The National Ideology

...Insofar as it prescribes that the functions of government be primarily vested in national agencies, the ideology of nationalism is universally convincing...

...In the future, some other basic unit may take the place of the nation-state...

...In the latter, he finds the dark, emotional, irrational aspects of the national ideology to be dominant...

...In one respect, it is still an indispensable factor in the ordering of the globe, for the business of government can be safely carried on only in national units...

...The national state founded in America did not pretend to be a wholly new creation...

...It set out to cultivate a political heritage taken over from the Colonial period, that of liberty under law, of rights not merely asserted in abstract-universal fashion but spelled out in legal language...

...The distinctive characteristic of American nationalism is that its central symbol is a legal text, that of the Constitution...

...America preserved the peculiarly English, pre-national-ist principle of legal order as the essence of government...

...Professor Kohn's emphasis upon the bright, rational and universalist character of American nationalism lends itself well to drawing contrasts between American virtue and European vice...

...A further complication which the student of nationalism must take into account is that no two nationalisms are exactly alike...

...It is part of the tragedy of the human condition that all ideas which are capable of welding people together in community must appeal to potentially destructive forces, and a truly fateful question which arises regarding any political ideology is whether the dark and destructive side is not altogether predominant in it...

...In addition to his central theme, Professor Kohn also deals with a number of subsidiary problems of particular relevance to American national unity and national self-interpretation...

...And I think he is right in placing American nationalism in a separate category together with those European national ideologies (e.g., the British, Dutch and Swiss) in which legal and constitutional traditions antedating the nation-state are preserved...

...it speaks, as it were, with the voice of nature...

...In this respect, the founding of the Confederate States re-enacted the founding of the United States itself...

...Ml nations, meat and small, have their distinctive national ideology which is shaped by their history and is undergoing constant change under the impact of social and political forces while harking back to its formative period...

...Its prime cause, it seems to me, is to be sought in the breakdown of balance mechanisms, and "good," unromantic national ideologies provide no immunity against this...

...But the South went counter to the progressive-humanitarian inspiration of the American national idea, and on this score it was the North which preserved the true "American" spirit...

...America had a counterweight to unbridled utopianism because its nascent nationalist ideology, far from looking exclusively to the future, was solidly anchored in the English constitutional tradition...

...His anti-romantic outlook renders the author receptive to the constitutional argument of the Confederacy...

...This is the main thesis of Professor Kohn's book...

...Because the first, formative impulse of American nationalism was one of order, of limitation, it had to develop along lines totally different from those followed by European nationalisms with their limitless dynamism...

...He goes as far as to call all these wars "civil wars," but to my mind this is stretching the analogy too far...

...but it reflects the irrationally emotional and aggressive side of human nature...

...In American Nationalism, Professor Hans Kohn, well known as a learned and versatile student of nationalism in its diverse manifestations, explores the distinctive character which the ideology of nationalism has assumed in the United States...

...But, Professor Kohn says further, America is not only free from the backward-looking romanticism of tradition-laden nations...

...Professor Kohn's knowledge of the literature, both permanent and fugitive, is inexhaustible...

...belief in liberty, human rights and universal progress is inseparable from it...

...This is likely to lead to some tension between the supporters of centralization and decentralization...

...Although the Southerners did indulge in "European," romantic nationalist language, it was the mystique of the Union, the war ideology of the North, which represented the truly romantic side in the conflict...

...The American nation lacks "even a name to which emotions could cling, like England, France, Italia or Hellas...

...The writer draws interesting parallels between the American Civil War and the roughly contemporary European wars waged to restore or create unified nation-states (the Swiss "separate federation" war of 1847, the Italian unification wars of 184849 and 1859, the German unification wars of 1866 and 1870-71...

...to "Partisan Review," "Commentary' Like all political ideologies, nationalism has many facets...

...We may say in this sense that in our time the nation is the natural unit for purposes of government...

...As a political ideology, then, nationalism has its bright and dark, rational and irrational, constructive and destructive sides...

...The psychological climate of the formative period of American nationalism was, indeed, that of 18th-century Enlightenment with its passion for reason, equality and progress...

...Destructive conflict between nations is by no means due to sheer ideological perversity...

...He finds American nationalism essentially different from its Continental European counterparts...

...From another point of view, however, it appears as just the opposite: as a vehicle of destructive passions, turmoil, anarchy and disorder...

...These include the problem of the relationship between American and English culture (Chapter II), that of the states within the union and the Civil War crisis (Chapter III), that of immigration and the various nativist and liberal responses to it (Chapter IV), and that of isolationism vs...

...The theme is developed lucidly, with ample quotations both from American and European classics of political literature and from obscure or half-forgotten authors who in their time gave voice to one or the other of the characteristic aspects of American nationalism...

...But American nationalism, as he describes it, is profoundly unromantic...

...inevitably so, because Continental nationalism is permeated with romanticism, the backward-looking, mythologizing glorification of the nation as a mystical, almost supernatural entity...

...Only the Swiss war was a civil war comparable to tho American...

...From this angle, nationalism appears as a "natural" idea in the sense of "natural law," and as closely allied to the ideas of stable, reasonable, legitimate order...

...the nation-state as the typical basic political unit dates back only to the 19th century...

...mixtures of egalitarian-progressive and authoritarian elements also occur...

...The chapter about the Civil War is the most original part of the book...

...He is, of course, too thoughtful a scholar to dismiss the whole of European history as a tissue of dark aberrations which the American rejection of evil "power politics" is called upon to exorcise...

...But while we are being assured day in and day out by a wide assortment of persuasive thinkers and propagandists that the days of the nation-state are over, there is no mistaking the fact that government, for the vast majority of mankind, still means government of (as well as by and for) a nation...

...Thus it has escaped the bane of European nationalism, the memory of past glories which cannot be recaptured but which provide a fertile ground for irrational jealousies, rivalries and conflicts...

...Perhaps the most important distinction one can make between different nationalisms, or different periods in the history of one and the same nationalism, is that some are tinged with egalitarian, progressive and democratic socio-political ideas while others reflect an authoritarian, totalitarian or conservative outlook...

...This aspect of nationalism is also "natural...

...If national existence is not the mysterious creation of some superhuman force but the conscious product of deliberate law-making, it was perfectly legitimate for the South to constitute itself as a nation...

...Nationalism as a worldwide political ideology has not found a satisfactory solution for this problem...

...The British Commonwealth is a supra-national federation, but it has no central government...

...Another perennial problem is how to tame the irrational and destructive components of a working political ideology, while preserving its integre-tive strength...

...participation in world politics (Chapter V...

...it merely enriched it with some additional, more universal elements derived from the philosophy of the Enlightenment...

...His book, though brief, provides good orientation among the manifold currents of thought through which the national idea has expressed itself in the American setting...

...But he seems to me to exaggerate the contrast between these "good" nationalisms and the "bad," romantic ones...

...We may also put this differently: In our time, only national governments can be legitimate...

...In all these chapters, the author travels over familiar ground, but his presentation has the great virtue of going back to the original sources and letting the past speak with its authentic accent...

...all other "unification" conflicts were essentially international wars...

...within it, each constituent unit is governed as a nation...

...On the other hand, peoples which have no national government of their own clamor irresistibly to be endowed with one...

...On the other hand, universal ideas of an inspiring character do form an essential component of American nationalism...

...This has not always been so...

...This is true of all political ideologies, religious as well as secular...

...it has also succeeded in avoiding the forward-looking romanticism of those European national and other ideologies which also originated with the Enlightenment but developed in a dangerously Utopian direction...

...It is moderate and steeped in common sense...

...Having arisen from this background, American nationalism, unlike most European nationalisms, is turned toward the future rather than the past...

...Finally, we observe that while the nationalist ideology in most cases calls for centralized, unitary government, some nation-states have a federal form of government...

...The crisis of the Union is discussed from three points of view, related to Professor Kohn's main thesis: the constitutional-legal origin of American nationhood, the progressive-humanitarian inspiration behind the American national idea, and the contrast with Europe...