NATIONALISM. - It is that sentiment of attachment to the national nucleus which arises spontaneously in the souls of its members. Its appearance, as a sentiment distinct from patriotism, is of rather recent date and is due to ideological causes and to particular historical contingencies. It is a commonly accepted opinion that the movement of nationalities began under the influence of the ideas propagated by the French Revolution. The Enlightenment rationalism of the 18th century, having proclaimed man free by nature and subject only to the law dictated by his reason and accepted by his will, also attributed to him the power to criticize and overthrow existing social institutions in order to rebuild them according to his own criterion.
From the asserted total autonomy of man to the autonomy of peoples and the consequent principle of self-determination the step was short and was easily taken. The principle of the self-determination of peoples included two postulates, which were merely different orientations of the same fundamental affirmation: popular sovereignty and the principle of nationality. The first refers to the internal political structure, assuring the people the free choice of their rulers; the second concerns the delimitation of the State, proclaiming the right of citizens to establish the limits of the political community. Nationalist Romanticism took possession of it in order to rise in revolt.
Political and social circumstances contributed to accelerating this ideological process and to converting it into nationalism. The hegemonic attempt of Napoleonic France, which while in the ideological field set itself up as the champion of the freedom of peoples oppressed them, and the political intrigues to which the Treaty of the Holy Alliance gave rise, reawakened the dormant national sentiment, both in Germany, of whose nationalism Fichte's Discourses to the German Nation are a manifestation, producing the movement of unification which Prussia took the lead in directing, and in Italy, where they exasperated minds against the arbitrary interventions of the so-called European directory, provoking the uprisings which then led to national unity.
The nationalism that thus arose was fostered by the general tendency of the modern State, a sovereign centralizer of all aspects of social life, jealous of its power and its unity, and therefore bent on leveling linguistic and cultural differences. In the ancient State a population could change sovereignty without its customs undergoing any change; in the modern State, on the other hand, the change of political sovereignty and, all the more, subordination to a foreign government impose new constraints on populations, which appear intolerable to the sentiment of national pride.
For these reasons nationalism has almost constantly taken a violent and reactionary stance, and has been judged by many as a deformation of patriotic sentiment corrupted by egoism. The teaching of the Church has been more objective. Every time the ecclesiastical magisterium has reproved it as opposed to morality, it has had in view "exaggerated or excessive" nationalism and the harms of national egoism, which must not be confused with nationalism seen in its essence. Pius XI, in the encyclical Ubi arcano, in fact considered love of country or of nation as an incentive to many virtues, reproving only its egoistic degenerations. According to the definition he outlined, nationalism is nothing other than the moral virtue which inclines one to love one's own nation and to fulfill all the duties that piety imposes toward those who are united by identity of origin and culture. That the nucleus of the concept resides in love toward the nation is demonstrated by the analysis of the various historical forms it has taken in different countries. Although reality does not present two nationalisms equal in their attitudes and immediate ideals, nevertheless, at bottom, in all of them it is possible to find that love of the nation to which each person feels drawn by natural impulse.
There therefore exists a close kinship between nationalism and patriotism. Patriotism has as the immediate object of its affective tendency the terra patrum, and only mediately refers to the people; nationalism, on the other hand, concerns immediately the ethnic group and mediately the soil of residence. When homeland and nation form an undivided social entity, the patriotic sentiment and the national sentiment are unified in a single love. When, however, homeland and nation do not coincide, the center of attraction of nationalism either comes to fall outside the boundaries of the homeland, or, if it is found within its boundaries, does not extend to the whole society to which the national minority belongs.
All the other elements that are usually adduced as distinctive marks of nationalism are accidental and serve only to distinguish one historical form of nationalism from another, according to the different ways in which it presents itself. Thus, for example, the more vigilant attitude of nationalism for the good of the nation, its care to strengthen power more greatly and to reinforce internal unity, the systematic character of its doctrine and its practice with regard to the strengthening of social life are accidental aspects, which could also belong to a patriotism that erected itself into a system, and are due for the most part to the historical circumstances in which the various movements with a nationalist orientation were born. Their reactionary nature depends on the moments of internal and external crisis which often determine their very birth.
A different judgment must nevertheless be expressed regarding those forms of nationalism which raise the nation to the level of the absolute and subordinate all the values of individual and social human life to its good and its power. The nation, in this case, is conceived as an organic and perennial whole, which includes within its bosom past, present and future generations, provided with an autonomous life, of which man represents only a transient moment of relative value, whose source resides in the nation. In domestic politics this conception leads to totalitarian forms of regime, inasmuch as it considers the human person as a means for the attainment of the superior ends of the nation and consequently strips it of every original dignity, denying its rights. In foreign politics it foments national egoism, which, heedless of the good of others, seeks only its own, measuring the morality of its attitudes by the criterion of interest, for which it is prepared to trample on the rights of others. In this extreme form it was expressly condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus (prop. 64). The infatuations of such false nationalism then degenerate into a movement of violent expansion, particularly at the expense of the weakest, in which an always legitimate affirmation of power is discerned. They are one of the principal causes of the division among peoples, among whom they feed hatred, and of incurable dissensions in international life, where they hinder mutual understanding and collaboration for the common welfare.