Gemeinschaft

Supranational or internationalist ethics and institutions such as the ‘United Nations’ assumes that there are shared beliefs, ethics, and values between different nations. But nationalism and its “ethical system” upends such an assumption. To borrow from Morgenthau:

“Nations no longer oppose each other, as they did from the Treaty of Westphalia to the Napoleonic Wars, and then again from the end of the latter to the First World War, within a framework of shared beliefs and common values, which imposes effective limitations upon the ends and means of their struggle for power. They oppose each other now as the standard-bearers of ethical systems, each of them of national origin and each of them claiming and aspiring to provide a supranational framework of moral standards which all the other nations ought to accept and within which their foreign policies ought to operate. The moral code of one nation flings the challenge of its universal claim with Messianic fervor into the face of another, which reciprocates in kind.” 

There is, therefore, no compromise between nations when nationalism and nationalist ethics replace or supersede supranational or internationalist ethics and institutions. There is only conflict and the imposition of one’s beliefs and “moral convictions” on others. Moreover, this mode of conflict, namely, conflict under the banner of nationalism, is accompanied by “a kind of ferocity and intensity not known to other ages.” Nationalism also shifts the demand for recognition and dignity away from the individual as in the case of liberal universalism and towards the group, as Fukuyama argued. The group in question is “from a particular place and observing particular customs.” Hence, nationality and national identity is a matter of geography, language, and culture above all else.

It follows that each group and thus every nation is unique and is distinguished from all others based on certain attributes and characteristics. At least this is what nationalist ideology assumes. As one philosopher said: “Let it not be imagined, that human art can with despotic power convert at once a foreign region into another Europe.” In essence, there are two systems at play on the international scene, one “universal” and based on “liberal rights” and another which is national and is based on “national self-assertion.” Liberal, socialist, and nationalist movements and systems have all contended and competed with one another in the recent past, and as we see even at the present moment, nationalist movements have not only remained relevant in recent times but have grown stronger as in the case of the United States. 

Arguably, liberalism, with its core assumption and belief of “free markets” and so forth, runs against common sense, in the sense that language barriers and linguistic differences necessitate political borders and sovereignty based on linguistic identity. Nationalism was therefore “born out of the acute anxieties bred by industrialization.” Capitalism is therefore our main explanation and overriding factor for both the economic and social phenomena and turbulence which are manifesting on the international scene. To borrow from Fukuyama, the transformation of virtually the whole world into an “urban society” as a result of capitalism, industrialization, and technology and thus the breakdown of “village communities” has led to a “psychological dislocation” which in turn “laid the basis for an ideology of nationalism based on an intense nostalgia for an imagined past of a strong community in which the divisions and confusions of a pluralist modern society did not exist.” In short, groups who once shared a common identity and a common language and a common sense of community are “lamenting the loss” of their social solidarity and are also turned off by the perceived “perversions of a cosmopolitan liberal society.”