Nationalism is a Good Thing.

In 1989, my fifth year in Malaysia, there was a telling confluence of events. 

The German Ambassador held a party on the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunion of East and West Germany. At that party he gave a speech in which he said, in English and I quote exactly, “Nationalism is the greatest evil of the 20th century.”

At the same time you could still see the Malaysian national slogan on billboards and handbills: “Nasionalisme Teras Perpaduan.” Nationalism is the core of unity. The use of the English loan word was intentional. The other Malay word translated nationalism is kebangsaan, a contested word that can call to mind ethnicity. 

So how is it that the greatest evil of the 20th century becomes the national slogan for Malaysia? Because the word has different meanings in different historical contexts. 

What the German ambassador meant by nationalism was ethic nationalism, the belief in the intrinsic rights of one ethnic group against others. In Europe that led to war and genocide from the beginning of the 20th century to its end. What the Malaysians meant by nationalism was loyalty to the shared concept of a multi-ethnic state in which each ethnic group had a right to its own mother tongue, religion, and culture but shared a single, unified, political system.

Americans, or at least American progressive Christians, seem to find this distinction confusing. We seem to believe that chauvinistic ethno-nationalism is definitive while forgetting what an incredible advance over previous systems of political identity multi-ethnic, multi-religious nations and their distinctive nationalism really became in the 18th and 19th centuries. 

We might start, of course, with the United States and the nationalism that developed among the colonists and eventually led to the American Revolution. Out of that nationalism there came concepts like freedom of religion and freedom from discrimination based on ethnicity and ultimately gender and even sexuality. It was a nationalism expressed in the sentiment “give me your tired, your poor, your wretched masses yearning to breath free” It was the nationalist ideal that Dr. King demanded be finally realized for all Americans. 

Over in Europe it was this new idea of a nation and the nationalism accompanying it that led to the emancipation of the Jews, and their becoming citizens of states rather than prisoners of ghettos. It was the nationalism of a form of nationhood in which Protestants and Catholics and Jews and Muslims to live together in Germany and France and England.

It remains the nationalism of a new concept of nation that has gradually displaced all older polities and in the process has made life better for more people than any period in human history since the Fall.  

Of course this form of nationalism constantly struggles against older forms of religious and ethnic bigotry. We saw that with the Nazis. Only a couple of years after the Berlin Wall the good nationalism that unifies people of different ethnic and religious groups would fail in Yugoslavia and bad nationalism would lead to genocide. We see it rising with Putin’s Russian chauvinism. We see it our own body politic with the revival of white supremacy. The old chauvinistic nationalism remains a potent reminder of how difficult the process of transforming culture really is. 

Because the idea that a citizen is a person born in a country, or naturalized (think about the meaning of that word) into it, rather than being a person limited to identifying with a particular ethnic group or religion has taken a long time to be realized, and isn’t yet realized. Still the idea of a citizen whose nationalism is tied to a continually affirmed and chosen affinity with people of many different religions and ethnicities far exceeds in worth all that came before. Without it my Malaysian wife of Chinese descent could never become an American. And you wouldn’t have a Muslim mayor of London. And you wouldn’t have an African American president. 

I sometimes think that  Christian Progressives share with Evangelicals a basic pessimism about humanity, and in particular our fellow Christians. We claim to want things to get better, but the slightest bump in the road, much less a major setback, and somehow we think our nation is sliding back down some Deuteronomistic slope into unrighteousness. We need to get a grip quit tearing down that which is good just because it falls short of the best of some imagined eschatological future. 

And oh yes, the reason we have Memorial Day? To remember those who died fighting for exactly for the original American nationalist ideal not only in the Union armies 180 years ago, but throughout the 20th century and on into our own time. They were not killed by American nationalism, they gave their lives for the kind of nation it represents. Were both soldiers and all victims of war sometimes used and abused because of folly, corruption, selfishness, economic interests? Yes, but it wasn’t nationalism that caused their deaths, it was the failure of nationalism and a retreat into factionalism and chauvinism.

Because nasionalisme teras perpaduan.