Banal Nationalism

"Yes, because as I said, when nationalism is sitting in the backseat, we don’t really notice it. Sometimes we don’t pay attention to it, but it’s there. I’m always a foreigner, wherever I study or work, so I always feel it because I see how people treat their nation, their flags. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter For example, no one in Israel would ever dare raise the demand for a pledge of allegiance in schools, as they do in the United States. When I came as a child to the United States, I was astonished. I had my nine year old dilemma, should I do it? Should I put my hand on my heart? Should I say Israel or America? Who am I? What am I doing here? It was like, ‘Wow, this is really a very strong commitment of national allegiance.’ Americans don’t always see it; they say it’s a pledge for liberty or a pledge for democracy —but it’s a very American thing. Americans just don’t see the national background of their everyday lives. And it happens in other countries too. This is why I love this book. It opened my eyes to see a lot things—from poetry , to hymns, to even, like you said, the way people treat their future. Are you optimistic or pessimistic? It seems a very personal question. But then you look at nations, and there are more or less pessimistic or optimistic nations, partly due to their historical background. Yes. I would go to the Proms as a student at Oxford. The audience joins in to sing a very national song on the last night, Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory . It’s not neutral. Yes. Liah Greenfeld shows in her first book, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity that, historically, the conception of identity started only when people started moving around. If you live in a village and never go out of that village and never meet anyone, you think everybody is like you. The question of identity is insignificant. The moment people start moving, and they see there are other peoples with other traditions and other languages, this becomes an issue. No, the people in the global elite gave up their national identity to enjoy the benefits of globalism. They cherish, say, English more than the national language, they send their children to study in global schools, they ski and party together, then they spread the coronavirus to the rest of the world. What I’m trying to show in my book is that if you are a globetrotter, it is more rational for you to be more global in your self-identification, and if you’re stuck in your country it’s more rational to be more nationalistic. It’s no surprise that globalists are mostly well-educated globetrotters who benefit a lot from this lifestyle, and the more nationalist people are those stuck behind and who are not likely to ever enjoy it. “Many countries like Israel, that were liberated in the postcolonial era, saw nationalism as a liberating force” I’m sure there are places in the United States where people will never meet anybody. I remember once I gave a talk in Colorado, and before I started talking, somebody said to me, ‘Beware when you say pluralism, they think you mean Catholics. This is not New York, there is more uniformity.’ But the two world wars made very clear distinctions of nations and made nations aware of themselves. Then there’s the media, immigrants, minorities. You can’t miss it now."