Nationalism

Nationalism empowers political movements that lead to excess, corruption and violence. Leadership regimes that are politically and economically corrupt, such as the National Salvation Front of Romania, Communist China, Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and North Korea, exploit existing senses of nationalism to disguise the fact that they mismanage and oppress their countries. They use nationalism as an irrational base of support for irrational policies. The people would do more to change their regimes if their minds were not clouded by emotionally-charged feelings of nationalism.

Nationalism causes ethnic violence through its narrative of racial superiority. This aspect of nationalism has caused numerous genocides, including but not limited to the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and the atrocities in Rwanda, Japanese violence against the Chinese and the abysmal treatment of the United States’ native American population. This is the inevitable result of nationalism’s focus upon definition – ‘we’ are ‘us’ because we are not like ‘them’ – and so encouragement to exclusion and antagonism. This applies to groups both within the state, where ‘the other’ is seen as both inferior and as a threat, and to other states with different ethnic and cultural traditions.

Nationalism reinforces the existence of essentially arbitrary nation-states. Nations form by comparing one group against an ‘other’, which can range from a small ethnic population to the rest of the world. These false divisions of humanity have been the basis for violence, war, instability and trade barriers that increase human misery. Nationalism has perpetuated those divisions and fuels the basis for conflict through continued dehumanising of “other” groups.

Nationalism oppresses women. Inherent in nationalism is the notion of blood descent; a nation’s health and security is tied to its birth rate. This leads to pro-‘natalist’ policies that violate the reproductive and civil rights of women. Romania is a good example of when nationalist thinking tramples the rights of women, leading to forced birthing for most Romanians and horrifying illegal sterilisations for the minority Roma population.

Nationalism is a movement of the past, linked the evils of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The future lies in an internationalist approach that stresses our common humanity, rather than emphasising those small differences that have been used by nationalists to divide us. In particular, nationalism stands against the widespread establishment of human rights, as it places absolute national sovereignty above the individual rights of all citizens. This makes it impossible for the international community to protect properly the human rights of those living under oppression and dictatorship.

Supranational organisations such as the United Nations and European Union provide a way forward for the different peoples of the world to cooperate towards common goals of peace and prosperity, while still respecting and celebrating diversity.