Isaiah Berlin on Nationalism
A Reconsideration at a Time of European Elections
From today June 6 to Sunday, June 9, more than 400 million Europeans are invited to vote for European parliamentary elections. As those who have followed these elections even superficially know, far-right parties are predicted to be making significant progress across the continent compared to previous elections. Polling suggests that the two far-right groups in the European Parliament could grab up to 20% of the seats, which is a slight increase to the current situation. Maybe more significantly, far-right parties are predicted to arrive first in six countries,[1] including in France where the Rassemblement National is announced to obtain twice the number of votes than the governing center-right coalition. They could finish second in four more countries (see this article from The Economist).
Since the ideological meeting point of these different parties is their endorsement of nationalism and nationalist politics, I thought it would be interesting to reread what the great Isaiah Berlin had to say about nationalism. An admirer of Berlin in general, I indeed find his writings on nationalism particularly insightful and intelligent. They display the gist of Berlin’s thought, in particular, his critical evaluation of the Enlightenment and his understanding of the importance of the cultural milieu for the “liberal man” to strive. On the other hand, while Berlin captures a lot of the essence of nationalism, I’m not sure that what he conveys about the phenomenon can fully account for the resurgence of nationalism in the current European context. To understand why this is so might also be instructive.
Berlin has written two main essays on nationalism and they will be my main sources here. The first one, “The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism,” was initially published in Foreign Affairs in 1972 and reprinted in The Crooked Timber of Humanity.[2] The second one, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power,” was first published in 1979 and reprinted notably in The Proper Study of Mankind.[3] They develop very similar ideas regarding the origins and causes of nationalism and its persistence in the 20th century, but the latter essay adds more developed considerations about why late 19th-century and early 20th-century thinkers have failed to predict its long-lasting significance, seeing it quite the contrary as a temporary phenomenon. In light of the current difficulties European elites have in dealing with the rise of nationalism, this last set of considerations might be relevant.
Berlin characterizes nationalism as an ideology that has four constitutive features.[4] First, the conviction that the nature of man is to belong to groups whose “common territory, customs, laws, memories, beliefs, language, artistic and religious expression, social institutions, ways of life” shape individuals, especially their values and the ends they pursue. Second, an understanding “that the pattern of life in society is similar to that of an organism.” That means that social life displays a form of holistic coherence expressed in shared goals and supreme values. This coherence cannot be artificially established, it is rather the product of History in the course of which ways of acting and thinking have progressively grown. Third, the idea that beliefs, ends, and ways of life pertain to groups, they are “ours” in the sense that they cannot be characterized independently of the group they belong to. Moreover, that implies that the ultimate reason to follow rules and principles that express these ways of life is not tied to fundamental values such as well-being or justice, but rather to the fact that correspond to the values of my nation or my group. Fourth, in its fullest expression, nationalism concludes that “if the satisfaction of the needs of the organism to which I belong turns out to be incompatible with the fulfillment of the goals of other groups, I, or the society to which I indissolubly belong, have no choice but to compel them to yield, if need be by force.” Nationalism thus easily justifies coercion and militarism by putting the values of one’s nation above all others.
Tu sum up, nationalism according to Berlin is a view of the world according to which forms of life are organically tied to group belongings and that there is no value in life but in the fact of belonging to a group. If moral rules and principles can be justified at all, it is necessarily in reference to the national group one belongs to, because only the nation can provide the reasons – through its language, its history, its culture – that ground individual behavior. In other words, as human beings who find reasons to act and ascribe values to states of affairs, we only exist as members of a national group. The nation provides thus the ultimate justification for anything that is deemed valuable.
In “The Bent Twig,” Berlin is especially concerned with the roots of nationalism. What can account for the fact that individuals adhere to this view of the world, in opposition to the Enlightenment promoting a universalistic philosophy and morality? Actually, for Berlin, this is precisely the pervasiveness of the Enlightenment ideas and their instantiation in politics, the economy, and the law that triggers the nationalist sentiment. Indeed, nationalism is a reaction to rationalism, “a confused effort to return to an older morality.”[5] Berlin’s account is therefore in some respects a version of the “cultural backlash” thesis that has proved popular in explaining the rise of populism.[6] Rationalism is seen by many as an attempt to transform ways of life based on principles and reasons that they do not regard as justified. This lack of justification has several origins. The rationalist principles, if implemented, may radically transform people’s lives without obviously improving them. They may lead to the destruction of social practices, customs, and beliefs that people value. They may express a form of contempt toward different ways of life that do not conform to the rationalist canon. More fundamentally, rationalist principles may be oblivious to the fact that value is anchored in groups constituted by traditions, customs, shared beliefs, and social practices.
The metaphor of the bent twig illustrates Berlin’s thesis. Nationalism rises as a response to the sense of humiliation that a people, or at least the most socially conscious members of a national group, are feeling. The fertile soil of nationalism is the “wounds” that are caused by this sense of humiliation. The response is an accrued sense of one’s national belonging and an inflated perception of the importance, originality, and value of one’s national group:
“[Nationalism] usually seems to be caused by wounds, some form of collective humiliation… The response, as often as not, is pathological exaggeration of one’s real or imaginary virtues, and resentment and hostility towards the proud, the happy, the successful.”[7]
Berlin is clear that the resentment caused by the feeling of humiliation, while necessary, is not sufficient to cause the nationalist backlash. You also need people who, self-consciously, already endorse the nationalist postulate that there is no value and reason to act beyond one’s national group. These nationalist leaders must then be able to trigger a more diffuse nationalist feeling among the rest of the group. Even more importantly, no nationalism exists without an antecedent idea of a nation, a widely shared sense that we belong to some national group. For this, real or fantasized shared elements are needed, a common history, a language, a religion, or an ethnicity.
While I was rereading Berlin’s essays, I was struck by how much they appear relevant to understanding the Russian nationalism that is fueling the current war against Ukraine. Putin’s rhetoric and historical revisionism are clearly aiming at reinforcing the nationalist feeling without which even a sense of collective humiliation cannot trigger the popular reaction and support he needs. I also have the intuition that it provides a convincing account not only of German nationalism – which was obviously the historical case Berlin had in mind – but also of various forms of nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. I’m less convinced however that it gives the complete picture of the kind of nationalism that is at play in Europe, especially in the Western part of the continent (France, Germany, Italy). For sure, the kind of resentment toward elites and their rationalist politics expressing contempt for local or traditional forms of life undoubtedly explains part of the vote for far-right parties. But it is difficult to argue that, in those countries, prevails a sense of “collective humiliation” where the collective in question is the nation. If humiliation there is at all, it is not at the level of the nation, but elsewhere, for instance at the geographical level (cities versus rurality) or at the social class level. Of course, fears (well-founded or not) triggered by immigration are undoubtedly related to nationalist considerations. But note first that the relatively recent growth of the far-right electorate in Western European countries cannot be fully explained by increased xenophobia. Moreover, considerations unrelated to the nation per se, such as growing economic inequalities or stagnation of purchasing power also largely account for the far-right vote.
A hypothesis then is that nationalist parties gather votes and voters that are partly expressing views and concerns unrelated to nationalism as an ideology. This may be a reason for hope: if other parties are able to better capture those concerns in their political platforms in the near future, the nationalist fever in Europe may be short-lived. A less optimistic stance is that while the nationalist sense of humiliation discussed by Berlin doesn’t explain the far-right vote, in the perspective of many people there is a link (causal or at least political) between the endorsement of nationalist policies (e.g., more controlled immigration) and taking seriously into account the kind of considerations that truly matter for most of the far-right electorate. Here, we should not downplay the widespread belief that European institutions, by their technocratic character, entail a disregard if not contempt for the concerns, values, and practices of a part of the European population. For this part of the electorate, as they judge it at least, a more “nationalist” Europe is the only way to bring them back at the center of democratic politics.
A few words on the other issue that Berlin discusses more specification in “Nationalism” regarding the underestimation of the importance and long-lasting significance of nationalism. Berlin points out the responsibility of the kind of progressist philosophy of history that is constitutive of rationalism philosophy:
“The picture is familiar: on the one side, the powers of darkness: Church, capitalism, tradition, authority, hierarchy, exploitation, privilege; on the other, the lumières, the struggle for reason, for knowledge and the destruction of barriers between men, for equality, human rights (particularly those of the labouring masses), for individual and social liberty, the reduction of misery, oppression, brutality, then emphasis on what men had in common, not on their differences.”[8]
In the face of the rise of nationalism in Europe, one can take two stances. The first approach is to keep with this optimistic and progressive philosophy of history, to argue that we know what are the values of (moral, economic, cultural) progress, and that those who support nationalist policies for one reason or another are wrong. The second stance is to accept that this philosophy of history is mistaken, that universalism is not the end of history, and that there is no historical and progressive path to an unambiguous ideal. If you take the first stance, you cannot understand nationalism in Europe as anything else than an anomaly. Because the diagnostic is doubtful, it is unlikely that we’ll find the correct remedy. The danger of the second stance is to succumb to radical relativism and to give up the constitutive ideals and values of the liberal society. The challenge, already well-identified by Berlin fifty years ago, is to preserve what makes the liberal society valuable and desirable while giving space in the public discussion to considerations that express the attachment of human beings to their collective belongings.
[1] The numbering includes parties affiliated to the Identity & Democracy and the European Conservatives & Reformists groups as well as “ideological allies.” That’s why The Economist in its article counts Slovakia among those countries in spite of the fact that the Smer party is neither far-right nor affiliated to the ID or ECR groups. However, this party shares with the far-right groups the nationalist politics that is the subject of this essay.
[2] Isaiah Berlin, Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas., First Edition (London: John Murray, 1990).
[3] Isaiah Berlin, The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, First Edition (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000).
[4] “Nationalism”, pp. 590-2.
[5] “The Bent Twig,” p. 254.
[6] See for instance Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
[7] “The Bent Twig,” p. 246.
[8] “Nationalism,” p. 602.