be limited in various ways and if there were no other considerations it would be well to restrict the people as much as possible uniting their activity uniformly and keeping them under Vigilant and Lasting supervision fish's ideas were directed at German intellectuals and at first he and AR mostly only found support with students they inspired for example members of the Burkin shaft movement which by 1817 became notorious for burning books that criticized it or were considered sufficiently anti-german one of its members in 1819 murdered a Critic before running into the street stabbing himself in the chest and crying out long live the German Fatherland he survived and was executed the Executioner though sympathized with the ideals of the nationalists he dismantled the bloodstained scaffold after the event and used the wood to build a secret summerhouse for members of the burken shaft to meet it was a sign if any that romantic nationalism had taken root in Germany Germany would finally become a nation in 1871 when the King of Prussia was converted to the cause but it would face a rocky path to stability and prosperity okay to zoom our perspective back out nationalism again was a European invention there were nationalities and things that resembled Nations but the concrete conception of Nations and nationalism were things that tended to emerge around the world upon contact with Europe first in Latin America and around the rest of Europe and then in Asia and Africa from the 20th century on the inspiration taken from the West Was often a conscious one many societies around the world effectively realized that they had the Poland problem they were disorganized and internally divided and and to fix that to bring strength unity and stability to their people they said they must to some extent learn from the West until the first half of the 19th century nationalism inspired by the French was closely linked to Liberal values but as romantic nationalism became more popular things began to change nationalisms around the world started to take on a hybrid character the ideology of Chang kek the leader of China before Mount seang is a good example of that Chong called for the naming of and extermination of domestic enemies namely Communists he called for the spiritual regeneration of his people for the sake of making a strong unified and safe China a goal he told Chinese they should be ready to die for at any moment but that was also with the goal of eventually creating a democratic pluralistic China precise labeling of that kind of ideology isn't easy and must just settle with calling Chong a nationalist as nationalism spread it began to appear increasingly powerful even Unstoppable many of those making that realization were politicians who began to lean into nationalism as part of their image and platform that combined with developing technology and state apparatus made a new type of nationalism possible and the last one we're going to talk about today and that nationalism was fascism fascism if we're trying to use the word accurately is an EXT form of nationalism the Italian fascisti were the first official fascists they wanted to create a single party fascist State and then subordinate the entire Italian Nation to that fascist state that would all be done in the name of establishing and heightening the greatness of the Italian Nation as musolini put it our myth is the nation our myth is the greatness of the nation and to this myth this greatness which we want to translate into a total reality we subordinate everything else musolini was somewhat inspired by mzini but he rejected internationalism as a principle that could bind people together as he put it the unit of loyalty was too large and he instead focused on his own country which developed into a passionate nationalism as he put it to the Italian parliament in 1925 we all know that what motivates me is not a personal whim it is not lust for power it is not an ignoble passion but only an unlimited and burning love for the Fatherland he became especially interested in the collectivizing potential of national Consciousness he wanted a shared National Consciousness to be at the center of a movement so collectivist that it was openly anti-individualistic all individuals were in theory to merge their being with the fascist State as musolini put it fascism stresses the importance of the state and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the state this is taking nationalism to such an authoritarian degree that people essentially become subjects again what the fascist State officially thinks and wants its subjects also officially think and want this higher personality he said becomes a nation the state creates a nation so fascists want to destroy the existing government and make a new state then that state creates a nation and through that Nation the will of the people is realized to the nation valtion is conferred and the people are made one it makes them as he said aware of their moral unity so with fascism the nation and its subjects belong to the fascist State and there's no restrictions on what the fascist State can do to that nation and to its subjects as you might expect that allows the fascist state to aim to entirely transform its nation and its people according to its needs as musolini put it fascism aims at refashioning not only the forms of life but their content man his character and his faith to achieve this purpose it enforces discipline and uses Authority entering into the soul and ruling with Undisputed sway both musolini and Hitler saw the nation as a highlevel singular organism musolini called it a living ethical entity it had to move to stay alive inactivity he said is death and it specifically had to move aggressively he said it had to make its will and power felt and respected not just domestically but beyond its own Frontiers a principle musolini made good on when he invaded Ethiopia in 1936 ples clear the way for 3,000 armored cars to advance with Native troops in front Hitler and the Nazis took a similar set of ideas a set of ideas now called generic fascism but they also included especially strong doses of anti-semitism M and social Darwinism anti-Semitism was tied to German nationalism from the beginning at first playing a minor part but getting Support over the decades social Darwinism was also popular around Europe towards the end of the 19th century when combined with nationalism it created the doctrine that the nations with the greatest physical mental moral material and political power would win in the struggle for survival or Supremacy and they would be justified in doing so B those ideas together and you had a fascist state with full control over its people it was led by men who became convinced that some living within Germans borders were not true Germans they were actually parasites within the nation they also believed that the German people in their greatness deserved more living space and in that regard they had their eyes set particularly to the east that all led to such a disaster that the word fascism has become perhaps the biggest pejorative in Paul politics ever since but nationalism still survives after the fall of the Soviet Union and the global decline of socialist States I think it's fairly easy to make the case that nationalism became the most influential political ideology on the planet I think that's enough said to bring things together it's time to ask the question what is nationalism I think the best thing to do here is to quote a few professionals and then take it from there here's the first nationalism locates the source of individual identity within a people which is seen as the bearer of sovereignty the central object of loyalty and the basis of collective solidarity another said that nationalism can be understood as a sense of belonging to a large Collective that conceives of itself as a political actor with the common language and Destiny what is beyond doubt said another is that the doctrine divides Humanity into separate and distinct Nations claims that such Nations must constitute sovereign states and asserts that the members of of a Nation reach freedom and fulfillment by cultivating The Peculiar identity of their own nation and by sinking their own persons in the greater whole of the nation to think about nationalism more broadly it's a modern solution to political organization some organize around tradition others organize around individual rights still more organize around socieconomic equality nationalists organized around the nation they may blend in other principles but that's the way they primarily operate to expand that into a definition it's a political ideology that sees the world as ideally divided into Nations and sees citizens as ideally collectivizing for the sake of the interest of those Nations if we can accept that then it breaks nationalism down into two main components the first is the view that the world is ideally divided into Nations those nations are units of people who are thought to have a sufficient amount of things in common which almost always includes a Common Language and territory the second component is that Nationals should ideally politically behave by collectivizing for their Nation since the 20th century the first component has swept the world and more or less become a global belief if there's ever been another political ideology that's had that kind of success I'd personally be hardpressed to name it but the second component is still controversial and for someone to be called a nationalist they need to believe both they need to see the world as ideally divided into Nations and they also need to prioritize the importance of national solidarity what that nation is what its interests are and what it asks of its Nationals depends on the nationalism I hope this was helpful thank you very much for watching and goodbye

in the modern world we typically hold that there are four great political ideologies liberalism which prioritizes individual rights socialism which prioritizes socioeconomic equality conservatism which prioritizes tradition and nationalism which prioritizes the nation of the four nationalism is perhaps the most powerful it&#39;s also almost certainly the most neglected over the last few centuries nationalism has shaped the world to an extent far beyond what many realize many of its tenants are now simply taken for granted seen as self-evident truths that widely go unacknowledged and unquestioned in the 20th and 21st century nationalism has seen unprecedented political success after the fall of the Soviet Union it has arguably become the dominant ideology on Earth but what is it what is nationalism I could offer a famous definition it&#39;s a political principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent or I could point at famous examples of it but I think the best place to start with nationalism to gain a full appreciation for it is to roll the clock back to look at nationalism as it came into existence and evolved over time and shaped the world we&#39;re going to start with something concrete the nation you know what a nation is it has a flag a territory a people and an Anthem the United Nations is a coalition of Nations but the world didn&#39;t used to be covered in Nations nations in terms of world history are fairly new mostly cropping up in the 18th 19th and even the 20th [Applause] century while we mostly had before nations were political societies tied to individuals or families like Emperors or royal families those societ were tied to territories but the borders of those territories tended to be somewhat Loosely understood and open to interpretation for example I could talk about the history of China and trace it back to Antiquity and doing that makes sense in a way if I talk about what China was like 2,000 years ago you understand well enough what I mean but until modern times there was no conception of a country called China delineated by precise borders its own government and whose political leaders could come and go over time while China as a political entity still remained before the nation of China came into being it was fixed around the concept of dynasties people are the subjects of dynasties not citizens of a country called China there was no Sovereign political entity above the dynasty that would be there to hold the Chinese people together if the dynasty collapsed and that was more or less the case until fairly recently with other societies around the world we did have what you could call National nationalities the Greek nationality is a standout early example of that when people in ancient times around the aan peninsula recognize themselves and each other as Greek but they never came together to form the nation of Greece until modern times when they fought against the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s and made the country of Greece in 1830 instead the ancient Greeks were politically tied to city states that fought one another and only occasionally banded together when circumstances seemed to C for it the idea of nationality came into existence over time and typically happened by way of contrast the ancient Greeks for example called Outsiders Barbaro barbarians that&#39;s because the Greek&#39;s mocked language that sounded to them as crude it sounded like people were saying barbar by focusing on that foreignness it made the Greeks realize their own commonality their common language common culture and identity a sense of common identity also tended to develop through War for example when the English won a battle against the French in the Hundred Years War they responded by dancing in the streets of London and in France where national identity was less developed at the time the Hundred Years War confirmed and defined its nationhood by uniting against the English the French discovered themselves as a people as a historian put it in seeing the English close up they felt themselves to be France but even as these nationalities emerged over time we still didn&#39;t have Nations the idea of the nation as we understand the word now was a conscious one developed about 300 years later there was one country in particular that theorized about the nation and turned it into the ideology of nationalism in a way that we&#39;d recognize today and that country was France this is that story in 18th century Europe industrialization was beginning populations were swelling and something like a middle class was developing people were growing wealthier and more literate communication and transportation technology was developing and regular people began to gather in cities communicate with one another and think philosophically about the world that was especially true in France and even more true in Paris which became the intellectual Hub of Europe in that culture many words in French either first appeared or were redefined Society hom land civilization public and even public opinion until that point in history people may have believed that they had some sort of regional significance maybe to their local communities but history and culture in the grander sense were mostly thought to be made by standout individuals the select few who made their mark on the world everyone else the overwhelming majority of people sort of just melted into the story undocumented unrecognized and unremembered but these new French terms portrayed a trend regular people started to think that they were the ones who truly mattered the ones who were truly shaping something even as large as France the elite few suddenly started to seem over represented overly powerful over time that led regular people to challenge an old political order one dominated by hierarchies and privilege they started to call it the old regime regime the Anan regime but that raises a question if the old social order was removed then what replaces it what Authority would hold people together basically what replaces a monarchy they increasingly arrived at an answer that political identity and political Authority comes from the people if it&#39;s French Authority then that Authority should come from the people of France the people who live on its territory make up its public and form its public opinion if political identity and political Authority comes from the people then you could express them together as a single political body one that you could argue should hold Sovereign political power a French word came into popular use that put name to That Body they called it the nation the nation elsewhere in Europe at the time typically referred to some sort of natural division of humanity so you&#39;re not actively creating something but you&#39;re pointing at something that already exists for example you could point out that the rich and poor are two divided Nations French people took that concept and slightly Twisted it they started talking about a new kind of nation one that didn&#39;t exist before by putting name to it they wied a new nation into existence this new nation they said was the French people on the whole and even more specifically it was the French people on the whole so long as they didn&#39;t have any legal privilege to be a member of this nation you had to live under under the same laws as everyone else and be represented by the same government as everyone else that meant that to these French thinkers anyone who heal privilege wasn&#39;t part of the nation for example a leading Revolutionary C said the nobility is not part of our society at all it may be a burden for the nation but it cannot be part of it that went for everyone else who held legal privilege in France including the clergy he said if the privileged order were removed the nation would not be something like less but something more which then left him with a Third Estate the representative body for the common mass of unprivileged French people who at the time were being disproportionately taxed he said the Third Estate then contains everything that pertains to the nation while nobody outside the Third Estate can be considered as part of the nation what is the Third Estate everything that set the French Revolution apart from the American Revolution the French declared that the people people could be embodied in a single political body the Third Estate technically only represented the unprivileged classes and the revolutionaries wanted to have one single body that could claim to be the representative of the entire French Community privileged or not so they abolished all the Estates and formed a new body that could do that called the National Assembly the National Assembly was capable of making one decision and therefore voicing one will which they argued was the will of the people which they also argued should be the Sovereign power in France again as CIS put it the nation exists before everything it is the object of everything its will is always legal it is the law itself the French called their singular National will the general will which was an idea taken from the philosopher John ja Russo&#39;s social contract which set out as he described it to find a new form of Association a new type of community that defends and protects the person and goods of each associate within that protection is made with a common force that unites each with all while everyone nonetheless obeys only themselves and remains as free as before to do that Russo envisions a community of people coming together as political equals so no one has a privilege and everyone follows the same laws this is a community based in consent everyone voluntarily surrenders themsel to the authority of it this is also a community that can be simply willed into being everyone just has to agree to form it the decisions expressed by that Community are called the general Will He said Each of Us puts his person and all his power in common under the Supreme direction of the general will and as a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole so the general will is the Supreme singular will of the community and for the community to be a just one and he said a free one everyone must be forced to follow it he said in order for the social compact not to be an empty formality it tacitly encompasses the following commitment which alone can give Force to the rest that whoever does refuse to obey the general will will be constrained to do so by the whole body which means nothing else but that he be forced to be free so in Russo&#39;s Society everyone voluntarily surrenders thems to the social contract therefore for making the decisions rendered by that contract just and equal but the political realities in Revolutionary France meant that the National Assembly getting Universal consent to its Authority and to its decrees was impossible but the ideas of the revolutionaries were popular and a conflict developed and pressure built on both sides the basic question was who has political Authority in France the privileged order or the nation represented by the National Assembly over time the National Assembly won that struggle by increasingly resting political and financial matters under its own control for example by being able to pass a law that declared all existing taxes which had not been consented to by the nation illegal popular revolution swept France it was thought that if everyone submitted to the authority of the nation France would finally become free and equal so the revolutionaries set out to accomplish exactly that they set out to to subordinate everything political in France to the nation they demanded the clergy bow their heads before the Majesty of the laws and they banned the right to organize around labor interests saying citizens who practice a particular profession must not be allowed to assemble for their supposed common interests there are no more group interests within the state there are only the private interests of individuals and the general interest the nobility too swore loyalty to the nation as it was described everyone offered up gave laid at the feet of the nation the king became increasingly marginalized as time went on as France went to war which they said was to spread their values of Liberty and equality the king felt forced to acques as Marie antoanet put it the king is not free he has to follow the general will and for our personal safety here he has to do what he is told as the nation continued to rise in status it became something that the king could betray France was becoming the French nation and the king became subservient to that Nation when he tried to veto laws from the assembly and when he was supported by Foreign monarchs he was finally deemed an enemy of the people an ideological line had been crossed the revolutionaries responded by storming the tuler palace the King was captured and judgment passed on his life as maximilan robes spear put it Louie must die because the home homand must live okay so we have this United French Nation taking power and you could probably see the idea of nationalism coming into shape but the reality wasn&#39;t so simple once in power the revolutionaries were in a weak position they were low on resources and felt threatened by foreign powers who are wary of the developments happening in France which brought in a geopolitical side to nationalism one that still holds true today at that point in history the city state was seen as being far too small and prone to being conquered on the other hand you had Empires which were coming to be seen as far too big holding too many diverse populations together too far from their power base which made them prone to an eventual collapse within that the nation state was coming to be seen as a happy medium big enough to be geopolitically competitive and also cohesive enough to endure through challenges and time people in nation states could feel bound to one another and relatable to one another by sharing a territory the Homeland sharing a Common Language like French and sharing a common culture and history for example the French had the Hundred Years War to commonly remember and Jon of AR to remember as a common French hero the problem is you have to teach people that they&#39;re members of a Nation it&#39;s not something that people just grow up inherently knowing and these ideas weren&#39;t being widely taught they were City oriented ideas at the time generally speaking the further you got from cities the less people identified with or even knew about a French Nation to the mass of peasants and therefore to most inhabitants of France the meaningful world and identity seldom extended Beyond The Village even as late as the mid 19th century a French Observer described the Countryside by saying every village is still a little world that differs from the neighboring world as mercury does from Uranus every village is a clan a sort of state with its own patriotism France was also linguistically diverse most subjects of the king didn&#39;t speak standard French and instead spoke a wide variety of languages and dialects which complicated claims at the time about France being a singular French nation which meant that the nation as the revolutionaries were pitching it didn&#39;t really exist yet the Revolutionary mirabo for example called France nothing but an unconstituted aggregate of disunited peoples it was a problem that had occurred to French thinkers in the decades before the Revolution and in the early 1770s John jaac Russo wrote down a solution for it he offered it in the form of advice to reformers in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth which was typically just called Poland Poland was under threat at the time by its neighbors and actually about to be carved up by them the clarity and the level of detail that Russo offered I think is startling he told them the problem was Poland was weak from Anarchy it was disorganized and internally divided because of that it was unstable and at the mercy of its neighbors whims to fix that rouso told Poland to infuse into the entire nation the spirit of its Confederates to establish the Republic in the Po&#39;s own Hearts so that it will live on in them despite anything their oppressors may do to do that Russo said Poland needed National institutions those National institutions would give form to the genius the character the tastes and the customs of the Polish people to the things that cause them to be themselves rather than another people give a different bent he says to the passions of the polls in doing so you will shape their minds and hearts in a national pattern that will set them apart from other people&#39;s in order to raise the patriotism of the poles to its highest possible level of intensity he says You must begin by giving the citizens of Poland a high opinion of themselves and and of their Fatherland take stories of Polish Glory he said and carve them in sacred characters upon each polish heart build monuments to those stories and establish Customs that praise The Virtuous citizens who had the honor to suffer for their country in the toils of the enemy while doing that he says to avoid any mention of the enemy because to mention them would be to honor them too much in short he told the polls to shed luster on all their patriotic virtues to keep their Minds constantly on the Fatherland to make it their Central preoccupation to hold it up constantly before their eyes that must be coupled with education to shape the souls of the citizens in a national pattern and so to direct their opinions their likes and dislikes to make them patriotic by inclination the newly born infant he says upon first opening his eyes must gaze upon the Fatherland and until his dying day should behold nothing else have them read polish literature have them learn its provinces its roads its towns its history and its laws let his heart and mind be full of every noble deed every illustrious man that was ever in Poland so that he can tell you about them at a moment&#39;s notice that nationalizing template Russo said would act as a key for the Polish state that would allow it to unlock a great Storehouse of energy on one hand what he&#39;s talking about here you could say is somewhat natural States and societies of types might build up myths about their own greatness what was new here was the intentionality and the thoroughness the imperative to educate and indoctrinate an entire society and to do that in the context of nationalism everyone was to be taught that they were a member of a nation and the nation was to be held up as an object of supreme importance something that defined what people believed and defined who they were inside Russo&#39;s Treatise became a major source of inspiration for the French revolutionaries so to make the French nation into a reality they set out to intentionally nationalize the people of France as one of the more radical leaders HRI grear put it all citizens were to be melted into the national mass in that they were somewhat successful they established the first comprehensive system of national education and tried to make Paris into the artistic capital of the world turning a Royal Palace into the first national museum the Lou National festivals were also planned through those festivals and those schools French was to be put forward as the only language used throughout the nation a musician was also tasked to compose a patriotic song to celebrate France&#39;s declaration of war against Austria the song produced began arise Children of the Fatherland the day of Glory has arrived it then urges the French to charge into battle and let the enemies impure blood water their fields the song produced was the the mares still the national anthem in France [Music] today but for the most part the revolutionaries plans didn&#39;t come to fruition France was unstable and economically collapsing the extremism of the French Revolution was divisive even among the revolutionaries as divisions Rose Terror became an instrument of order chaos ensued and order was only restored when Napoleon took power consolidating France under himself as its new emperor the project of nation building had largely failed in France but the idea had been demonstrated the word nationalism was coined in the late 1790s as observers tried to make sense out of what had just transpired in France France&#39;s unusual power and geopolitical connectedness meant that the ideas demonstrated in France traveled far and wide the Nationalist ideas that spread can be understood as resting on a few points the first is that the nation came to be seen as the world&#39;s natural unit especially in comparison to Empires or multinational States like Prussia which were starting to seem like artificial constructs the second is that the nation was to be the primary loyalty for individuals and the main framework for ties of solidarity mostly replacing ties to local regions and to religion the nation therefore needed to be able to formulate clear membership criteria and needed the ability to categorize minorities and possibly discriminate them finally a nation had to strive for political autonomy within a certain territory and needed a state of its own to guarantee it the aspiring Nations that emerged after 1789 typically claimed their cause was in the name of Freedom they wanted to make the transition from subjects into citizens the nation would be the new highest Authority and its leader leaders would typically act or at least claim to act not in their own interests but in the interests of the nation also as the French demonstrated this is something that could happen suddenly a people just had to declare themselves a people and declare their intention to form a nation the first major wave was based on the idea that colonized and enslaved peoples had a right to their own nation that idea swept through Latin America starting with sandang now Haiti and continuing through the Brazilian colon and through the wars of Liberation led by Simone Bolivar who recruited armies from indigenous and mixed race populations to establish new nations corresponding to the old Spanish provinces which formed Venezuela Colombia Bolivia Ecuador and Peru while similar events further south led to the creation of Chile Argentina Uruguay and Paraguay those revolutions weren&#39;t entirely based in nationalism they were based on an idea of the sovereign of the people which in itself was both liberal and National again this was most closely inspired by the French Revolution the American Revolution by contrast was more heavily based in federalism you can see the French mix of liberalism and nationalism in their Declaration of the rights of man which says that men are born and remain free and equal in rights but also that the basis of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation and that no group no individual can exercise any Authority that does not expressly derive from it so it was that mix of liberal and nationalist principles that started sweeping through the world first in Latin America then back in Europe namely in Greece and Italy where Italians demonstrated unification nationalism Italian nationalists wanted to unite the scattered Italian states the Italian jeppi mazini was the best known European nationalist of his age he believed that Nations could exist as rational political actors that could form coalitions like a United States of Europe that would Foster International Peace mazini said that required primarily emphasizing International loyalty your first duties he told Italians are to humanity you are men before you are citizens but he argued that you need to make a nation first before you participate internationally he said we must exist as a nation before associating ourselves with the Nations which compose Humanity roughly similar politics have since been articulated by thinkers like wdro Wilson and you could argue are perhaps even more roughly embodied in organizations like NATO bricks the European Union and the United Nations but despite mazzini&#39;s hopes conflict between nations often occurs territorial disputes between nations often occur Nations often go to war with one another and human diversity within any one given territory can cause nationalist Conflict for a number of reasons for example if you go back to John ja Russo&#39;s recommendations for Poland to nationalize its citizens what would happen to the people living in Poland&#39;s borders who don&#39;t want to identify as poles what if they don&#39;t speak Polish and what if they&#39;re in a region where most people around them are like them and not like other poles do they accept the Polish language and polish culture being imposed on them or do they fight for their own Nation separate from Poland or for that matter if Poland did become a nation what would happen to those who identify as poles but live somewhere outside of Poland&#39;s borders like Prussia at the time should they try to get Poland to Annex parts of Prussia to unite the poles as nationalism spread a history of similar conflicts spread with it that to many made hopes of achieving International Peace through nationalism seem naive it also created a new type of nationalism what you could call the nationalism of persecuted Nation alties Zionism is probably the most famous example of that a leading Zionist thinker Theodore Herzel legitimated his claim to a Jewish Nation by saying no one can deny the gravity of the Jews situation wherever they live in perceptible numbers they are more or less persecuted the persecution of people who seem foreign is a practice that goes back to Antiquity but Herzel framed the problem as specifically occurring on the level of Nations for example saying every nation in who midst Jews live is either covertly or openly anti-semitic because of that persecution it was argued that Jewish people needed their own nation which of course became Israel as the 19th and even the 20th century went on it became standard for Nations to try to strengthen themselves by implementing russan National programs to teach their citizens that they were members of a nation and to Foster National loyalty pride and solidarity for example at the end of the 19th century the United States of America implemented a national Pledge of Allegiance in its schools it goes I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all I can recite it from memory because I was taught it as a child because American politics also emphasize individual Freedom it&#39;s not something that I was forced to say if I wanted to opt out of saying the Pledge the authorities around me respected it okay so I want to Pivot our attention to a new type of nationalism but to do that I need to bring in some philosophy the nationalism I&#39;ve been talking about so far meaningfully although not entirely came out of the Enlightenment Enlightenment thought can be understood as an emphasis on logic and rationality and of the belief that they produce knowledge which when accumulated adds to human progress Enlightenment thinkers observed humanity and concluded that there&#39;s a common Humanity shared by everyone which inspired the French revolutionaries to make a new French Nation where all French people had a certain amount of power and a certain amount of political dignity a key takeaway here is that Enlightenment principles are Universal in nature if you think about it the whole point of logic and rationality is to get us away from a subjective reality and bring us towards a universal reality when people agree to use logic and rationality they&#39;re agreeing to have the same intentions to follow the same set of rules and that way they can check one another they can find problems in each other&#39;s thinking and circle over time closer and closer to the truth it&#39;s the philosophy that science is built on science is something that anyone anywhere can take part in precisely because it&#39;s Universal now now we&#39;re going to bring in another type of philosophy Romanticism Romanticism by contrast appeals to emotion in its pure most essential form it&#39;s a revolt against received ethical and aesthetic standards it takes the standards of the day and turns them on their head and in doing that creates excitement typically by rejecting modern what are normally called civilized values and by leaning into Primal values values that make us on some instinctual level feel alive rouso is typically seen as its first major figure though not all his writing works as Romanticism he was most clearly one when he rejected what everyone else around him saw as progress for example when he asked has the restoration of the sciences and the Arts contributed to purifying or to corrupting morals and he concludes that it was the latter he said the effect is certain the depravity real our souls have been corrupted in proportion as our sciences and our Arts have advanced toward Perfection how did he arrive at that conclusion I actually don&#39;t think that it&#39;s the point the excitement in the shock of the conclusion especially to its perian audience at the time I think was the main point and an argument was produced to procure that excitement Romantics don&#39;t try to be Universal but instead appeal to the inward self to their inner convictions and their inner feelings that affects how they see others two Romantics friendly relations to others are only possible in so far as the others can be regarded as a projection of their own self that often leads to an emphasis on race or as we&#39;ll see an emphasis on the nation but Romanticism didn&#39;t begin in politics it was typically in art for example in paintings poems and literature but after the French Revolution Romantics were led into politics gradually through nationalism which of the major post-revolutionary principles offered the most visceral excitement it was the most vigorous the country that developed and embodied romantic nationalism more than anywhere was Germany Germany at the time was far from being the European power that we know now the German people were scattered downtrodden and economically behind it was far from clear that the re was such a thing as a German state or a German Nation if anywhere it seemed to be embodied most most in the Holy Roman Empire but that was a decentralized and unusually weak Authority a high-ranking imperial official put it this way in 1766 he asks what are the Germans and he answers himself we have been for centuries a puzzle of a political Constitution a prey of our neighbors an object of their scorn outstanding in the history of the world disunited among ourselves weak from our divisions strong enough to harm ourselves powerless to save ourselves eles insensitive to the honor of our name indifferent to the glory of our laws envious of our rulers distrusting one another inconsistent about principles coercive about enforcing them a great but also a despised people a potentially happy but actually a very lamentable people in the late 18th century Germans found a way to cope with that lack of national strength and unity by essentially getting in touch with Germany they traveled the countryes side in search of Germany&#39;s metaphorical interior they looked for Germany&#39;s rhythm in BS and folk songs they tried to capture the sensual power of its Landscapes through poetry they also philosophized about the German language calling attention to its unique character but then going even further claiming that words aren&#39;t just things that describe the world but allow you to feel the world from the inside that way of thinking found its clearest expression in the stern German drun movement the storm and stress movement but it wasn&#39;t nationalism yet it was Germans creating a romanticized sense of country or a romanticized sense of nationality it was making Germany into something subjective something interior it was creating a deeper relationship between subject and object a person and a place it was something that would allow Germans to say eventually this is who I am that feeling crystallized into nationalism for the first time after the French Revolution specifically after the French invaded German lands its clearest proponent was a man named Ernst morit ar ar explicitly called for the unification of Germans into a nation in doing that AR articulated a key feature of romantic nationalism which is that it leans into a sentiment that&#39;s felt or could be felt by its Nationals that&#39;s often a sentiment that flies in the face of the so-called civilized world the sentiment that that art leaned into was the shared hatred of the French it was a sentiment held personally by art as he recalled upon seeing the French occupy the Rin land here I learned to hate them as enemies and destroyers of my people and hardly do I see one more and my cheeks flush hot with blood he then tapped into that hatred as a means of arousing and unifying Germany for example in this poem what is the Fatherland of the German name me the great country where the German tongue sounds and sings songs in God&#39;s praise that&#39;s what it ought to be call that thine Valiant German that is the Fatherland of the German where anger Roots out foreign nonsense where every French man is called enemy where every German is called friend that is what it ought to be it ought to be the whole of Germany AR wanted the hatred of the French to be the main pillar of a new nationalism in Germany something that would have the cohering power of a religion as he put it let the unanimity of your hearts be your church let hatred of the French be your religion Let Freedom in Fatherland be your Saints to whom you pray so there&#39;s a strong element of collectivism here he&#39;s trying to get everyone to think and feel the same things to behave the same way nationalism by definition is a collectivist ideology a nation is a collective and nationalists behave politically by collectivizing with their Nation but some nationalisms allow for a significant amount of individualism while other nationalisms lean more heavily into collectivism the Germans ended up creating a highly collectivized form of nationalism most fully embodied by the Nazis the man who developed the philosophy of collectivism for the Germans was Johan gutle fisha like AR fish&#39;s nationalism matured once the French invaded Germany a key moment for him was seeing Napoleon ride through Berlin in 1806 fisha in response delivered a series of addresses to the German Nation a German Nation politically speaking didn&#39;t exist at the time but there was a common language that could be used to unite the German people so it was on that language that fisha focused fisha claimed that all the neol Latin languages around him like French were inferior since they were tied to Latin he claimed that they were dead languages he said to be frank they have no mother tongue at all he pointed out that Germans had their own original language which he called a living language he also claimed that it transformed the people who spoke it Germans he said by speaking a living language were vitalized people for example saying description and characterization in such a language is itself a directly vital and sensuous matter representing once more one&#39;s own entire life seizing it and intervening in it so all these German people are vitalized in the same way because they&#39;re speaking the same living language from there a metaphor to a body forms he says Germans separated are a malfunctioning body and to be strong and overcome their problems the German people need to come together and form a new whole body for fisha that process had the force of divinity behind it he said the animating breath of the spiritual world will take hold of our national B&#39;s inert bones and join them together so that they might gloriously exist in a new and trans figured life he argued that this wasn&#39;t something you do just for the good of the nation he said that if you join together with the national body&#39;s bones you gain a profound existential meaning a meaning that goes beyond your own finite life he said a man is certain that the cultivation he has achieved remains in his people so long as this people endures and that this cultivation itself becomes a lasting foundation for all further development and it&#39;s the universality he said of that particular law that binds people together he said it binds this throng into a natural consistent hole so in this system Germans gain meian life by being part of their nation that makes the existence of their Nation more important than any one particular National that means that Germans must be prepared to make sacrifices for their Nation to preserve their Nation fisha said a German must even be prepared to die so that it might live and he live in it the only life that he has ever wanted that created a doctrine of people and Fatherland the people give everything even their lives for the Fatherland and the Fatherland in turn is the people who are kind of orgiastic brought together as this imagined living body a set of ideas picked up and carried out by the Nazi party a little more than 100 years later in such a society the love of Fatherland must itself rule the state as the supreme ultimate and independent Authority no other force or principle can be allowed to conflict with it which fisha said was for the purpose of creating domestic peace fisha said to achieve this end the Natural Freedom of the individual has to be limited in various ways and if there were no other considerations it would be well to restrict the people as much as possible uniting their activity uniformly and keeping them under Vigilant and Lasting supervision fish&#39;s ideas were directed at German intellectuals and at first he and AR mostly only found support with students they inspired for example members of the Burkin shaft movement which by 1817 became notorious for burning books that criticized it or were considered sufficiently anti-german one of its members in 1819 murdered a Critic before running into the street stabbing himself in the chest and crying out long live the German Fatherland he survived and was executed the Executioner though sympathized with the ideals of the nationalists he dismantled the bloodstained scaffold after the event and used the wood to build a secret summerhouse for members of the burken shaft to meet it was a sign if any that romantic nationalism had taken root in Germany Germany would finally become a nation in 1871 when the King of Prussia was converted to the cause but it would face a rocky path to stability and prosperity okay to zoom our perspective back out nationalism again was a European invention there were nationalities and things that resembled Nations but the concrete conception of Nations and nationalism were things that tended to emerge around the world upon contact with Europe first in Latin America and around the rest of Europe and then in Asia and Africa from the 20th century on the inspiration taken from the West Was often a conscious one many societies around the world effectively realized that they had the Poland problem they were disorganized and internally divided and and to fix that to bring strength unity and stability to their people they said they must to some extent learn from the West until the first half of the 19th century nationalism inspired by the French was closely linked to Liberal values but as romantic nationalism became more popular things began to change nationalisms around the world started to take on a hybrid character the ideology of Chang kek the leader of China before Mount seang is a good example of that Chong called for the naming of and extermination of domestic enemies namely Communists he called for the spiritual regeneration of his people for the sake of making a strong unified and safe China a goal he told Chinese they should be ready to die for at any moment but that was also with the goal of eventually creating a democratic pluralistic China precise labeling of that kind of ideology isn&#39;t easy and must just settle with calling Chong a nationalist as nationalism spread it began to appear increasingly powerful even Unstoppable many of those making that realization were politicians who began to lean into nationalism as part of their image and platform that combined with developing technology and state apparatus made a new type of nationalism possible and the last one we&#39;re going to talk about today and that nationalism was fascism fascism if we&#39;re trying to use the word accurately is an EXT form of nationalism the Italian fascisti were the first official fascists they wanted to create a single party fascist State and then subordinate the entire Italian Nation to that fascist state that would all be done in the name of establishing and heightening the greatness of the Italian Nation as musolini put it our myth is the nation our myth is the greatness of the nation and to this myth this greatness which we want to translate into a total reality we subordinate everything else musolini was somewhat inspired by mzini but he rejected internationalism as a principle that could bind people together as he put it the unit of loyalty was too large and he instead focused on his own country which developed into a passionate nationalism as he put it to the Italian parliament in 1925 we all know that what motivates me is not a personal whim it is not lust for power it is not an ignoble passion but only an unlimited and burning love for the Fatherland he became especially interested in the collectivizing potential of national Consciousness he wanted a shared National Consciousness to be at the center of a movement so collectivist that it was openly anti-individualistic all individuals were in theory to merge their being with the fascist State as musolini put it fascism stresses the importance of the state and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the state this is taking nationalism to such an authoritarian degree that people essentially become subjects again what the fascist State officially thinks and wants its subjects also officially think and want this higher personality he said becomes a nation the state creates a nation so fascists want to destroy the existing government and make a new state then that state creates a nation and through that Nation the will of the people is realized to the nation valtion is conferred and the people are made one it makes them as he said aware of their moral unity so with fascism the nation and its subjects belong to the fascist State and there&#39;s no restrictions on what the fascist State can do to that nation and to its subjects as you might expect that allows the fascist state to aim to entirely transform its nation and its people according to its needs as musolini put it fascism aims at refashioning not only the forms of life but their content man his character and his faith to achieve this purpose it enforces discipline and uses Authority entering into the soul and ruling with Undisputed sway both musolini and Hitler saw the nation as a highlevel singular organism musolini called it a living ethical entity it had to move to stay alive inactivity he said is death and it specifically had to move aggressively he said it had to make its will and power felt and respected not just domestically but beyond its own Frontiers a principle musolini made good on when he invaded Ethiopia in 1936 ples clear the way for 3,000 armored cars to advance with Native troops in front Hitler and the Nazis took a similar set of ideas a set of ideas now called generic fascism but they also included especially strong doses of anti-semitism M and social Darwinism anti-Semitism was tied to German nationalism from the beginning at first playing a minor part but getting Support over the decades social Darwinism was also popular around Europe towards the end of the 19th century when combined with nationalism it created the doctrine that the nations with the greatest physical mental moral material and political power would win in the struggle for survival or Supremacy and they would be justified in doing so B those ideas together and you had a fascist state with full control over its people it was led by men who became convinced that some living within Germans borders were not true Germans they were actually parasites within the nation they also believed that the German people in their greatness deserved more living space and in that regard they had their eyes set particularly to the east that all led to such a disaster that the word fascism has become perhaps the biggest pejorative in Paul politics ever since but nationalism still survives after the fall of the Soviet Union and the global decline of socialist States I think it&#39;s fairly easy to make the case that nationalism became the most influential political ideology on the planet I think that&#39;s enough said to bring things together it&#39;s time to ask the question what is nationalism I think the best thing to do here is to quote a few professionals and then take it from there here&#39;s the first nationalism locates the source of individual identity within a people which is seen as the bearer of sovereignty the central object of loyalty and the basis of collective solidarity another said that nationalism can be understood as a sense of belonging to a large Collective that conceives of itself as a political actor with the common language and Destiny what is beyond doubt said another is that the doctrine divides Humanity into separate and distinct Nations claims that such Nations must constitute sovereign states and asserts that the members of of a Nation reach freedom and fulfillment by cultivating The Peculiar identity of their own nation and by sinking their own persons in the greater whole of the nation to think about nationalism more broadly it&#39;s a modern solution to political organization some organize around tradition others organize around individual rights still more organize around socieconomic equality nationalists organized around the nation they may blend in other principles but that&#39;s the way they primarily operate to expand that into a definition it&#39;s a political ideology that sees the world as ideally divided into Nations and sees citizens as ideally collectivizing for the sake of the interest of those Nations if we can accept that then it breaks nationalism down into two main components the first is the view that the world is ideally divided into Nations those nations are units of people who are thought to have a sufficient amount of things in common which almost always includes a Common Language and territory the second component is that Nationals should ideally politically behave by collectivizing for their Nation since the 20th century the first component has swept the world and more or less become a global belief if there&#39;s ever been another political ideology that&#39;s had that kind of success I&#39;d personally be hardpressed to name it but the second component is still controversial and for someone to be called a nationalist they need to believe both they need to see the world as ideally divided into Nations and they also need to prioritize the importance of national solidarity what that nation is what its interests are and what it asks of its Nationals depends on the nationalism I hope this was helpful thank you very much for watching and goodbye

Transcript for:Political Ideologies and Nationalism

Transcript for:
Political Ideologies and Nationalism