Nationalism, a Dogma? [1]
By Jane Addams
A MARKED change has taken place in the concept of nationalism during the last quarter of a century. I have come to this conclusion by contrasting the impressions I received in Europe last summer with those of thirty-five years before.
At the earlier moment, in all political matters the great popular word was unity; a coming together into new national systems of little states that had long been separated. New Italy was vociferously jubilant from toe to heel, for Venice had been so recently rescued from Austria that she still wore wreaths of welcome in honor of her home-coming and Victor Emanuel was the most popular king in Europe. The first Kaiser and Bismarck ruled over a newly made German empire, represented by an imperial parliament in which it was said that a homogeneous people, long estranged, had at last been united. It rather smacked of learning, in those days, to use the words of Slavophile and Panslavic, but we knew that the words stood for a movement toward unity in the remoter parts of Europe where Bohemia was the most vocal, although she then talked less of a republic of her own than of her desire to unite with her fellow Slavs. The most striking characteristic of all these nationalistic movements was their burning humanitarianism, a sense that the new groupings were but a preparation for a wider synthesis, that a federation of at least the European states was a possibility in the near future.
The words of Mazzini, who had died scarcely a decade before, were constantly on the lips of ardent young orators, who stressed his statement that it was impossible to unite men into stable nations unless such efforts were founded upon a recognition of the higher claims and obligations of humanity. And, of course, one still heard mid-Victorian phrases concerning the parliament of man. Certainly the desire to unite, to overcome differences, to accentuate likenesses, was everywhere a ruling influence in political affairs.
All this was, of course, in marked contrast to the impressions received in the summer of 1919. Nationalism was still the great word, but with quite another content. Whereas I had formerly seen nationalistic fervor stressing likenesses and pulling scattered people together it now seemed equally dogmatic and effective in pushing apart those who had once been combined -- a whole ring of states was pulling out of mother Russia, Bavaria was organizing her own government, and Italy, in the name of nationalism, was separating a line [page 2] of coast from its Slavic hinterland, to mention but a few instances.
Had nationalism become overgrown and over-reached itself, or was it merely for the moment so self-assertive that the creative impulse was submerged into the possessive instinct? To be sure, there was the old type found in Poland gathering together her scattered people; although it was constantly explained that the new Poland was a valuable barrier and that the guarantee to defend France from attack extended to her outputs as well, apparently the motives were so inextricably mixed that it was impossible to make a fair statement. Then there was much disconcerting talk about coal and iron deposits in regard to all the new boundaries. Of course, the formation of Czechoslovakia had much about it of the old ideas. Cavour as well as Masaryk had sent an army to fight in a cause not his own in order to secure recognition for his newly formed state, but on the other hand there was nothing corresponding to the solemn pride of the young Italians thirty-five years before, that if Nice had to be given up, it had been relinquished as the result of a plebiscite and not of conquest.
Had the notion of nationalism become institutionalized and dogmatized during thirty-five years, or was it only that now, older and disillusioned, I had been talking too much with other older and disillusioned people? Certainly not all the people with whom I talked had been disillusioned. In Paris one day I had been received by Venizelos, out of respect for my many Greek neighbors; he at least had seemed at ease and sure of his nationalism. He said that, thanks to the glorious traditions of Greece, she need put forth no claims because the people of Hellenic temper and aspirations were themselves asking to join their fortunes to hers. That sounded like the old talk, and it would have been a great comfort if I had not heard a Bulgarian later say that the Bulgarians of Thrace who were to be handed over to Greece could not understand why they had been given no opportunity to decide their own fate, and had become most restive and threatening. Signor Orlando, when he had received our committee on resolutions, had grown eloquent over Italia Irredenta; and in sonorous phrases had set forth Italy's historic claim to the east coast of the Adriatic, but this was in contrast to the statement of an Albanian official I had met who was much worried over the surrender to Italy of the port of Avalona, which after all was little compared to the fate now awaiting Albania -- a possible division between Greece and Serbia.
In yet another contrast I recalled several [Romanians] we had met, who were proud of their Latin speech, so pleased that the Entente was ready to enforce their claims, that there was no bolshevism within their borders; but later, in Holland, we were told of the Unitarians, the Calvinists, the Roman Catholics, the Lutherans and Jews long living in Transylvania, who were now all to be brought under the rule of the Greek church of [Romania]. A distinguished Unitarian clergyman had just been released from prison but was still interred. The sectarian schools and seminaries had been closed that the children and young people might all be instructed by orthodox teachers of the national church. The whole situation was apparently still more complicated where the religious test remained as part of the national concept and imposed itself under the name of patriotism.
Was that perhaps the clue? Had nationalism become dogmatic, like the Greek church itself? Had it hardened in thirty-five years? It was as if I had left a group of early Christians and come back into a flourishing medieval church holding great possessions and equipped with well tried methods of propaganda. Had the early spontaneity now changed into an authoritative imposition of power? Certainly one receives the impression everywhere, in this moment when nationalism has been so tremendously stressed, that the nation demands worship and devotion for its own sake, as if it existed irrespective of the tests of reality. It demands unqualified obedience, denounces all who differ as heretics, insists that it alone has the truth, and exhibits all the well known signs of dogmatism. It sends out its missionaries, and in Germany at least its state universities were analogous to the theological schools in which propagandists are carefully prepared.
This utter inability to see the "other side," to apply impartially the ordinary standards of just dealing, is a well known characteristic of the dogmatic mind, as is a habit of considering ordinary standards inapplicable to a certain line of conduct because the motives inspiring it are above reproach.
Although dogmatic nationalism was curiously exaggerated in Germany, there was a similar manifestation of it last summer in the dealings of the Entente with their heretics, so to speak. We saw arriving in Rotterdam, from the German colonies in Africa, many families fleeing from their pioneer homes; in the railroad stations were posted directions for the fugitives coming from Posen, from Alsace, from Czechoslovakia and from the [Danzig] corridor. They told of prohibition of language, of the forced sale of real estate, of the confiscation of business, of the expulsion from university faculties and the alienation of old friends. There was something about it all that was curiously anachronistic, like the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, of Cromwell's drive through Ireland, of the banishment of the Huguenots from France. It was as if nationalism had fallen back into an earlier psychology, exhibiting a blind intolerance which does not properly belong to these later centuries, as if it had become purely creedal. In fact, the very existence of these widespread nationalistic dogmas suggests one of those great historic myths which "large bodies of men are prone to make for themselves when they unite in a common purpose requiring for its consummation the thorough and efficient output of moral energy." It is said that the making and unmaking of these myths always accompanies a period of great moral awakening. Such myths are almost certain to outlast their social utility, and they frequently outlive their originators -- as the myth of the Second Coming, evolved by the early Christians when only heaven itself could contain their hopes, endured for a thousand years.
Upon my return to the United States last August I seemed to encounter a similar situation here, affording the sharpest possible contrast to what had existed in the late eighties and throughout the nineties in the century of our youth.
In that remote decade the young men's movements in the church, in politics, in labor, in reform, in philanthropies as diverse as the settlement and the Salvation Army, were all characterized by a desire to get back to the people, to be identified with the common lot, each of them magnified the obligation inherent in human relationships as such.
Americanism was then regarded as a great cultural task and we eagerly sought to invent new instruments and methods with which to undertake it. We believed that America could be best understood by the immigrants if we ourselves, Americans, made some sort of a connection with their past history and experiences. We extolled free association and the discussion of common problems as the basis of self-government and constantly instanced the New England town-meeting. [page 3] We especially urged upon the immigrant that he talk out his preconceived theories and untoward experiences. We believed that widespread discussion might gradually rid the country of the compulsions and inhibitions, the traditions and dogmatisms under which newly arrived immigrants suffered. This method was not without its successes. In fact thirty years later we are able to point to thousands of instances in which the radical young man who most earnestly arraigned unjust conditions has become the typical prosperous and bourgeois citizen, sometimes so complacent that one is moved to repeat the English bon mot, that if a man is not too liberal when he is young, he becomes too reactionary when he is old.
The early settlements practically staked their future upon an identification with the alien and considered his interpretation their main business. We stuck to this at some cost, for we believed that especially in times of crisis it was our mission to interpret American institutions to those who were bewildered concerning them, although it was often apparently impossible for the overwrought community to distinguish between the public incident which the settlement was trying to understand and the attitude of the settlement itself.
At one such moment of public panic, which had to do with a Russian immigrant, twelve years ago, I wrote as follows:
Every settlement has classes in citizenship in which the principles of American institutions are expounded and of these the community, as a whole, approves. But the settlements know better than anyone else that while these classes and lectures are useful, nothing can possibly give lessons in citizenship so effectively and make so clear the constitutional basis of a self-governing community as the current event itself. The treatment at a given moment of that foreign colony which feels itself outraged and misunderstood, either makes its constitutional rights clear to it, or forever confuses it on the subject.
The only method by which a reasonable and loyal conception of the government may be substituted for the one formed upon Russian experiences, is that the actual experience of refugees with government in America shall gradually demonstrate what a very different thing government means here. Such an event as the Averbuch affair affords an unprecedented opportunity to make clear this difference and to demonstrate beyond the possibility of misunderstanding that the guarantee of constitutional rights implies that officialism shall be restrained and guarded at every point, that the official represents, not the will of a small representative body, but the will of the entire people, and that methods have therefore been constituted by which official aggression may be restrained.
These words, written so recently, already have a remote sound -- to advocate the restraint of over-zealous officialism as a method of Americanizing the alien, would indeed be considered strange doctrine; for there is no doubt that at the present moment one finds in the United States the same manifestation of the world-wide tendency towards national dogmatism, the exaltation of blind patriotism above intelligent citizenship, as that evinced elsewhere. Many of the liberties supposedly inherent in a system of self-government were doubtless necessarily canceled during the war, but it is as if we were now willfully prohibiting their normal and natural restoration.
Is it that the odium and animosity lavished upon the Central Powers during the war has not yet spent itself and that, connected as it is with an intense nationalistic feeling, it is at present being turned upon the alien because he is perforce outside the national life? Because the emotions aroused by the war are not yet fully discharged, do we see in the suspicion of the alien, the mania to hold him responsible for every strike and for every heresy, only a case of “balked disposition” so familiar to the psychologist?
To ticket bodies of men by a collective name, and to regard the men as we believe the principles deserve to be regarded, is an egregious blunder similar to that made by the dull schoolboy who obtains “his answer” in apples and pears because he has confused them with dollars and cents. When we confound doctrines with people, it shows that we understand neither one nor the other. Many men not otherwise stupid, when they consider a doctrine detestable and fail to understand that changes can be made only by enlightening people, feel that they suppress the doctrine itself when they denounce and punish its adherents. They really are as confused as the schoolboy.
The application of a collective judgment in regard to aliens in the United States is particularly stupid. The twenty-seven million people of foreign birth living among us are not only quite as diversified in their political opinions as those of us forming the remaining millions of the population, but they are in fact more highly differentiated from each other by race, tradition, religion and European background, than the rest of us can possibly be even although we are as diverse as the cracker in Georgia and the Yankee in Maine.
The task before us is to utilize properly the enthusiastic patriotism engendered by the war by making it more inclusive. The slogan “To make the world safe for democracy,” which transcended the nationalistic point of view, secured an unhesitating response and resulted in a great output of self-denying and heroic action upon an international scale. "To Americanize every alien in America" might become a compelling slogan, but it could be consummated only if our enthusiasm ran in wider channels and after the conception of nationalism had been transformed from a dogma of the eighteenth century to the evolutionary conception of the twentieth century.
Would it not be possible for students of the social order to reassure a panic-stricken public? Could our fellow citizens not be told how gradually social changes come about if free opportunity for modification is guaranteed? That quite as the capitalistic system so incompletely superseded the feudal system that great tracts of the feudal regime are still extant, not only in European countries but in democratic England itself, doubtless the capitalistic system in turn will yield to a more socialized form of society so gradually and incompletely that the very processes of change as such will be much more normal than a static condition, a standing still could possibly be?
It is certainly most important that Americans should not make a problem for themselves by placing an unfair emphasis upon differences which are inevitable in a country such as ours; that we should not get into the habit of arresting aliens for holding meetings of a type which have been held for many years without disorder and free from espionage. The altered equilibriums and distributions brought about by war opened avenues for a tremendously increased activity along the lines of teaching English and of classes in preparation for securing first and second citizenship papers. These are most praiseworthy; but we could diversify almost indefinitely our opportunities for mutual effort with the alien population, thus finding a new center and perspective. It is possible, for instance, to collect funds for starving Poland, Armenia, [Romania], indeed for almost any part of underfed Europe, in cooperation with bodies of citizens whose affections and interests are centered in those starving countries. As we undertook a mutual task of this sort, how “our convulsive inconsistencies, how our antipathies and dreads of each other” would soften down; what tolerance and good humor, what willingness to live and let live would inevitably emerge!
William James was constantly urging us to look at each other sub specie aeternitatis; perhaps that advice was never so needed as now.
[1] A paper read before the American Sociological Society, Chicago, December 29, 1919.
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