Nationalism

[Benito Mussolini]

What's your views on Nationalism(agree or disagree)? Please explain why you view nationalism that way.

 

Nationalism to me is the only chance for a nation's culture and heritage. Internationalism has caused nothing but war and chaos.

[RagnarBuliwyf]

You're going to be loved.

[Lucy Heartfilia]

I prefer nationalism, But not aggressive nationalism. We should learn about other's, but we should not become "others".
I follow the principals of Subash Chadra Bose.
 

[SoS]

Nationalism is the other opiate of the masses. Seems to lead to a lot of ignorant, horrific behavior. Enjoy.

[Benito Mussolini]

Nationalism is the other opiate of the masses. Seems to lead to a lot of ignorant, horrific behavior. Enjoy.

 

How is Nationalism the opiate of the masses? If anything it's the savior of the masses. It makes the people proud of their culture, country and heritage.

[Wilhelm IV]

I personally support nationalism in the sense of patriotism, which I consider good. The nation you live in has effectively kept you alive and for that I believe it needs respect.

 

What I do not agree with, is when it goes into Nazism, where you wish to exterminate the population of other countries due to a culture difference between your nation/people and there. Nationalism up to that level, where you're expressing hatred for people who are not your culture, simply leads into violence and genocide in my mind.

 

But yes...you're going to do " very well indeed" here, looking at the mods and the community. Such ideas are generally disliked here and I'd suggest keeping your head down about them, if you have them...but that's a bit late now, is it not?

 

To  be honest, I'm surprised your nation name is even allowed, looking at the rules here. But I think we shall avoid derailing this thread into moderator discussion, shall we not?

Edited September 14, 2014 by Wilhelm IV

[Benito Mussolini]

I personally support nationalism in the sense of patriotism, which I consider good. The nation you live in has effectively kept you alive and for that I believe it needs respect.

 

What I do not agree with, is when it goes into Nazism, where you wish to exterminate the population of other countries due to a culture difference between your nation/people and there. Nationalism up to that level, where you're expressing hatred for people who are not your culture, simply leads into violence and genocide in my mind.

 

But yes...you're going to do " very well indeed" here, looking at the mods and the community. Such ideas are generally disliked here and I'd suggest keeping your head down about them, if you have them...but that's a bit late now, is it not?

 

To  be honest, I'm surprised your nation name is even allowed, looking at the rules here. But I think we shall avoid derailing this thread into moderator discussion, shall we not?

 

Why would my nation not be allowed? You can be a Fascist in this game, just look at the polices. I'm not some crazed Neo-N@zi i'm a Fascist. I respect all races, I just think Authoritarian Nationalism and Corporatism go along well together.

[SoS]

How is Nationalism the opiate of the masses? If anything it's the savior of the masses. It makes the people proud of their culture, country and heritage.

Savior huh? Can't imagine how I made that stretch between religion and nationalism...

 

Just like a religious fanatic, you can't be convinced otherwise. It subverts your reason, judgement, and better nature. For what other reason would they lead by emotional motivators, if not to prevent rational behavior?

 

By nature, humans place others in inner circles and outer circles. They increasingly distrust those that have less in common with them. Nationalism is nothing more than a manipulation of our most primitive instincts of love and fear.

 

The leaders of nations, religions, industries - divide us by superficial schisms - and use the spaces in between to grow rich and powerful. The entirety of their power rests in the stupidity of the common human and his eagerness to swallow one form or another of BS.

[Odin]

Benito, just rename yourself to Benito Berlusconi, and you got your peace here

 

My pov:

 

Don't know about nationalism. In Germany there's no such a thing anymore^^  Maybe a bit patriotism during football world/europe championships. Other then that, if you say "Im proud to be german" , they tell you "go die fckn Nazi". Or "I prefer center-right policies", they answer "Are you a nazi?".

 

German people are the most rotten crazy in the world. Totally extreme. If you tell them being nationalistic, they end up burning europe. If you tell them be good to homosexual, they end up creating public toilets for shemales and genderneutral words to not offense someone. If you tell them be good to foreigners, they just hire mediterran looking people in the policeforces and then wondering about sharia-police. If you tell germans about the Koran, 1 week later they already fight in Syria.

Or after WWII, 1 year after hardcore Nazis, in the east they switched to hardcore socialists.

If you tell the germans to reduce their army, they reduce it too 120000 soldiers, and 100 Leopard 2 and 15 Fregatte/Fishingboat--mixes (in comparison Greece has over 500 Leopard2).

 

 

Thats the country im living in. Nationalism is sth you need a community. Being nationalistic alone, you know...^^

[Clarke]

Nationalism is usually bad, even in the case of America which is corrupted with nationalism to justify wars and other corrupt evil deeds. 

[Solomon]

Nationalism seems a bit outdated. Personal nostalgia can be sweet but cultural nostalgia is just sad.

[Karl Marx]

Frankly, I've begun not to care either way.

 

In the United States, patriotism seems to be based on past accomplishments (back-to-back World War champions, first to the moon, last superpower standing). While some of the things people love to continue to bring up are good or prestigious in of themselves, I just don't feel compelled to like the country more. Just because the thing we've done (well, some of them, at least) have been great, the country that is responsible is not necessarily great. For instance, H!tler ended the postwar recession in Germany, a good thing to have done. Does the fact that he did a few great things mean that I should feel obligated to respect or support him? Absolutely not.

 

However, I wouldn't consider myself a multiculturalist, either. "Hey, did you know that whites will be a minority in the U.S. by 2050?" That's neat. Who cares? "We need more diversity in education/the workplace/whatever." Why? Who cares what race their teacher, co worker, or classmate is? "We need to promote a more multicultural/multiethnic society." Again. why?

 

tl;dr nationalism and multiculturalism are flawed

[Seryozha Nikanor]

silly people everyone knows patriotism isnt nationalism

 

/s

[Ayayay]

The fact is Nationalism probably won't die for a long time. Remember, Nationalism is new. The idea that a nation is responsible only to its citizens, that a state does not have the right to intervene in another states affairs, that authority is derived from the people, or that a person is part of a nation instead of a religion and town. It's an absurd concept if you go back a few centuries. In fact, the very idea of nationalism and self-determination can be traced back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

 

People seem to forget that America was an oddity, while the first country to experience nationalism was arguably the British Empire with songs like "Rule, Britannia!" it was still an exception in a sea of localism. In fact, America was arguably the first nation that could be considered Nationalistic as we had no culture yet we began to call ourselves "Americans" over "New Yorker" or "Georgian." We built our entire Constitution on this absurd idea of Nation while trying to take ideas from the Roman Republic and the Iroquois Confederacy. We created a Democratic Republic combined it with the values of Freedom and Equality and tried holding it together with the idea that we are all one and the same.

 

I personally think the problem is that people take nationalism and self-determination for granted. Most people can't seem to comprehend how people thought of themselves before nationalism or how the very idea of a nation state was constructed less than 400 years ago. (And perhaps it isn't even that old)

 

Take the French Revolution for example, how many people in France do you think actually spoke French? Now, how many do you think spoke it well? The answer? Only half the state spoke French and less than 15% spoke it well. The First French Republic was when the idea of "We are French" came to be a norm and the resulting Napoleonic Wars resulted in Nationalistic sentiments dispersing throughout Europe. "We are Prussians" and "We are Italians" were foreign concepts before those wars.

 

The fact is that Nationalism is still young and it has yet to run its course. However, when one looks back we can see the countering ideas of religion and the state(or ruler of that state) has always been on a Seesaw. Religion and the idea that God is the ultimate authority has not truly recovered in the past 200 years. There has only been a handful of times were it has regained some traction (the Great Awakenings and the Islamic revival being some of the few) but it never regained its place as the ultimate authority. Even in the Islamic world, religion is not as powerful as it was several hundred years ago.

 

I personally believe that the question we should be asking is, "Will Nationalism continue to be the main driving force for the next several hundred years or will Religion overtake it once more?"

Edited September 16, 2014 by underlordgc

[WISD0MTREE]

Nationalism is usually bad, even in the case of America which is corrupted with nationalism to justify wars and other corrupt evil deeds.

 

Which wars are you referencing?

[Bilal the Great]

I think nationalism is a good thing, it helps unite a group of different peoples to a single cause.

[SoS]

Too often it unites people in stupid and or horrific behavior.

[Edis]

Nationalism is not appropriate. It's about hating other religions, which leads into fights, wars, conflicts, etc. 

 

Nationalism means actually loving ours, hating differents.

[Dietrich]

Nationalism is natural. Whether or not it is right, whether it leads to good or bad things, whether it is about love or hate, the fact is that nationalism is a natural human phenomenon.

 

Thousands of years ago, humans lived in small tribes consisting of several genetically similar families; today, we live in large tribes consisting of thousands or millions of genetically similar families. Genetic similarity is all relative, of course. There is a genetic divide between Europeans and Africans, but also between Germans and Italians, and between Saxons and Bavarians, and even among different Saxon families. Nobody can say for certain why nationalism in the modern age has hardened along the lines it has - why was German nationalism more successful than either European or Bavarian nationalism? - but it's clear that it has a lot to do with shared history, language, and geography.

 

For example, Germany is bounded by the North and Baltic Seas to the north and the Alps to the south; to the west, it has traditionally been held back by France at the upper Rhine River and the Ardennes, and to the east, it has historically sprawled haphazardly across the North European Plain, although today a clear line has been drawn at the German-Polish border due to the forcible deportation of Germans from the new Soviet sphere of influence (itself largely a product of the same forces that led to modern nationalism) after World War II. In this way, a German nation makes more geographic sense than a European nation or a Bavarian nation. In addition, history has seen the rise of relatively strong centralized states in France, the Low Countries, Denmark, and Poland, while Germany was always either a loosely-defined patchwork of tribes or a loosely-defined patchwork of feudal states; this distinguished it, historically, from the nations around it, and contributed to a feeling that Germany was a historical entity as well as a geographic one. Had a German state managed to carve out a well-defined slice of territory for a significant amount of time, it may have become an independent state like Austria or Switzerland (both German-speaking states whose national identity is made murky by historical and geographic separation from Germany as a whole); as it is, though, Germany as a nation was made historically distinct precisely because it lacked any permanent internal borders, but had relatively clear external borders. Finally, the German language is spoken throughout Germany; there are regional dialects, but they mean little in the big scheme of things. Language was the glue that finally allowed a German nation-state to come into being, albeit without certain German-speaking regions like Austria, Switzerland, Alsace-Lorraine, and Luxembourg, again due primarily to geographic and historical factors.

 

So having concluded that there are very good reasons for the formation of modern nations, and that nationalism is natural and inevitable in human populations, I have come to see nationalistic sentiments as healthy. I think that a healthy nationalism is desirable; a lack of nationalism might indicate social impairment in individuals, or the deterioration of social structures in societies, neither of which is natural, healthy, or desirable.

 

It worries me that so many people are so willing to denounce nationalism, largely on the basis of events that occurred between seventy and a hundred years ago, which demonstrate very little about nationalism in and of itself. World War I and World War II were indeed sparked and fueled for the most part by a nationalistic struggle between Germans and various other Europeans, but the Civil War was primarily a political and legal struggle, and the Thirty Years' War was primarily a religious struggle. Would you call law and religion fundamentally bad because wars have been started over them? I know that some people would, but it's inane to do so. It makes no sense.

 

Humans are prone to violence; we'll fight over anything. Nationalism is not unique in its ability to occasionally start wars or trigger genocides; religious, political, and economic factors have done the same thing time and time again. Whether or not you agree that nationalism is a net positive, you simply can't argue that it's a net negative on the basis of a handful of recent wars and genocides, unless you're equally willing to condemn dozens of other things that are generally accepted as normal, acceptable, and often necessary (or at least desirable).

Edited October 12, 2014 by Dietrich

[Greatnate]

Nationalism is both useful and disgusting. In situations like Yugoslavia and Iraq, nationalism is the only available solution to centuries of racial and religious divides. In a nation like Germany, it is well beyond the point of utility and only exists to disrupt Germany's total incorporation into the European union, which is Europe's only hope to future relevancy. European continentalism is the only likely solution to the current state of European irrelevance. By combining and negating nationalism, Europe can at least hope to one of the future 8 great powers. Essentially nationalism has come of age and is well past its prime, now must be the age of internationalism or the age of decline, we can only decide between the two.

[Don Juan]

Nationalism is a constructed idea, much like the modern nation state, before which, people would think provincially or even on a town/city basis as to their origin/identity.

[Dietrich]

Nationalism is both useful and disgusting. In situations like Yugoslavia and Iraq, nationalism is the only available solution to centuries of racial and religious divides. In a nation like Germany, it is well beyond the point of utility and only exists to disrupt Germany's total incorporation into the European union, which is Europe's only hope to future relevancy. European continentalism is the only likely solution to the current state of European irrelevance. By combining and negating nationalism, Europe can at least hope to one of the future 8 great powers. Essentially nationalism has come of age and is well past its prime, now must be the age of internationalism or the age of decline, we can only decide between the two.

 

I... find one point of agreement here, and several points of disagreement.

 

I agree that Germany alone cannot stand on the world stage; no European power has the sheer resources (in every sense of the word, including population and available living space) to compete with the emerging superpowers of the 21st century. Even Russia, the once-mighty counterbalance to U.S. imperialism, doesn't have the potential to be truly competitive on the world stage unless it manages to consolidate power in its historical sphere of influence (East Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia), which would require that it come into conflict with heavyweights such as Germany and Turkey, neither of which would take kindly to any encroachment on their own spheres of influence. Even the former U.S.S.R., stripped of its former sphere of influence, would today be little more than a particularly large and assertive regional power.

 

However, I don't think that the logical conclusion to draw from this is that Germany needs the E.U.; Germany needs a sphere of influence, and it can achieve that by co-opting the existing structure of the E.U., but - from a nationalist perspective - this does not mean that it needs to see Europe as anything more than a purely geographic entity. The natural resources of the underdeveloped East European countries could provide Germany with a bounty as rich as that of any superpower, and - although German industry could stand alone - the industrial capacity of West Europe would allow it to take full advantage of those natural resources. This is already occurring. Countries like Romania and Bulgaria are nowadays dependent on exporting natural resources to Germany and importing manufactured goods from Germany. This demonstrates that the E.U. is clearly capable of becoming a vehicle of German imperialism, if Germany commits to exerting itself more heavily even in less economically vital countries like Spain, Italy, and Greece, which serve as a necessary bulwark against immigration from the Middle East, which inevitably finds its way north and across the German border.

 

Nationalism does not necessitate isolationism or autarky; German nationalism, in the 21st century, would naturally lead to political union with German-speaking countries like Austria and Switzerland - which alone could make Germany an indisputable economic superpower - and economic domination of East Europe, which requires some degree of political domination as well, as one only has to look east at the current decline of Russian economic dominance in Ukraine to see. Germany is a natural superpower, but it can only become a real superpower if it becomes the undisputed political and economic leader of Europe. This is not incompatible with German nationalism.

 

Besides, your logic only applies to Germany and Europe. Look at India, for example. What precludes Indian nationalism - or Hindu nationalism, as Narendra Modi espouses - from propelling India to greatness? And what precludes Chinese nationalism from propelling China to greatness? The same questions could be asked of countries like Brazil and Indonesia. Nationalism is not only feasible for a superpower, but could even be helpful in that it justifies diplomatic assertiveness.

 

What nobody has mentioned yet is the feasibility of certain strains of nationalism that have yet to be realized: what of Arab nationalism, or African nationalism? I tend to see the former as vaguely feasible with Egypt as its natural leader - the most obvious obstacle is tension between Arab Sunnis and Arab Shi'ites - but the latter as unfeasible due to much more intractable regional differences in culture, religion, and geography, with no clear leader and little immediate incentive for regional leaders to cooperate for the greater good.

[SoS]

You kinda convinced me on the value of nationalism as an alternative to sectarian violence and fuzzy borders. Still, as nations progress nationalism should be used to promote globalism. A pride in ones nation contributing to the condition of all people.

[Greatnate]

If Germany takes the nationalist route rather than the pan-nationalist route with the EU, the endeavor will eventually fail. If Germany goes the imperialist route, eventually the rest of Europe will get fed up with rule from Berlin and the union will collapse. If German nationalism and the nationalism of other countries continues to exist, even with in an egalitarian EU, division will eventually cause the state to fracture and re-balkanize. If however pan-nationalism wins out and they are able to form a new identity as European, rather than German or French or whatever, they can form a powerful and lasting state.

 

Hindu nationalism in India probably does more good than harm in the short run. It enables the Indian government to attempt to cement dozens of ethnic groups into a single national identity. However, it's also responsible for conflict with Pakistan and Bangladesh. By seeking to create a nation for the Hindi (Hindustan) the Muslim minority was alienated and sought its own state. Actions taken to benefit the Hindi at the expense of the Muslims has resulting in decades of conflict. But as long as significant sub-nationalist sentiments exist in areas of India, Hindu nationalism will continue to be a net good.

 

In case of China, the failure of the Chinese to get the Uyghur, Tibetian, and Mongolian peoples to consider themselves Chinese by this point, the international criticism drawn by their actions in Tibet, and the fear generated by their loud demands in the south China sea means that Chinese nationalism is a net harm to the country. Focusing on economic development and international cooperation are far more effective for China than internal efforts of Sinicization and external efforts to increase their control of the south China sea.

 

Arab nationalism was a nice idea, but is at this point dead. Nationalism in the potentially constituent countries will prevent it from returning to relevance any time soon, maybe forever. 

 

The African union is a great idea, and barring the effects of nationalism in its constituent countries, it could one day form a great state.

[Hereno]

Nationalism is not a single concept that means a single thing, but generally speaking, it's just a generalization of loyalty to an in-group that is larger than the family or city but smaller than the world. It's somewhere in the middle, and is often racially-based. The most interesting and healthy nationalism is that like exists in the US, because it is more likely to be based on ideas and multiculturalism rather than on history or racial identity. But, in the end, it will be gone as well, when more and more people begin to see themselves as citizens of the world rather than citizens of a country or nation-state.