I know, I know, am I really going to dedicate one whole newsletter to one guy? He must be pretty special. Well, yes... I suppose he was.
Hello and welcome to our new political saga: Nationalism. In this saga we'll be addressing the movement that some scholars believe is 'taking over the world'.
I thought we should start this saga off with the man who is most famous for writing about Nationalism, so much that the term has loosely come to be associated with him.
George Orwell was born in Bengal, India in 1903 and died in London, England in 1950. Although he lived a very short life, it was a most fascinating and adventurous one. Orwell (pseudonym, Eric Arthur Blair) lived across the globe: from India, to Sussex, to Paris, London, Burma, and Spain. He said he always knew he wanted to be a writer, but throughout his life he served as an Imperial Policeman, a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, and a journalist for the BBC. During these years, he produced a number of essays, documenting his experiences and his gradual shift to be a strong advocate for libertarian, decentralist socialism with a profound distaste for totalitarianism, Nazism, and Stalinism.
Orwell wrote extensively on this opinion in his renowned novels 1984 and Animal Farm, portraying, rather metaphorically and figuratively, the dangers of a totalitarian state (like that of the Soviet Union during Stalin's reign).
Orwell believed that the rest of Europe, during and after WWII, was in danger of falling to totalitarianism and much of his writing seems to be a warning of the threat that Nationalism was. His famous 'last warning' was a sign to avoid the horror he depicted in his dystopian novel, 1984: "Don't let it happen. It depends on you".
To help you better understand Nationalism, I'll quote Orwell directly from 'Notes on Nationalism', May 1945:
"By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’.[1] But secondly – and this is much more important – I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality."
Perhaps Orwell was a cynic and feared the future too intensely, but if you look where we are today: populism on the rise in Europe, China emerging as the new global superpower, Brexit – perhaps we ought to still heed his warning.
