https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/nationalism-good-and-bad-bruce-thornton/
The last two weeks we have been inspired by the brave resistance of Ukraine’s people to the brutal violence of the Russian invaders. Outmanned and outgunned, the Ukrainians have continued to fight against overwhelming odds, even as the invaders answer their resistance with atrocities like the bombing of a maternity hospital in Mariupol.
The paradox is that both sides in this war are in part motivated by nationalist loyalties that the transnational “new world order” has proclaimed are quaint superstitions and folkways at best, and intolerant promulgators of xenophobia and violent aggression at worst. What the Russo-Ukrainian war shows is that patriotic nationalism, like pretty much everything we humans do, can be good or bad, depending on the intentions and purposes it serves.
The weakening of nationalism reflects the globalist ideology that slowly developed over the last two centuries. It reflects two developments that define modernity: secularism and the world-shrinking technologies that expanded global trade. For most of humanity, faith has been one of the foundations of national identity like language, history, culture, customs, and mores. But especially in the West, faith has been reduced to a private preference banished from the public square, rather than being part of the collective expression of national identity. It’s no coincidence that over time the decline of patriotism has paralleled the decline of faith.
The other development was new 19th-century technologies like the railroad, telegraph, and steamship, which created a global economy. International commerce brought the world’s peoples closer together and bound them by trade, creating a global economy which brought disparate national cultures together. The gradual growth of greater global trade and its managerial elite suggested that international cooperation and similar interests were more efficient and beneficial than the zero-sum national difference that frequently, like religion, fomented violent conflict. Similarly, transnational organizations, covenants, and treaties would turn force into a costlier and less effective means of adjudicating conflicting national interests than international diplomacy.
Especially after the rise of fascism and Nazism in the 20th century––which were blamed on nationalist loyalties rather than on the malignant novel ideologies that exploited them––nationalism fell out of favor, particularly to the global elites and supranational institutions of the “rules-based international order.” Nationalism became a malignant ghost from the past that the enlightened global elites scorned.
