READING: John Lukacs on Nationalism vs. Patriotism
From 1992. Courtesy of John Ganz <https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/reading-watching-050524>…
John Lukacs (1992): ‘That nationalism differs - and often profoundly - from patriotism is something to which we should have paid more attention, especially in the United States where the two terms are still regrettably confused. When Americans speak of a super-patriot they really mean an extreme nationalist. When Dr. Johnson pronounced his celebrated phrase, “Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels,” he meant nationalism, since the latter word in English did not yet exist. When Hitler, writing about his youth in Mein Kampf, said that “I was a nationalist; but I was not a patriot,” he knew exactly what he meant, and so ought we.
Patriotism (as George Orwell noted in one of the few extant essays about its distinction from nationalism) is defensive, while nationalism is aggressive; patriotism is rooted to the land, to a particular country, while nationalism appeals to the myth of a people, indeed to a majority; patriotism is traditionalist, nationalism is populist. Patriotism is not a substitute for a religious faith, whereas nationalism often is; it may fill the emotional and at least superficially spiritual - needs of people.
It may be combined with hatred.
(As Chesterton wisely said, it is not love, which is personal and particular, but hatred that unites otherwise disparate men. “The jingo nationalist,” said Duff Cooper, “is always the first to denounce his fellow countrymen as traitors.)
One hundred years ago it seemed that nationalism and socialism were antitheses, respectively on the far Right and the far Left of the political spectrum. The reason for this was not that of the difference between their economic, or even social, ideas. The reason was that socialists, at that time, were internationalists, anchored in the belief that class-consciousness was stronger than the sense of nationality.
They were wrong.
The Marxist idea failed - and how thoroughly! - not by 1989, at the end of the 20th century, but in 1914, at its very beginning when international socialism melted away in the heat of national enthusiasms like a pat of cold margarine in a hot skillet; when it appeared that a German (or a French or a British or an American) workingman had almost nothing in common with workingmen of another nation, whereas he had plenty in common with managers or even industrialists within his own nation. But already a few years before 1914 Mussolini, the young radical socialist and the brains of the Italian Socialist party, discovered that he was an Italian first and a socialist second - that is, a nationalist, and not an internationalist, socialist.
All of this corresponded to another important change in the political vocabulary of the Western world. During the 19th (and late 18th) centuries, the words people and popular belonged only to the Left. Some time after 1890 these terms (in Germany, Austria, and also elsewhere) were beginning to be appropriated by the Right. In 1914, when he broke with the Italian Socialist party, Mussolini named his new nationalist newspaper Popolo d’Italia. This was five years before he would announce a new party, a Fascist one, and five years before Hitler joined a small National Socialist - völkisch, that is, populist - party in Munich. National socialism (and not only in Germany) was becoming a general phenomenon.
The universal application of the adjective “Fascist” to what people see as “the extreme Right” is wrong, and it confuses the issue. The worldwide phenomenon was not Fascism; it was national socialism. Neither Hitler nor Stalin were Fascists; both of them were extreme nationalists, though the latter was careful not to admit this openly…
Lukacs, John. 1992. “American History: The Terminological Problem”. The American Scholar. 61:1 (Winter), pp. 17-32. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/41211973>.