NATIONALISM. — It is that feeling of attachment to the national community which arises spontaneously in the hearts of its members. Its appearance, as a sentiment distinct from patriotism, is comparatively recent and is due to ideological causes and particular historical circumstances. It is commonly held that the movement of nationalities began under the influence of the ideas propagated by the French Revolution. The Enlightenment rationalism of the eighteenth 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 reconstruct 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 was but a short step, and it 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 former refers to the internal political structure, assuring the people the free choice of its rulers; the latter concerns the delimitation of the State, proclaiming the right of citizens to establish the boundaries of the political community. Nationalist romanticism took possession of it in order to launch its counteroffensive.
Political and social circumstances helped to accelerate this ideological process and to convert it into nationalism. The hegemonic attempt of Napoleonic France, which, while championing the freedom of peoples in the ideological sphere, oppressed them, and the political intrigues to which the Treaty of the Holy Alliance gave rise, reawakened the dormant national sentiment, both in Germany, whose nationalism is manifested in Fieh’s Discourses to the German Nation, producing the unification movement of which Prussia assumed leadership, and in Italy, where they exasperated popular feeling against the arbitrary interventions of the so-called European directorate, provoking the uprisings that subsequently led to national unity.
The nationalism that thus emerged was welcomed by the general tendency of the modern State, sovereign centralizer of every aspect of social life, jealous of its power and unity, and consequently intent on leveling linguistic and cultural differences. In the ancient State, a population could change sovereignty without its customs undergoing any alteration; in the modern State, on the other hand, a change of political sovereignty and, with still greater reason, subordination to a foreign government impose new constraints upon populations, which appear intolerable to the feeling of national pride.
For these reasons, nationalism has almost constantly assumed a violent and reactionary character, and many have judged it to be a deformation of patriotic sentiment corrupted by egoism. The Church’s teaching has been more objective. Whenever the ecclesiastical magisterium has reproved it as contrary to morality, it has had in view «exaggerated or excessive» nationalism and the harms of national egoism, which must not be confused with nationalism considered in its essence. Pius XI, in the encyclical Ubi arcanum, in fact considered love of country or nation an incentive to many virtues, reproving only its egoistic degenerations. According to the definition he indicated, nationalism is nothing other than the moral virtue that 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 core of the concept lies in love of the nation is demonstrated by an analysis of the various historical forms it has assumed in different countries. Although reality presents no two nationalisms identical in their attitudes and immediate ideals,
nevertheless, at bottom, all reveal that love of the nation toward which each person feels naturally impelled.
There is therefore a close kinship between nationalism and patriotism. Patriotism has the terra patrum as the immediate object of its affective tendency, and refers only indirectly to the people; nationalism, on the other hand, immediately concerns the ethnic group and only mediately the land of residence. When fatherland and nation form an indivisible social entity, patriotic sentiment and national sentiment are unified in a single love. When, however, fatherland and nation do not coincide, the center of attraction of nationalism either falls outside the boundaries of the fatherland or, if it lies within its boundaries, does not extend to the whole society to which the national minority belongs.
All the other elements customarily adduced as distinctive characteristics of nationalism are accidental and serve only to distinguish one historical form of nationalism from another, according to the different ways in which it manifests itself. Thus, for example, nationalism’s more vigilant concern for the welfare of the nation, its care to strengthen power and reinforce internal unity, and the systematic character of its doctrine and practice with regard to the enhancement of social life are accidental aspects, which could also belong to a patriotism erected into a system, and are due for the most part to the historical circumstances in which the various movements with a nationalist orientation arose. Their reactionary nature depends upon the moments of internal and external crisis that often determine their very birth.
A different judgment must nevertheless be expressed concerning those forms of nationalism that elevate the nation to the status of the absolute and subordinate all the values of individual and social human life to its welfare and power. In this case, the nation is conceived as an organic and perennial whole, which includes within itself past, present, and future generations, endowed with an autonomous life, of which man represents only a transitory moment of relative value, whose source lies in the nation. In domestic politics, this conception leads to totalitarian forms of government, insofar as it considers the human person a means for attaining the nation’s higher ends and consequently strips him of every original dignity, denying his rights. In foreign policy, it fosters national egoism, which, unconcerned with the good of others, seeks only its own good, measuring the morality of its attitudes by the criterion of interest, for which it is prepared to trample upon the rights of others. In this extreme form, it was expressly condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus (prop. 64). The infatuations of this false nationalism then degenerate into a movement of violent expansion, particularly at the expense of the weaker, in which an always legitimate assertion of power is discerned. They are one of the principal causes of division among peoples, among whom they nourish hatred, and of incurable dissensions in international life, where they prevent mutual understanding and collaboration for the common good.