When I was a graduate student I lived in a rooming house in Greenwich Village on the border of Little Italy. This was about a decade after World War II, but the little pizzeria in which I sometimes ate still displayed a framed copy of a wartime news story: A soldier from the area had been badly wounded and was lying, apparently in a terminal condition, in a military hospital in the South Pacific. He had expressed the wish that he might once more taste a pepperoni pizza from that pizzeria. I don’t recall whether the news story mentioned just how this was arranged, but the pizza was indeed flown by the U.S. Airforce all across the ocean. I reflected at the time that this was a war, actually number two within decades, fought by the United States in defense of democracy. Yet what passed through the mind of this soldier was not the great political ideals for which he had fought, but the childhood smells of Italian food. I also remembered something I had read somewhere of what a French writer had said about the previous war, that more French soldiers had died for the smell of baguettes than for the ideals of the Republic.
In its issue of November 19, 2016, The Economist had a cover story about “The New Nationalism.” The cover was a parody of the famous painting “The Spirit of ‘76” (a.k.a. “Yankee Doodle”), which showed three individuals dressed in 18th-century garb—an old man with a drum, flanked by a boy also with a drum and a young man with a fife, marching across a battlefield. The painter, Archibald McNeal Willard, was inspired by a Fourth of July parade he saw in 1875. The picture was exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia the following year, on the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Since then it has been an icon, frequently reproduced and sometimes (as here) parodied. The Economist substituted the heads of Donald Trump in the middle, flanked by Vladimir Putin and Nigel Farage (the former head of the UK Independence Party and a principal advocate of Britain’s exit from the European Union); in addition there was Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front, waving a Tricolor. In the long article were added a number of other leaders (most of them not included in the quartet) to this “league of nationalists” – Xi Jinping (China), Narendra Modi (India), Recep Tayyip Erdogan (Turkey), and Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi (Egypt). Rather a motley crew! I suppose most of these eminent characters could be plausibly called “nationalists,” but those from Western democracies are usually called “populists”—which points to a rather different political stance, namely rebellion against a domestic political elite. (I rather doubt that Xi Jinping would comfortably fit the label “populist”!)
I have very great respect for The Economist, but I think that in this instance it conflates two phenomena, nationalism and populism, which sometimes but not always overlap. Nationalism is a modern ideology according to which the “nation” is conceived as the principal foundation of political order and a major source of personal identity. A witty definition of a “nation,” still often cited today (usually without citing the source), is “a dialect with an army,” from an article by Max Weinreich in 1945, in the bulletin of YIVO, a Yiddish scholarly institute in New York. (Actually Weinreich wrote “without an army or a navy”). He wanted to make the point that Yiddish, bereft of any military, was only a dialect rather than a language. Three years later the State of Israel emerged with an awesomely effective army, but its language was not Yiddish but Hebrew. By the way, the only place where Yiddish was used as an official language was in Birobidjan, the more or less fictitious Jewish state created by Stalin in Siberia not far from the Chinese border. I don’t l know whether this was ever more than an anti-Semitic joke by Stalin, but not surprisingly nobody wanted to move there. A better known political science term for “nation” is Benedict Anderson’s “imaginary community” (in the 1983 book by that title). Many political scientists have believed that this entity, often based on a fictitious history, is the largest in size with which people can identify. This proposition is empirically dubious. But it is certainly the case that today’s rebellions against larger transnational entities, especially in Western democracies, largely march under nationalist banners—against the United Nations, the European Union, multiculturalism, and liberal internationalism. These latter entities are viewed as too remote, abstract and without personal meaning. Example: A few years ago I happened to drop into a meeting of young professionals at a German think tank (I was there for another meeting). An EU official from Brussels, herself a German, had given a lecture on the purpose and functioning of her organization. She concluded by saying, “Thank you for your interest in the EU.” I tried to imagine a German government official saying to this audience “Thank you for your interest in Germany”!
There are movements afoot in Western democracies (certainly not in the United States) to dismantle what had previously been defined as nation states, because these are deemed to be, precisely, too remote (and even too oppressive) to be sources of loyalty and identity. Think of Spain, or of Belgium. But also think of Nigel Farage and his UKIP, who wants to get out of the European Union in the name of a United Kingdom, which Scottish nationalists (not to mention Irish ones) would gladly dismantle along with the idea of a shared British nationalism.
Populism is mainly a rebellion against political elites within national boundaries (Beltway bureaucrats, investment bankers, and Ivy League professionals in the United States, enarches/graduates of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration in France, Oxbridge alumni in Britain). It should be added, though, the populists (“peasants with pitchforks”) see these national elites as having important international connections in what the late Samuel Huntington called the “Davos culture” (after the World Economic Forum, where all these elite types assemble annually in a snow-bound Alpine village in Switzerland). Such gatherings are not only (sometimes even interesting) intellectual seminars, but a setting for deals between powerful individuals.
Religion relates to this picture in many ways. If one looks at the contemporary world in a global perspective the importance of religion is very obvious indeed, with attention naturally focused on Islam, but with other religions playing significant roles in different countries—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism. Not to mention the explosive growth of Evangelical Protestantism (especially in its Pentecostal version) in Africa and Latin America, where Catholicism (though nowhere hegemonic) continues as a significant cultural and political force. Western Europe is the outlier, with Eurosecularity still dominant. When Tony Blair was British Prime Minister his spokesman was asked why Blair, a strongly religious man, never mentioned his religion in public—the pithy answer was: “We don’t do God here.” That cannot be said about the United States, where 81 percent of Evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, arguably the vote that tipped him into the White House (with some help from conservative Catholics and Jews, many more of the former, and not to forget Mormons). But even in highly secularized Europe God comes out from his cultural niche. In a number of countries the populist parties talk about “Christian values” (sometimes with anti-Muslim undertones). Germany is an interesting case. President Joachim Gauck was a Protestant pastor in East Germany, and Chancellor Angela Merkel grew up in a Protestant parsonage in the same region (the most unchurched in Europe). Gauck has been an outspoken advocate of human rights and democracy; Merkel made her career as a very cautious, pragmatic politician. She then made the surprising decision to open the borders to a million refugees, a decision for which she is paying a high political price—with no discernible motive other than compassion. She never talks about religion or anything personal. In a recent interview with a journalist she mentioned in passing that she prayed before making important decisions.
Religion has always functioned to legitimate political institutions, to give the fragile constructions of human history the imputed stability of God’s will. It still does that in many places—in states defined as Islamic, in India through the ideology of Hindu nationalism (Hindutva), in Israel by the Orthodox belief in God’s promised land, in Putin’s Russia by the intimate relationship between the Kremlin and the Moscow Patriarchate. But religion also promotes transnational loyalties and identities, dramatically so in the Muslim idea of the global community of Islam (the ‘ummah), in the lingering idea of Catholicity represented by the Roman Church, not only a religion but a civilization (as in the title of the Jesuit periodical La Civiltà Cattolica). The nation-state pitting itself against any transnational entity (such as the Holy Roman Empire) can be dated from the moment when Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself not “Emperor of France” (a dynastic title), but “Emperor of the French” (the people of the Republic). The curious marriage of nationalism, empire, and the ideals of the republic was carried on the bayonets of the Grande Armée across Europe. It survived in Woodrow Wilson’s idea of the right of national self-determination, in whose name American bayonets helped to destroy the transnational Habsburg and Ottoman empires (with disastrous consequences still with us today).
I must be careful, or this post will not only become too lengthy, but also degenerate into a lecture on political theory. In terms of the current ascendancy of populist rhetoric, it seems to me that Western democracies confront two urgent imperatives:
Imperative 1—A bridge must be built between those who are worried that their society, be it because of large-scale immigration or of domestic cultural change (“political correctness”), may become a place in which they no longer feel at home and the elites who are dedicated to grand projects of social justice and look down on those who refuse to be inspired by these projects. This requires a measure of re-education on both sides. In Europe and the Americas the Christian churches are uniquely situated to play such a mediating role, and indeed have already begun to do this. The “peasants with pitchforks” must be educated to direct their understandable anger into more productive channels (such as sharing pizzas and baguettes with people accustomed to different kinds of cuisine, and acquiring a taste for the latter). And those who wield the discourse of the elites must curb their inclination to classify the “peasants” as fascists, racists, or homophobes.
Imperative 2—Emile Durkheim, the father of French sociology, taught that a society will disintegrate from within or be destroyed from outside unless it has a “collective conscience” shared by a great majority of its members. This becomes difficult with societies that become increasingly pluralistic—that is, with people of different religions and worldviews co-existing peacefully in the same society. This has a simple but exceedingly important implication: People with different religions and worldviews will agree for different reasons with the core propositions of the same “collective conscience.”
Both imperatives require strong political leadership.