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Critical Review
Winter–Spring 1998 (Vol.12 Nos.1–2)
Can Patriotism Save Us From Nationalism? Rejoinder To Viroli
By Bernard Yack *
Abstract
Viroli is right to draw a distinction between republican patriotism and nationalism. But in arguing that the former can correct the problems associated with the latter, he places too much trust in the descriptions of patriotism offered by republican theorists. In practice, republican patriotism has been almost as fierce and hostile to outsiders as nationalism. Patriotism might make us better citizens, but it will not make the world a more peaceful or generous place.
What should we make of the difference between patriotism and nationalism? Given the way in which they are talked about today, it is tempting to describe them as little more than positive and negative terms for the same phenomenon and to conclude, paraphrasing Hobbes, that nationalism is patriotism misliked and patriotism, nationalism liked.
But Professor Viroli has given us good reason to resist this temptation. In his fine book For Love of Country (Viroli 1995), as well as in the current issue of Critical Review (Viroli 1998), he guides us through the long tradition of political discourse about patriotism and highlights the important ways in which it departs from discourse about nationalism. Patriotism, in this tradition, is “love of the political institutions and the way of life that sustain the common liberty of a people” (Viroli 1995, 1). It differs from ethnic nationalism in its focus on the political values of citizenship. And it differs from civic nationalism—which Viroli agrees with me in characterizing as a mixture of self-congratulation and wishful thinking on the part of some contemporary liberals—in its enthusiastic embrace of a collective passion, the love of the republican patria.
Why then, Viroli wonders, have the participants in today’s heated debates about nationalism and cosmopolitanism paid so little attention to a way of talking about shared sentiment and identity that promises a combination of local loyalties and principled devotion to the cause of liberty? Lack of familiarity with republican patriotism and failure to distinguish it from nationalism seem to be the culprits for him, shortcomings that he seeks to correct with careful historical scholarship.
I would like to suggest, however, a different answer to Professor Viroli’s question. Contemporary intellectuals have been reluctant to invoke the language of republican patriotism as an “antidote to nationalism” (Viroli 1995, 8–9), I believe, because the practice of republican patriotism has never lived up to the shining image fashioned by its leading advocates. Dressed up in the language of its most eloquent partisans, from Cicero to Shaftesbury to Robespierre, republican patriotism looks like a generous love of one’s compatriots that “sustains liberty instead of fomenting exclusion or aggression” (ibid.) against outsiders. Republican love of country, says Benedetto Croce in a passage Viroli quotes with approval, is as different from nationalism as a “gentle love for another human being” differs from “bestial lust, diseased luxury, and selfish whim” (ibid., 168). In short, republican patriotism provides us, in theory at least, with the solidarity of particularism without its nasty side-effects, for “the love of common liberty easily extends beyond national borders and is translated into solidarity” (ibid., 12, emphasis added).
Unfortunately, this antidote to nationalism is merely a form of discourse, i.e., a way of talking about our shared sentiments and identities. As Viroli ably demonstrates, there is a long tradition of discourse characterizing republican patriotism as a generous passion that inspires love for fellow citizens without inspiring hostility to outsiders. But how accurate is that characterization? Does republican patriotism in practice live up to this vision of a gentle and generous sentiment? Even a quick look at the historical record suggests that it does not. Republican patriots may have inspired many memorable and useful virtues over the centuries, but gentleness and sympathy toward outsiders are not prominent among them.
Cicero, the founder of the republican tradition that Viroli studies, may characterize patriotism as a form of compassion and respect. But does the history of the Roman republic give us much reason to think of patriotism as a love that “sustains liberty instead of fomenting exclusion or aggression”? I think not, unless you are willing to believe that the Roman republic conquered the Western world in response to a never-ending series of unjust and unprovoked attacks by its neighbors. Shaftesbury may urge us to follow the gentle and generous example of ancient Greek patriots who “were yet so far from a conceited, selfish, and ridiculous contempt of others, that they were even, in a contrary extreme, admirers of whatever was in the least degree ingenious or curious in foreign nations” (cited in Viroli 1995, 59). But he ignores the extraordinary ferocity of the Greeks’ never-ending wars with neighboring cities and peoples. The patriots of the French Revolution may describe their love of country as a generous sentiment that they wished to share with the world. But when the world resisted their embrace, they quickly learned to march to the chorus of the Marseillaise as it urged French patriots to “let impure blood water our fields.” Wherever republican patriotism has risen to the level of a shared passion—and it is a shared passion that Viroli is calling for—it has been a fierce rather than a gentle passion that patriots have displayed.
The problem with nationalism is not its lack of a positive vision of national loyalties, a vision that connects love of one’s own to respect and admiration for others. Like republican patriotism, nationalism has had many partisans who describe it in this way. Herder, for example, urges us to cherish each nation as a unique facet of humanity, just as republican patriots teach us to cherish the liberty of each community. The problem in each case lies in the actual sentiments that their followers express, not in the way they describe these sentiments. Republican patriotism does not look like an antidote to nationalism because it seems, in practice, to promote the same kind of irritable pride and hostility toward others that we associate with nationalism. A strong dose of it might make us juster and more conscientious citizens, but I doubt that it would make the world a more peaceful or generous place.
References
Viroli, Maurizio. 1995. For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Viroli, Maurizio. 1998. “Reply to Xenos and Yack.” Critical Review 12(1–2).
Yack, Bernard.1996. “The Myth of the Civic Nation.” Critical Review 10 (2): 193–212.
Endotes
*: Bernard Yack, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, telephone (608) 263-2414, is the author of The Longing for Total Revolution (Princeton, 1986) and The Problems of a Political Animal (University of California, 1993), and the editor of Liberalism without Illusions (University of Chicago, 1996). Back.