Against Nationalism

Why nationalism as a prism is at odds with tradition

I write this post as a person quite fond of the national conservative movement, admiring the boldness of its champions and the fervour of its adherents. I write not to condemn it in its entirety, for among the shattered remnants of the Res Public Christiana, the national conservatives remain its most valiant defenders. Yet I must warn: nationalism as a prism of looking at the world is deeply flawed, a perilous idol, a golden calf erected in the desert of modernity and its worshippers know not what they do.

Man as sole frame of reference

Every affirmation relative to society or to government supposes an affirmation relative to God; or what amounts the same, that every political and social, is necessarily converted into a theological, truth, writes Juan Donoso Cortés¹

Its ultimate frame of reference is the nation - the brotherly unity of man of one tongue and one blood. As such it lacks any external frame of reference, any moral compass outside itself. As the great English historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee puts it, the local national state (…) is an abomination of desolation standing in the place where it ought not. It has stood in that place now — demanding and receiving human sacrifices from its poor deluded votaries — for four or five centuries.² Pope Pius XI puts it clearly in the Encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge: Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds³.

Nationalism thus fails to conform with the First Commandment. Where Christians put God, nationalism puts man in the plural and liberalism man in the singular. Both ideologies effectively collapse into anthropolatry. They are a scream of human pride, as man raises himself to usurp the place that belongs to the divine. Let us all proclaim:Non nobis Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam.⁴

Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple, Rafael, fresco (Source)

To be a Catholic and a nationalist is a contradiction not only in essence but also in etymology. The very word katholikos means universal in the tongue of the Greeks. To claim to be both a nationalist and a Catholic is to affirm what one denies and deny what one affirms, a contradiction of terms. As apostle Paul puts it There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.⁵ Not that all these distinctions are abolished in their entirety, but to claim that they constitute a deep chasm which separates the us enjoy the rights and protections of the law from them to whom anything is permissible. The 16th century Bartolome de las Casas, bishop of Chiapas writes in defense of the Indians: They are not so forsaken, by divine providence that they are incapable of attaining Christ´s kingdom. They are our brothers, redeemed by Christ´s precious blood, no less that the wisest and most learned men in the whole world⁶. Not only does nationalism fail to acknowledge God, but it further violates the Greatest Commandment: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”⁷ Christ wanted love to be called his single commandment. This we owe to all men. Nobody is excepted⁸. Nationalism teaches nations not love your neighbour but to hate him, to despise him, to bring war and subjugation to him. And thus the following verse is applicable: So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister,and then come and offer your gift. ⁹Thus he, who calls himself a Frenchman and Christian and harbours devouring hatred for his German neighbour, is one in need of repentance and change of heart . As Pope XIII puts it, Men who in every nation pray to the same God for peace on earth will not kindle flames of discord among the peoples; men who turn in prayer to the divine Majesty, will not set up in their own country a craving for domination; nor foster that inordinate love of country which of its own nation makes its own god.¹⁰

Seeing the horrors of the 20th century, we can agree with Juan Donoso Cortés as he proclaims I know not if there be anything under the sun more vile and despicable than the human race outside the Catholic lines¹¹

Inner Effects

The destructive inner effects of nationalism are its general Gleichschaltung of the entire nation, its flattening of the rich social tapestry, where every valley is to be lifted up and every mountain or hill be made low, and the uneven ground shall become level and the rough places a plain.¹² not in anticipation of the Lord´s coming but to prepare a highway for the Leviathan As Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira explains, No matter how much the Revolution hates the absolutism of kings, it hates intermediate bodies and the medieval organic monarchies even more. This is because monarchic absolutism tends to put all subjects, even those of the highest standing, at a level of reciprocal equality in a lower station that foreshadows the annihilation of the individual and the anonymity that have reached their apex in the great urban concentrations of socialist societies. Among the intermediate groups to be abolished, the family ranks first. Until it manages to wipe it out, the Revolution tries to lower it, mutilate it, and vilify it in every way.¹³ This spirit seeks not to rise to the level of the scholar but to descend down to the ignorance of the pub. It aspires not to elevate the multitude to the sublime but to sink the sublime to the level of the multitude.

As early as 1791, the Revolution, the fountain of destruction, issued the Le Chapelier law which explicitly bans all and any guilds or trade unions, with its first article declaring: In that the abolition of any kind of citizen's guild in the same trade or of the same profession is one of the fundamental bases of the French Constitution, it is forbidden to reestablish them under any pretext or in any form whatsoever.¹⁴ By such decrees, the Revolution sought to exterminate all organic social life. The Catholic social teaching holds quite the opposite view: For, to enter into a "society" of this kind (i.e. workingmen´s unions, artificer´s guilds, etc.) is the natural right of man; and the State has for its office to protect natural rights, not to destroy them; and, if it forbid its citizens to form associations, it contradicts the very principle of its own existence, for both they and it exist in virtue of the like principle, namely, the natural tendency of man to dwell in society.¹⁵

In 1794, nationalism erected a new Golden Statue - that of standardised language and commanded all to worship its golden tongue or be cast as heretics . A brutal assimilation policy against all local varieties of language has begun. The Frenchman was determined to spread the standardised version of the official language down the throats of all its subjects against their will.¹⁶ There was no place to a local patois in Republican France, those sweet and ancient tongues of hearth and hamlet.

Speak French, Be Clean, shown in a school in southern France (Source)

Woe unto the Magyar statesman, when he followed those deceiving paths of the Frenchman! For when in his pride he sought to champion the unity of the Kingdom of Saint Stephen by enforcing his tongue down the throats of all his compatriots, not only had he failed to bolster its unity, but he dug deep chasms inside it and shattered the scaramental unity of the apostolic kingdom. Woe unto him, who sought to enforce unity, where there was variety and dugdeep chasms that tore this unity apart!

When the Holy Spirit spoke at Pentecost, He recognised the plurality of tongues: And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power¹⁷. Our God has sought not to standardise the vernaculars of these peoples and enforce one language upon all.

Not only was there any place for the local varieties and dialects - there remained no place for any meaningful local autonomy. This was to be expected, since the Revolution tends to do away with any wholesome regionalism whether political, cultural, or other-within countries today.¹⁸ The Catholic view sees local particularism as not existing due to the mercy of the State, but being primordial and the State derivative. As Juan Donoso Cortés writes: (…) the municipal unity, which has also its symbol, in the right of using its own coat of arms and unfurling its banner. From the variety of municipia is formed the national unity, which in turn, is symbolised by a throne and personified in a King. Above all these magnificent associations is that of all Catholic nations, with their Christian princes, fraternally united in the bosom of the Church. This perfect and supreme association is unity in its head and variety in its members¹⁹ The national unity thus emerges from the variety of the local particularities, and such has no right to dillute them or destroy them.

Under nationalism, all particularities, be they based on estate or locality be abrogated and all fueros abolished, its result the destruction of basic or intermediate social bodies - the family, municipality, county, region, guild, university, church, guild, aristocracy and army - until they were left standing, face-to-face amidst the apocalyptic horizon of a social desert, the individual and the State²⁰. Shorn of the deepest ties to family (nuclear as well as extended), place, community, region, religion, and culture, and deeply shaped to believe that these forms of association are limits upon their autonomy, deracinated humans seek belonging and self- definition through the only legitimate form of organization remaining available to them: the State.²¹ All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State²² this is not merely a slogan of the Italian Fascists, it is the great eschaton of nationalism, crushing all under its feet until a trembling naked man stands defenseless facing the Leviathan. What terrific irony how this cult of the “particular” or in Toynbee´s words parochial came crushing down on the particular, the homely. How it became a force of the anywheres against the somewheres within the borders of the nation-state.

Outer Effects

What shall one say of the outer consequences of this dreadful idolatry? How the war against virtue and fueros became the war of nation against nation and tribe against tribe.

Outwardly, nationalism has produced tragedies of a continental scale. Its attempt to redraw political borders to align with ethnic and linguistic ones has proven both vain and violent. In some regions, borders could be drawn; in others, the exercise proved impossible without mass displacement and persecution. Many areas that were ruled by multicultural empires for centuries had grown to become mixed in language Drawing a border there results in many stranded on the opposite side of it. The homogenising forces within these new states sought to assimilate their new populations of alien tongue, which furthered revisionism among their neighbours. An example may have been the tense relations of post-Trianon Hungary with its neighbours harbouring significant Magyar communities just across the border.

Not only were these new successor states hostile to each other, they had also began weak from the onset, and had been easy prey for the Nazi and Bolshevik demons to devour. A firmly rooted Catholic monarchy on the Danube may had stood a better chance of resisting these forces, had it been still under Blessed Emperor Charles. I must suffer so much, so my people will come together again²³ so said aid he in his final illness on the island of Madeira, as a preview of the suffering of his peoples under the dual yokes of totalitarianism.

Blessed Emperor Charles (Source)

Furthermore, nationalism led to a transformation of a limited 18th century warfare by to a limitless warfare driven by nationalist passions. As Toynbee puts it: Democracy has not merely failed to work against War, but has positively put its ‘drive’ into War and has done still more than the sister force of Industrialism has done to key our Western warfare up from the low tension of the eighteenth-century ‘sport of kings’ to the enormity of ‘la guerre totale’²⁴

Democracy and Industrialisation, these are the two culprits which he identifies as standing behind the transformation of an 18th century limited warfare into a destructive 19th century series of wars of nationality fielding a citizen army, the levée en masse. For him, Nationalism has been generated by a perversion of Democracy.²⁵Combined with the existence of “parochial states”, Toynbee predicts that the combination of Democracy and Industrialisation logically leads into oppressive totalitarian states.²⁶

The human tragedy of wars of nationalism has been already evident in the aftermath of the First World War: the deliberate genocide of the Armenian, Assyrian, Maronite and Greek populations of the Ottoman Empire as it modernised and later its suppression of any and all peoples speaking other than the language of the Anatolian Turks. Citizen, Speak Turkish!²⁷ , such was the commandment under Ataturk. The Assyrian Nestorian Christians of Hakkiyari and Urumiyah, who had been evicted from their ancestral homes during the War of 1914-18, and who had since found life impossible to live in their post-war asylum in 'Iraq, were a tragic instance of a nationality which had ‘found no rest for the sole of her foot’.’ The same might be said of those Macedonians (and they appeared to be a large majority) who were Bulgarian in their national sentiment; for the Jugoslav Government had refused to recognize them as an alien minority which was entitled to benefit by the minorities-protection treaty which Jugoslavia had signed; and, in consequence, the Macedonians could only find freedom for their Bulgarian national self-expression at the price of leaving their ancestral homes, which were now under Jugoslav rule, and seeking asylum as refugees within the narrowly circumscribed post-war frontiers of the Kingdom of Bulgaria. These are all cases in which the impact of Nationalistn upon the political map has resulted neither in an adjustment nor in a revolution but in an enormity — if it is to be regarded as a greater enormity that a national movement should be denied the self-expression which Nationalism claims as its ‘sacred right’ than that it should succeed in fulfilling its own sectional ambitions at the cost of an oecumenical catastrophe like the Great War of 1914-18.²⁸

Not to say about the atrocities of World War II: the extermination of Polish, Jewish and other peoples that were to give way for a Lebensraum, later followed by an uprooting and expulsion of the Germans of Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, Sudetenland and all regions east of the arbitrarily chosen rivers of the Oder and Niesse. ²⁹ The Polish of Lwów, Wolyń³⁰ and all areas east of the Curzon line were hunted down and brutally murdered because of banderite dreams of establishing a Ukrainian national state. As evidence by a recent visit by a Polish presidential candidate, the banderite demons had not yet been exorcised.³¹

These were not wars. They were orgies of hate and destruction, of unbound passions and the deepest and darkest confines of the human heart. Like the blood of Abel cries the blood of countless martyrs from the earth.

What Is To Be Done?

What are we to do? Are we to forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship³² ? On the contrary!We must not choose between patriotisms, as if loyalty were a rivalrous commodity. We should seek to build an integral patriotism, where one needs not to chose whether he be a patriotic Breton or a patriotic Frenchman, where being a patriotic Catalan is not contradictory to being a patriotic Spaniard but complementary to it, both fidelities to the inheritance of one´s ancestors that pours out from the local and radiates outward, expressions of a rightly ordered love, where the hearthstone radiates outward to the altar, the village to the throne, the province to the realm

This is what the concept invoked³³ by the vice-president J. D. Vance ordo amoris demands. The ordo amoris can be conceptualized as a series of concentric circles radiating outward from ourselves, beginning with loving God ³⁴How can man love a stranger whom he knows not if he scorns his neighbour whom he meets daily? Love begins in the near, in the tangible, in the given. From the spouse, to the child, to the hamlet and the land—thus grows the tree of loyalty, if its root is sound.

The Hay Wain by John Constable, oil on canvas (Source)

This love for one´s home — what Sir Roger Scruton called oikophilia —that sacred affection for the known, the inherited, the handed-down. This is no tribal idolatry, no xenophobic shriek, but the voice of reverent stewardship. The oikophilic man does not clamor for dominion; he longs for continuity. He does not scream that his country is supreme, but weeps when it is defaced. He wishes not to conquer, but to hand down.

This oikophilia is also cautions of imprudent immigration policy. Isaac Riley explained the case well : When opening our homes, we must be mindful of our primary duty to our family and children, refraining from allowing dangerous people to enter, yet not battening the hatches so as to snuff out any expression of homely love. Clearly, if our own homes were perpetually open for anyone and everyone to freely help themselves, very quickly there would be nothing homely left and we would have morally failed in our first duty to our own families. This is the case not because strangers are necessarily destructive or evil, but because a well-managed home can only facilitate a certain degree of hospitality without compromising its own integrity. So, too, with the nation.³⁵ What father opens the door of his home to wolves, even should they wear the sheep´s garb of humanitarian slogans? Did our ancestors die for nothing at Tours, at Lepanto, at Covadonga or at the outskirts of Vienna? Are we not defacing their tombs by surrendering all what sacrificed their lives for?

“A nation without borders is no better than a house without walls.”³⁶ Thus the Frenchman who mourns the transformation of Marseille, whether he be a centralist Jacobin or a Provençal regionalist, is not moved by hatred, but by love. They both mourn the changing landscape of their beloved city. Their concern is not rooted in hatred, but in love: in oikophilia, in ordo amoris, in a desire to remain faithful to the beauty they have inherited.

Why National Conservativism Still Makes Sense

We live not in an age of reforms but in age where old certainties lie ruined. We stand amidst the debris and wreckage of shattered Christendom. The great edifices of order — throne, altar, custom — lie broken, trampled by revolutions whose appetites were never sated. This hour demands no indecisive lukewarm men of compromise, but a resolute champions standing in defense of the few treasures that have survived. Let us reject the dictatorship of relativism³⁷ as described by the Cardinal Ratzinger prior to being elected Pontiff.

Politics today is now a metaphysical arena, where the corrida of the soul is played out, where order contends with chaos and fidelity confronts betrayal and where the soul and the very survival of nations and peoples lies at stake. The question stands not on how to improve, but whether we find the courage to preserve what is ours, are we to at least maintain, what we have not built? Are we lesser sons of greater sires?³⁸

And yet from the ashes of devastation, a new hope emerges. It is those who call themselves national conservatives. They are the new defenders of the fueros, of subsidiarity, of the parish, of the homestead — of all that is local, rooted, and homely. They are the somewheres, standing in defiance of the anywheres, opposing with quiet resolve the looming second coming of the Leviathan and the ever-advancing Gleichschaltung of Davos and Brussels.

Where their forefathers in 1848 sought to raze empires and enforce the tyranny of linguistic unity, these men now kneel before the crumbling altars of their fathers to guard the last vestiges of tradition. No longer proud idolators of blood and tongue, they are humbled defenders of hearth and home. No longer obsessed with cartographic envy, they have found common cause across borders. Slovak patriots who once dreamt of razing Budapest³⁹ in tanks now look to Orbán’s Hungary with admiration and imitation. The bitter rivalries of yesterday give way to a sacred alliance in defense of a common inheritance.

In this sense, they appear to be fulfilling the words of Professor Corrêa de Oliveira: In this connection, the Counter-Revolution must favor the maintenance of all sound local characteristics, in whatever field, in culture, customs, and so on. But its nationalism does not consist of the systematic disparagement of what belongs to others nor the adoration of national values as if they were extraneous to the great treasury of Christian civilization.⁴⁰

Integral patriotism, with its banners raised high and altars restored is no mere sentiment clouded in nostalgia. It is a theological rebellion against a nihilistic enterpise of global homogenisation. It is the creed of men who still keep vigil by the tombs of their forefathers, and who burn with the sacred duty to pass that memory on — unbroken, unaltered, and undiluted — unto their children. It does not seek to impose unity from above, nor dissolve particularity from below, but to resurrect an architecture of loyalties rooted both in the soil and in the soul.

1. DONOSO CORTÉS, Juan, marques of Valdegamas: Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism, considered in their fundamental principles, p. 13, link

2. DE LAS CASAS, Bartolomé, In defense of the Indians, p. 39, link

3. Matthew 5: 23-24

4. Latin: Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but to thy name give glory

5. Galatian 3:28

6. PIUS XI, Caritate Christi Compulsi, point 20, link

7. TOYNBEE, Arnold Joseph, The Trend of International Affairs Since the War, p. 809 Source

8. PIUS XI Mit Brennender Sorge, point 8, link

9. Mark, 12:30-31

10. DE LAS CASAS, Bartolomé, In defense of the Indians, p. 39, link

11. DONOSO CORTÉS, Juan, marques of Valdegamas: Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism, considered in their fundamental principles, p. 63, link

12. Isaiah 40:4

13. CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Plinio, Revolution and Counter-revolution, p. 36, link

14. MUSSOLINI, Benito

15. LEO XIII Rerum novarum, point 51, link

16. ELÍAS DE TEJADA, Francisco: ¿Qué es el carlismo? par. 53, link (in Spanish)

17. Act of the Apostles 2: 6-11

18. CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Plinio, Revolution and Counter-revolution, p. 36, link

19. DONOSO CORTÉS, Juan, marques of Valdegamas: Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism, considered in their fundamental principles, p. 46, link

20. LE CHAPELIER, Isaac René Guy, link (translated to English).

21. DENEEN, Patrick, Why liberalism failed, p. 60, link

22. GREGOIRE, Henri: Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française, link (in French)

23. Quotes by Blessed Emperor Charles: link

24. TOYNBEE, Arnold Joseph: A Study of History, Volume IV, p. 175, link

25. TOYNBEE, Arnold Joseph: A Study of History, Volume IV, p. 198, link

26. TOYNBEE, Arnold Joseph: A Study of History, Volume IV, p. 197, link

27. See Wikipedia article Citizen, Speak Turkish!

28. TOYNBEE, Arnold Joseph: A Study of History, Volume IV, p. 208, link

29. SNYDER, Timothy: Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin

30. See the movie Volhynia, link

31. MENTZEN, Sławomir: Dzień z Mentzenem i Bryłką: Lwów, YouTube, link (in Polish)

32. Line from Aragorn´s speech at the Black Gate from Peter Jackson´s adaptation of the Return of the King

33. PESTRITTO, Sebastian: Ordo Amoris: Putting the American Peoples First, at The American Postliberal, link

34. CLEMENTS, Richard: First, Love Locally: JD Vance and “Ordo Amoris” at Word on Fire, link

35. RILEY, Isaac: A Moral Argument Against Migration, at The European Conservative, link

36. LITTLEJOHN, Brad: Theology of Immigration at First Things, link

37. CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Plinio, Revolution and Counter-revolution, p. 75, link

38. THEODEN of Rohan, link

39. SLOTA, Ján: My pôjdeme do tankoch, YouTube, link (in Slovak)

40. RATZINGER Joseph, confronts the Dictatorship of Relativism, link