Age of nationalism

The region surrounding Israel would appear to constitute another challenge to the
idea of the dominance of nationalism, given the conspicuous attention to religion
rather than nationality and especially to what is commonly perceived as a region-
wide conflict between Sunni and Shia. That attention is a reminder that no one way
of labeling the world explains everything, and religious conflict certainly explains a
lot in the Middle East. Many of the recent and ongoing conflicts in that region,
however, can properly be characterized, at least in part, as struggles to liberate
nation-states from the yoke of particular clans, ruling families or religious sects, or
from the influence of foreign powers. That certainly is true, for example, of the
wars in Iraq and Syria. Nationality has trumped religion when the two have directly
conflicted, as when Iraqi Shia fought for Sunni-controlled Iraq during the eight-
year war against Shia Iran. Identification with individual nation-states has been
more durable even than region-wide Arab nationalism, including the Arab
nationalism of Pan-Arabisms leading champion, Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose
political union between Egypt and Syria was short lived. The boundary lines drawn
during World War I by Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot have lasted, just
like the colonial boundaries in Africa. The leading challenge to those lines, in
northern Iraq, has come from the biggest unrealized nationalist aspiration left over
from the postWorld War I treaties: that of the Kurds. Likewise, the most salient
long-running conflict with the broadest repercussions in the Middle East is a clash
between two nationalist ambitions: those of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
THE FACT that nationalism in the Middle East has not yet gotten completely out
from the shadow of religious conflict, as nation-states in Europe did in the
seventeenth century, is part of a larger regional historical lag in which the Middle
East also has been slower to get out from the shadow of empire. Historian Niall
Ferguson, explaining why the twenty-first century is likely to be less bloody in
most of the world than the twentieth, cites as one reason the fact that the messy
dissolution of empires is now mostly behind us. But he names one major, conflict-
ridden regional exceptionthe Middle Eastwhere an empire is troubled but not
yet dissolved, by which he means the American empire.
Troubled empire or not, the United States exhibits as much nationalism as anyone
elseeven though Americans do not call it nationalism. More often it is termed
American exceptionalism, which carries the connotation not just of assertion of
national identity and values but also of being something bigger and better than
anyone elses nationalism. Exceptionalism is what the citizens of a superpower get
to call their own nationalism.
The United States also is part of the worldwide trend of increased and intensified
nationalism during the past quarter century. Politically, this has partly taken the
form of one of the two major U.S. parties moving away from the internationalism
and realism of Eisenhower and Nixon in favor of a foreign policy of
neoconservatism, the most muscular expression of American exceptionalism. A
perceptive analyst of American nationalism, Anatol Lieven, suggests that this party
can now most appropriately be called the American Nationalist Party. The trends
involved are not limited to one side of the political spectrum, however; they are
reflected in prevailing American habits and attitudes ranging from the wearing of
flag pins on lapels to unquestioningly imputing goodness to a wide range of U.S.
actions overseas simply because it is the United States that is doing them.
The intensity of American nationalism points to the chief prescriptive implications
of living in the nationalist era, which come under the heading of knowing oneself.
Americans should understand how much their own first inclinations for interacting
with the rest of the world stem from the same kind of nationalist urges that underlie
inclinations in other countries, however much the American version is portrayed
differently by affixing the label of exceptionalism. They should bear in mind that
first inclinations and urges are not always in the best interest of the nation that is
the object of their affection and attachment. U.S. policy makers should be
continually conscious of how U.S. actions may step on someone elses nationalist
sentiments, eliciting the sort of counteractions that almost always are elicited when
competing nationalist perspectives confront each other.
In assessing sundry problems overseas and how to deal with them, one of the first
questions that should be asked is how a problem reflects nationalist sensibilities
and ambitions, of masses as well as elites, in other countries. The resulting
perspective is more apt to yield sound, policy-relevant insights than is a vision of
transnational contests between good and evil, between moderates and extremists, or
between democrats and autocrats. Sometimes the policy implication may be for the
United States to do less; other times it may be to do moreas perhaps, for
example, with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where a two-state solution appears
increasingly out of reach but where a one-state formula seems inconsistent with the
strong nationalist aspirations of both sides.
No single model of the world can generate an all-purpose grand strategy. But the
best fit for the nationalist era is a pragmatic realism that takes as the basic
ingredient of global affairs the sometimes conflicting and sometimes parallel
interests of individual nation-stateswhile recognizing the power that can be
generated by nationalist sentiments within nation-states.