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I am Not Sure
A posting from John Robb that currently spins through my mind though I am not sure yet if this is competely valid.
I am not sure why most people were surprised by Bush’s inaugural speech. It contains the essence of what swept the Republicans to power, and what will keep them there. What is it? It is the last gasp of the idea of a "nation" — a people with a common beliefs, origin, and history. Bush merely pumped the idea that American nationalism was exceptional.
The problem is that we live in a market-world. Our ability to compete effectively in these global markets determines our long-term success. Muscular nation-states don’t do well in this environment. They involve themselves in non-economic behavior that radically harms their ability to compete effectively.
I’m not so sure about the future of the nation-state, but a point I think should be brought out is the identification of the United States as a nation-state. This may sound odd, but until Bush I had never thought of the US as a nation-state. The two are potentially quite different things. A nation is a group of people, usually speaking the same language and sharing the same culture — the Latin “natio,” which I have thought of as being basically a tribe. Implicit in the idea of the “nation” is exclusiveness — you’re either a member of the tribe or not.
A state, on the other hand, is an entity exercising sovereign authority (at least theoretically) over a given piece of land. Until the late Middle Ages, and indeed into the 20th century, there were nations and there were states, but there weren’t nation-states. Over time, some states became more or less coterminous with certain nations (the United Provinces,France,Portugal), but other states contained multiple nations. The most obvious examples are the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire, but this was equally true of the United Kingdom (English, Welsh, Scots, Irish (okay, CP, against their will), Sweden (Swedes, Finns, Norwegians), and Spain (Spanish plus all the locals in the colonies). Other nations either had no states — the Poles after 1798 — or had multiple states, like the Germans and the Italians. It’s an oversimplification, but I have always thought of Revolutionary France as being the first nation-state — that is to say, a state explicitly identifying itself with a nation.
By this measure, the United States was never a nation-state. Sure, most of the original colonists (and pretty much all of the Founding Fathers) were English Protestants, but the United States was never an English Protestant nation in those terms. Indeed, the whole point of the United States was that anyone could become an American. All you had to do was to move here and subscribe to certain common values. You didn’t have to change your language (thought learning English sure helped), and you certainly didn’t have to change your religion. There were currents within American society that exalted “American-ness,” and would have turned the United States into an American nation, but these never really got much traction, and were always overwhelmed by the tide of new immigrants from new places who were happy to be Americans, even if they didn’t have much in common with the people already here.
Bush is the first President ever who I think views Americans as a nation, in the sense of being an exclusive tribe. There have been outbursts of American nationalism before, and idealism and messianic impulses are a well-established current within American foreign policy. Bush, though, is the first President I can recall who not only held America up as a model (most have), but who maintained that it was a nation superior to all others, and as such had the duty to rule the world. Up until him, most Americans have believed that the rest of the world would become like the US because this was the best way to live, but that didn’t mean that they would become Americans, or that Americans were some sort of supermen. To me, the best evidence of this is the title Bush chose for something we had never had before — a Department of Homeland Security. “Homeland” was a term other people used. I have lived in the US practically my whole life, and until then, I had never heard the US described as the homeland. To me, it was a huge step towards delimiting an American nation apart from, exclusive of, and superior to all other nations.
I’m not sure what this has to do directly with Robb’s quote, but I do think it is useful to ponder the extent to which Bush’s nationalism is a genuinely new development in American history. And it scares hell out of me. I never want to hear Amerika uber alles, but it sure seems we’re headed that way.
Posted by: Aigin | Jan 25 2005 0:13 utc | 20
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