The Rise & Decline of Nationalism

Edward G. Lengel Ph. D. & Matthew M. Anger

Nationalism, wrote Hilaire Belloc, was one of many secular creeds at odds with the Faith and one which, while still a potent force in the early 20th century, was likely to yield before other materialist doctrines. Yielded, it certainly has. Since the end of the Second World War, liberal "internationalism" has been finally and securely established as a major force. Nevertheless, if nationalism has given way to more global post-war movements, like communism, consumerism and modernism, it has still left an indelible mark on our culture.

To understand the origins and impact of nationalism is to understand much of the decline of Western civilization. Such a statement might sound slightly idiosyncratic to people, including Catholics, who have long regarded nationalism as something positive or at least as a bulwark against secular internationalism. Love of one's homeland is a virtue, as is love of one's familial and national traditions. The Catholic Church has never denied these things, even at the height of Christendom in the Middle Ages. As is typical of the wonderful balance inherent in the Faith, however, the Church has always demanded that everything be in its proper place. Love of God comes before all earthly affections. Nationalism (as distinct from love of country) subverts this by insisting that the state, which it calls the "nation" or the "fatherland," must lay first claim to our affections. The Church reasonably points out that the country and the state are not the same; and that in any case our human differences are overridden by our common identity as children of God. We cannot afford to overlook the fact that Catholic religion and culture were "internationalist" in the true sense of the word long before there was a United Nations or International Monetary Fund. Seen from the perspective of millennia rather than mere decades, it is apparent that the rise of the cult of the nation could only have come about by a fracturing of Christendom.

The Middle Ages: A Supranational Civilization

The inhabitant of the Middle Ages did not regard the Roman Empire, which is commonly supposed to have "fallen" in 476, as some vague and disconnected historical occurrence. Certainly it was not as intellectually distant from him as are the Middle Ages from us today. There were no such gaps in cultural continuity for a culture that viewed itself as the inheritor of Romanitas ("Romanness") and harkened back to the dream of universal government.

According to historian Christopher Dawson, medieval unity—cultural, religious and political—achieved its zenith at the time of Pope Gregory X (1271-76), the age of St. Louis IX and St. Thomas Aquinas. Not surprisingly, it was the Church which set the tone for Western civilization; conversely, the weakness of subsequent pontiffs in the 15th and 16th centuries played a chief role in the gradual political division of Europe and its almost inevitable byproduct—religious division, in the wise of the Protestant revolt. In the words of Dawson, "while recognizing that what is Catholic is not necessarily medieval, and what is medieval is not necessarily Catholic, we must at the same time admit that there has never been an age in which European culture was more penetrated by the Catholic tradition, or in which Catholic ideals found a fuller expression in almost every field of human activity" (The Formation of Christendom, 1967).

Seeds of Dissolution

That the Protestant revolt initiated the political fragmentation of Europe should come as no surprise. But the growth of nationalistic sentiments was neither instantaneous nor inevitable, as argued by later liberal writers. The nation-state gradually took shape in the course of three centuries; nationalism as an ideology did not emerge before the end of the 18th century. The Protestant heresy set the stage for these events by destroying the unifying moral and political force of Catholic Christendom. The centuries that followed saw the decline of religion, especially in northern Europe, the rise of liberal humanism and other intellectual challenges to the traditional order, and the growth of the nation-state. The culmination came during the French Revolution (in a very real sense the child of Protestantism), which inaugurated an era of international relations, and international conflict, based not on family or religious rivalries but on political struggles between governments with the will, and the resources, to mobilize entire populations in the service of the state.

The divisions in Europe before the Protestant schism were many, but they were superficial, not fundamental. Division was dynastic and to a certain extent ethnic, not political or religious. Boundaries between countries were ill-defined and porous. The European royalty squabbled and made war, but almost exclusively for dynastic reasons. Bloody as these conflicts often were, however, they were not total wars. Entire populations and economies were not mobilized to the cause, and although civilians often suffered they were never systematically targeted for terrorization, extermination, or expulsion.

Society in the Middle Ages was organized everywhere along pretty much the same lines. Feudalism emphasized the personal loyalty of lord to vassal; the idea of loyalty to one's government or country was unknown. Monarchs did not campaign for "public opinion." They were more concerned with securing the allegiance of their nobles. The common man would likely have seen his king or queen as a very distant figure. He may have admired the monarch, but his loyalty was to his noble. Populations intermixed. And while language differences were real, they were largely subordinated by the use of Latin in a universal Church that played the prominent role in daily life. And while the clergy of particular regions might from time to time defy the Pope, there was a real fundamental unity in religious observance that precluded religious differences on a popular level. The concept of political or ideological divisions between peoples would have been considered nonsensical.

Protestant rebellion inaugurated the era of the religious war. These conflicts, especially the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648, were terrible struggles that involved immense suffering for civilians, who were for the first time purposefully attacked by the armies of both sides. "Intolerance," that watchword of liberal-secular historians, was the order of the day. Historians often neglect to point out, however, that the various Protestant factions at that time did not seek a peaceful co-existence with their neighbors to which the "intolerant" Catholics objected. Instead, the Protestants declared openly and from the very beginning their intention to destroy the Catholic Church and secure the entire continent for their own creed.

Catholics, after having restored vigor to the Church by virtue of the so-called Counter-Reformation, faced what appeared to be a stark choice: destruction at the hands of the Protestants, or victory and the restoration of Christendom in a form stronger and more enduring than ever before. Protestant victory would certainly have meant, aside even from the horrific moral evil that would have been involved in the near-total destruction of the Church, the inauguration of a series of devastating civil wars among Protestant sects that would likely have destroyed European civilization. Catholic victory, on the other hand, would have meant European unity in a very real sense under a re-invigorated Church. Dynastic wars would have recurred, to be sure, but anything like the Napoleonic Wars or World Wars I and II would have been unthinkable. It was the last real opportunity for the restoration of Christendom.

The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia that confirmed the military stalemate between the warring sides in the Thirty Years' War was a tragedy of the sort that succeeding generations could hardly have imagined. A complete Protestant victory had, to be sure, been averted, and although religion remained a source of conflict, the era of the religious wars was over. But the division of Europe was intellectually accepted and the foundations laid for the further growth of Protestant states in England, Germany, Switzerland and Holland, which would serve as seed-beds for liberalism a century later. The Catholic monarchies, especially France, were preserved for the Church but gravely weakened in both physical and moral terms by decades of civil wars inspired by religion.

Absolutist Interval

The period from 1648 to 1789 saw a return to Europe of dynastic warfare, but in a form very different from that which had existed in medieval times. Most importantly, it was on a much wider scale, being both nearly continuous and more destructive, placing a much greater strain on the resources of the state. The result was a sea-change in the structure of European society. As warfare became more sophisticated and the stakes became higher, governments found themselves forced to find better ways of mobilizing their resources. Bigger bureaucracies, more centralized administration, and bigger armies were the result. The Bank of England, for example, was founded in 1694 for this very purpose. The so-called "absolute monarchs" like Louis XIV found much more power concentrated in their hands, power which they exerted and increased by bringing their nobles under tighter control and attempting through a variety of means, especially taxation, to draw directly on the wealth of their people.

Even in England, where the monarch was "constitutional" but not impotent, the state became centralized and much more powerful. For the first time people were brought in direct contact with their rulers. Warfare impacted civilians as never before. They were conscripted (though not yet systematically), their houses were burned, their property looted, and their families terrorized by large armies. On the continent, the standing army (i.e., not disbanded in peacetime) became the norm. The English resisted it, but even they were forced to keep an army almost constantly in being because of overseas commitments.

"Vive la Nation!"

For all the changes wrought in the European polity in the 17th and 18th centuries, however, there can be no question that the most decisive break with the past came with the French Revolution. Secular ideology appeared as a force to move entire peoples, first to destroy, and then to serve the state.

Initially, the French Revolution was, like the American Revolution, a revolt against taxation levied by a state seeking to pay for war. The French and Indian War in the American instance and the war for American independence in the case of France. Very rapidly, apostate intellectuals seized on the opportunity to turn the monarchically directed reforms into something more. An ideological assault on the ancién regime in favor of a new liberal, secular state, led by men like Jean-Jacques Rousseau. [See "Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Mad Myth-Maker," The Angelus, July, 1999.]

Increasingly radical movements for political independence were fostered by the Lutheran and Calvinist demand for religious "self-determination." To challenge religious authority could only mean the undermining of all traditional forms of rule. Rousseau's particular contribution to nationalism was the popular and impassioned enunciation of the "social contract" uttered not in the arid, stilted formulae of the Enlightenment rationalists, but in the glowing prose of the emerging Romantic movement. Contrary to his libertarian personal inclinations, Rousseau's ideal state drew on the harsh militaristic model of ancient Sparta, and glorified mass government, mass war and, consequently, mass terror, all in the name of the "General Will." In a flash of supreme honesty, the man who would carry Rousseau's ideal to its fulfillment stated, "Perhaps it would have been better if the world had never heard of us." Napoleon Bonaparte uttered those words at the height of his power.

Unfortunately for the reformers, the events of 1789 quickly began to take on a momentum of their own. The radicals subverted a revolution to further their own aims while mobilizing the people through new forms of large-scale political indoctrination. This saw the creation of a state religion and the Cult of Reason, a new civic code, and further centralization, culminating in Napoleon's levée en masse that conscripted thousands of unwilling Frenchmen into his Grand Army. Public "education" and national symbols like "Marianne" fostered loyalty to the patrie. The same ideals of republican nationalism were exported to the rest of Europe under the auspices of the French-sponsored administrations that were imposed on conquered territories. Ironically, in occupied countries like Spain this new nationalist sentiment was used against the French, and was even adopted by the anti-Napoleonic regimes as a means of inspiring the people in unconquered countries like England, Russia and Austria.

The 19th Century: Apogee of Nationalism

The end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 restored a semblance of the old European order, but many ideas had been instilled in the European people that could not be easily rooted out. Among all these ideas, the one that would prove most important in the 19th century was nationalism. As an ideology it proved remarkably adaptable, appealing to liberals and conservatives alike. Nationalism was closely connected to the romantic movement that was most powerful in the first half of the century, through its emphasis on a romanticization of national histories and folklore and regional ethnic culture. Science too rallied around nationalism. Whereas the common assumption (based on biblical scholarship and empirical research) of scientists before Darwin was that humans had descended from a common ancestor, the middle of the 19th century witnessed a powerful new movement among scientists that claimed humans had either been created, or evolved from primitive ancestors, in separate regions of the planet. This new idea, predating but eventually merging into the more general concept of Social Darwinism, became all the rage in the latter part of the century and was used to justify national differences as racially-based, natural, permanent, and immutable. The English and Americans commonly used it to justify their view of the Irish and French as inferior, and their claims that Catholicism and "absolutist" politics were typical of the lesser races while Protestantism, and classical liberal economic and political organization, were typical of the superior races.

The liberal insistence on "free trade" that accompanied their political demands was never more than a sop to internationalism. Significantly, it was most characteristic of a nation that pursued the most aggressively nationalistic economic policies imaginable: England. Free trade was for English liberals a vehicle for English power and prestige based on a smug assumption of English superiority to other peoples in fair competition. It was not intended to transcend international divisions in any fundamental sense or act as a bond of international unity. Liberals of other countries were markedly less favorable to free trade, and the English themselves lost faith in it as their own power declined.

The scramble for colonies in Africa that took place during the 19th century was driven in large part by nationalistic sentiments and a desire to build political prestige. While the new imperialism was in most cases beneficial for native peoples, it carried within it the seeds of future decline. Very importantly, it was distinguished from the ancient Roman sense of imperium, as carried on by the Habsburgs, in that its expansion was not primarily religious or even dynastic (both ennobling and conserving forces). Rather, the expansionism of the 19th century was primarily driven by commercial or narrow political interests and in neither case was it seen as a force of genuine assimilation and civilization, though apologists for the Great Powers often employed estimable platitudes to cover up the seamier aspects of the emerging globalism.

More ominous, however, was the growth of international rivalries in Europe itself. In 1848 mass uprisings spread like wildfire across the face of Europe, threatening to topple both royalty and the Church. Liberalism was central to the revolts. Nationalist slogans went hand in hand with liberal demands for the destruction of the old social, political, and economic order in favor of the constitutional state. Worker grievances were ruthlessly exploited by liberals who used the common people for their own purposes and then sacrificed them on the barricades. Pope Pius IX, initially sympathetic to the liberal rebels, was alienated by both the violence of their methods and the radical nature of their aims. The Catholic Church was one target of the rebels in Italy, Austria, Germany and France. Another target was the concept of the multinational state itself as embodied in the Austrian Habsburg monarchy, which was nearly torn apart and saved only by Russian intervention. In Germany and Italy, liberals attempted to unify their countries but were prevented by outside intervention.

The Italian liberals like Garibaldi and Mazzini who helped the Sardinian monarchy to secure the unification of Italy in 1860 remembered the Papacy's opposition to their aims in 1848 and were actively hostile to it, eventually seizing the remainder of the Papal States and then initiating an anti-Catholic domestic policy that would have the Italian state and the Church at loggerheads until Mussolini came to power in the 1920's. In Germany, an authoritarian state was founded in 1871 under auspices that were also anti-Catholic. Bismarck's kulturkampf of the 1880's against the Catholic Church in Bavaria and elsewhere caused a great deal of spiritual and physical damage, and was pursued in one form or another throughout the existence of the Protestant Prusso-German empire that Belloc and Chesterton so despised. In France, the establishment of the Third Republic after the fall of Napoleon III in 1871 inaugurated a period of severe repression of the Church by the Republican and violently nationalist government. The English government meanwhile continued its oppression of Catholics in Ireland and engaged in an endless series of running battles with the Papacy overseas, while at the same time inculcating pride for the British Empire in its citizens through public education. The United States after the Civil War was likewise unfriendly to Catholic interests and pursued its own imperial policies in Latin America, treating immigrants shabbily and propagating at home a nationalist agenda that had been unknown before 1860.

The Habsburg Hope

The only beacons of hope for Christendom in this period were those states that were struggling to keep nationalism in check: namely the Habsburg Empire and to a much lesser extent Spain (Ireland and Poland, which possessed Catholic nationalist movements against outside occupation, were exceptions, but even in these countries nationalist groups tended to become infected by liberal or freemasonic elements). Spain had since the 1820's been struggling with severe domestic unrest and did not provide as yet a significant bulwark against the forces unleashed by the French Revolution. The Habsburg Empire (the "dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary") was on the other hand one of the last truly Catholic countries in Europe, and certainly the most important one. Unwieldy as it was, with a cumbersome government, a slowly-growing economy and a weak army, its rule in the territories it administered was on the whole just. At the same time, the old Catholic unity was undermined to some extent by a growing secular cosmopolitanism in Vienna, while the Hungarians, who in the 1848 Revolutions had imbibed a strong dose of nationalist feeling, tended to act repressively towards minority populations.

The Popes recognized the importance of Austria-Hungary and did their best to maintain good relations with it. Unfortunately, the subject nationalities of the Habsburg empire, who had been peaceful enough before 1789, were rapidly becoming radicalized and demanding autonomy or independence. To a great extent, this was the result of propaganda spread underground by western exiles of Czech, Polish or other descent who were themselves heavily influenced by liberalism and romanticism. The Czechs were the most restive of the subject nationalities, resurrecting their language and creating a national mythology that was in part genuine and in part the product of their own imaginations. Some of them chose Jan Hus, the 15th-century Czech heretic, as a national symbol and hero. Panslavism, meanwhile, spread among the Slavic and Orthodox minorities of Austria-Hungary with the active assistance of Russia and Serbia, who were not above stirring up ethnic hatred in Austria-Hungary even as they ruthlessly repressed their own minorities.

For all the stresses to which it was subject, however, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was not doomed to fall apart. Numerous historians have shown that the country was in fact becoming more economically robust, its government becoming more efficient, and its rule becoming more just in the years leading up to the First World War. Unfortunately the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo in August 1914 by a Bosnian Serb terrorist (at the likely instigation of the Serbian government) was enough to set the continent in flames and extinguish the Habsburg state before it had time to revive itself. It is significant that the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, chose as his target a man who, as the next Emperor, was a dedicated reformer. Franz Ferdinand campaigned for more representation for the Slavic population, a move that would likely have undermined the nationalists who sought not reform but armed revolt. It is also significant that the ham-fisted Austrian response to the shooting was manipulated by a German government whose policies were essentially anti-Catholic and Social Darwinist in nature, and which intended to settle the national question in Europe once and for all, by brute force.

Mass Politics, Mass War

The eagerness with which all Europeans, ordinary people as much as the upper classes, went off to war in 1914 is a testimony to the effectiveness with which governments had harnessed nationalism to their own purposes. Decades of state-mandated public education and media bombardment had instilled in the youth of Europe an almost fanatical love of country and disdain for others. Loyalty to the state, whatever its goals. was made paramount to love of self, love of family, and even love of God. By 1914 almost nobody was willing to question the nationalist ethos. Even the socialists, for all their talk of international worker solidarity, supported the policies of their governments almost to a man and were as bloodthirsty as anyone else in their desire for victory. The same was true in America when it entered the war in 1917. Pope Benedict XV, who stood above the conflict and attempted to mediate a settlement with the help of the Austrian Emperor Karl I, was scorned by both warring sides and respectively accused of being "pro-German" or "pro-French."

The power that nationalism placed at the hands of the state was immense, as reflected in the scale of a war more horrific than anything that had gone before. In recognition of the fact that this was in the truest sense a popular war, enemy populations, not just enemy soldiers, were targeted. The Germans bombarded Paris and London without regard to the military or civilian nature of their target, with the specific goal of reducing allied morale; and in Belgium and northern France they carried out ruthless reprisals whenever the military deemed it necessary for their own convenience. The scale of their atrocities against civilians in Russia, while not approaching that of World War II, was great nonetheless. Britain, France and eventually the United States, meanwhile, imposed a tight embargo on Germany and Austria that was continued for many months after the armistice of November 1918, reducing the civilian diet in Germany to starvation level. The allies too were not above bombing German cities when they could.

The end of World War I created a widespread revulsion against nationalism that garnered support for radical leftist movements like Communism or more vague concepts like pacifism. The socialists, shamed by their support of the war, attempted with mixed success to reclaim their internationalist heritage. In Germany and Italy, however, the real and perceived injustices of the peace settlement contributed to a revival of nationalist feeling. In Italy, Mussolini's Fascists concentrated at first on a fairly constructive and largely successful program of rebuilding Italy internally and asserting her presence internationally. Unfortunately, a series of rebuffs by the Western powers, in combination with Mussolini's own mercurial temperament, drove Italy to a more aggressive international stance and alignment with Hitler that led to her eventual defeat.

In Germany, Nazism revived nationalism in a form more virulent and dangerous than ever before. Nazism itself was a hodgepodge of paganism, Social Darwinism, socialism and nationalism; but to many of its supporters what mattered was that Hitler proposed to restore Germany's "place in the sun" that had been "unfairly" denied it in World War I. The Nazis would revive the German state and German prestige among nations: that was what mattered. In arguments steeped in mysticism and paranoia that wholly ignored the military facts, the Nazis claimed that Germany had not, in fact, been defeated militarily in World War I, but had been "stabbed in the back" by Jews and leftists at home. The Jews were targeted not because they had betrayed Christ, but because they had betrayed the state; not so much for their religion as for their racial identity.

The unique thing about the rightist nationalist movements of the interwar years in Italy and Germany was their apparent anti-liberalism. Yet they shared many essentials with the left. Like the liberal states of the pre-1914 era, Germany and Italy manipulated nationalist sentiment as a means of enforcing the subordination of the individual to the state. Religion could be tolerated only insofar as it tended to reinforce this trend. In Germany, unsurprisingly, Protestant churches were regarded with favor by the Nazis due to the ease with which the Protestants could adapt themselves to service of a secular ruler. The Catholic Church, on the other hand, denied the supremacy of the state just as surely as it had in 1792, and ended up constituting the only organized opposition to absolute Nazi rule. No surprise, therefore, that the Nazis singled it out for persecution. Had Catholicism not constituted the faith of such a large portion of the German population, especially in Bavaria and Austria, there is reason to believe that the Nazis would have tried to wipe it out altogether.

In the Balkans, meanwhile, the vacuum left by the destruction of Austria-Hungary (the restoration of which the Papacy constantly sought), left the region politically and economically unstable and prone to manipulation by outsiders. The Nazis made the most of the fragmentation of Central Europe, penetrating the region economically and playing powers off against each other for their own purposes. Justifiably terrified by the specter of Communism, these countries proved easy prey to Nazi machinations, were dragged into the Second World War, and then collapsed before the Soviet onslaught of 1944-45. These countries found that their bid for independence had only won them a new Soviet master that was inclined to be less indulgent than the Austrians had been.

Fruit of Nationalism: Postwar Globalism

Since the end of World War II, nationalism has seemed on the wane in the West. Old enemies like France and Germany now view each other as close friends and allies, while the attempts of the Eurocrats to create a "United States of Europe" have made substantial progress. Before 1939, politicians, intellectuals and the media in the United States and Europe supported the idea of the nation-state on a variety of racial and ethnic grounds. After 1945, however, these same organs of "public opinion" roundly denounced nationalism as an outmoded concept no longer worthy of civilization. What was the reason for this change in attitude?

Two contributory factors were World War II and the Cold War. World War II appeared to many people to demonstrate the evils of nationalistic hatred. The Cold War revealed the pressing need for western unity in the face of Soviet aggression. Fundamentally, however, these conflicts only provided an opportunity for ideas that had been developing since the turn of the century to gain popular acceptance. These ideas, which for the sake of convenience can be termed "internationalist," were closely interwoven with the growth of the left in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Socialists in particular, but also modernists, anarchists and others on the left, either violently criticized or entirely rejected the concept of the nation-state. Socialism was based in part on the idea that national divisions were artificial and only class divisions were real. The need for workers of all countries to join together in a worldwide brotherhood of labor was, they believed, pressing, and if it could be achieved it would destroy global conflict. They toyed with a variety of schemes for international unification or the development of an international language such as Esperanto.

This was, of course, far different from the concept of Christendom that predated the nationalist era. And as socialism "developed" through the two world wars, its view of internationalism also changed. The radical socialists who took power in Russia continued to proclaim international fraternity but in fact maintained the Soviet nation-state in an even more centralized and oppressive form. The "unity of workers" in the Soviet Union and occupied eastern Europe was never more than a farce; Russian nationalism was fostered by the Soviet rulers while the national feelings of the subject peoples were brutally suppressed. This was not international brotherhood but blatant imperialism.

In the West, socialists began to moderate their social aims, basing their program no longer on the liberation of the workers but on the expansion of the state. Internationalism was no longer for the proletariat but for the bureaucrats. The goal of international unity became synonymous with the idea of a European "super-state," and eventually even a World State. The most obvious manifestations of this are of course the European Economic Community, which has always been a vehicle not just for the economic integration of Europe but for its political integration as well, and the United Nations, the much more powerful successor to the League of Nations which had never been much more than a forum for international arbitration. In North America too, however, the same process has been taking place albeit at a slower rate through NAFTA, to say nothing of the U.S. government itself. The difference is that the United States still feels confident enough in itself to go it alone, and maintains a somewhat stronger nationalist element partly as a result of its position of leadership during the Cold War. This state of affairs is unlikely to continue for long, however.

The new internationalism is firmly founded in the philosophy of modern liberalism, and thus the "world state" is simply the "nation state" on a more powerful and terrifying scale. This centralized global regime is about as far away from medieval Rome as one could imagine. Its goals are almost Orwellian, rooted as they are in population control, an immense bureaucracy, and a society reorganized along the lines of the cult of political correctness. It is fundamentally anti-Catholic. Indeed the idea of a rival Church claiming jurisdiction over the souls of the entire world is anathema to the liberal internationalists, and could not be allowed to stand unmolested even in its weakened state following the modernist onslaught of Vatican II.

How does one explain the antipathy between nationalism and internationalism—both sharing the same ideological patrimony—yet apparently so antithetical to one another? The same might be asked of liberal capitalism and communism. Friction between these two forces becomes less mysterious when we see it as part of the fundamental schizophrenia of post-Catholic civilization. With the upsetting of the cultural harmony of the Christian order, concepts once inextricably linked were divorced and pursued to absurd extremes. For example, the balance between power and freedom, presided over by true authority, was lost and people began to expound either libertarianism or totalitarianism. The wavering back and forth between the two, as each system alternately disappointed them with its inability to restore the old sense of stability, contributed to the popular fickleness of our century in which people heartily embraced liberalism, then fascism, then postwar democracy and socialism.

Nationalism Revisited

Residual nationalism is targeted for the rage of the liberal internationalists, albeit often for the wrong reasons. Partly it is because the phase of nationalism, crucial to the growth of liberalism, is seen as outdated and a hindrance to the secularist agenda. The advocates of New World Order can also rely on the genuine and quite understandable disgust that intelligent people have towards the racially driven hatreds and massacres seen in Rwanda, the Balkans, the former Soviet Union and elsewhere.

The survival of nationalism challenges the concepts of "diversity" and "tolerance" that lie at the heart of the current liberal ethos. It is no wonder that liberal intellectuals in western colleges and universities vent their wrath on nationalism through an ever-fluctuating series of "new" theoretical paradigms like post-modernism. All human differences, the postmodernists claim, are a fiction; indeed reality itself is a fiction. The nation has no basis in reality, and can be wiped off the map and replaced with something else if only (and note the ominous implications of this) people's attitudes are changed. Education (read indoctrination), they claim, will wipe out the old prejudices and instill a new set of values to the liking of the liberals and the international government they desire. The paradox of a "diverse," tolerant world society that will nevertheless wipe out national, cultural and even linguistic differences while refusing to tolerate the "intolerant," would then be realized.

A Catholic Response

However frustrated Catholics may be with the drive to global tyranny it would be misleading to think that the answer lay in some prior stage of the gradual decline of Western civilization. We cannot throw off the shackles of the New World Order simply to embrace fascism of the 1930's or republicanism of the 1790's. Nationalism, as it has developed since the late Middle Ages, is inherently divisive since it seeks to advance the goals and ambitions of a particular set of people over others. By such reasoning, the Church must be subordinated to the interests of the state and the secularized populace. The interests of one's neighbors (who should also be part of a greater Christian commonwealth) are subordinated to the violently selfish and short-term interests of a particular party, class or ethnic group.

This is not to deny the differences which exist between nations nor to imagine that all national friction and strife can be eliminated. Current attempts to exterminate individual national cultures in favor of an international, state-mandated cultural porridge of political correctness, must be resisted. Most importantly, Catholics must extend a true sense of fraternal charity throughout the world and to overcome these differences and foster conversion, both spiritual and social. It is a case of the supernatural transcending the natural, which lies at the heart of the Catholic message. Thus, rather than be caught up in the meaningless terminology of "Nationalist vs. Globalist" imposed on us by outsiders, it is time that we revived the idea, once a very real and living institution, of Catholic international order. The alternative is an unsavory choice between the Balkanization of the world or the New World Order.