One of the west’s foremost political philosophers, Sir Isaiah Berlin, is a fellow at All Soul’s College in Oxford, England. Bom in Riga, Latvia, in 1909, he is a former president of the British Academy. He is author of Karl Marx, The Age of Enlightment, Four Essays on Liberty, and Vico and Herder. A selection of his essays, entitled The Crooked Timber of History: Chapters in the History of Ideas, was published in 1991. Berlin was interviewed earlier this year by Nathan Gardels.
In our modern age, nationalism is not resurgent; it never died, neither did racism. They are the most powerful movements in the world today, cutting across many social systems.
Non-aggressive nationalism is another story entirely. I trace the beginning of that idea to the highly influential 18th century German poet and philosopher, Johann Gottfried Herder.
Herder virtually invented the idea of belonging. He believed that just as people need to eat and drink, to have security and freedom, so too they need to belong to a group.
Noblest of pains: Deprived of this, they felt cut off, lonely, diminished, unhappy. Nostalagia, Herder said, was the noblest of all pains. To be human meant to be able to feel at home somewhere.
Each group, according to Herder, has its own set of customs and a lifestyle, a way of perceiving and behaving that is of value solely because it is their own. The whole of cultural life is shaped from within the particular stream of tradition that comes of collective historical experience shared only by members of the group.
Co-existence of cultures: All he wanted was cultural self-determination. He denied the superiority of one people over another. Anyone who proclaimed it was saying something false. Herder believed in a variety of national cultures, all of which could, in his view, peacefully coexist.
Each culture was equal in value and deserved its place in the sun.
What transforms the aspiration of cultural self- determination into aggression?
Nationalism, at least in the west, is created by wounds inflicted by stress. As for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet empire, they seem today to be one vast, open wound. After years of oppression and humiliation, there is liable to occur a violent counter- reaction, an outburst of national pride, often aggressive self-assertion, by liberated nations and their leaders.
Submerged past: Today Georgians, Armenians and the rest are trying to recover their submerged pasts, pushed into the background by the huge Russian imperial power.
People tire of being spat upon, ordered about by a superior nation, a superior class, or a superior anyone. Sooner or later they ask the nationalist questions: “Why do we have to obey them?” “What right have they…?” “What about us?” “Why can’t we….?”
That the pursuit of total harmony, or the perfect state, is a fallacy, and sometimes a fatal one.
20th century violence: in the grand scale of things, one has to consider that, despite royal and clerical monopolies of power and authority, the Middle Ages were, in some ways, more civilised than the deeply disturbed 19th and worse still, our own terrible century, with widespread violence, chauvinism and in the end mass destruction in racial, political holocausts.
At 82, I’ve through virtually the entire century. I have no doubt that it is the worst century that Europe has ever had.
Like Herder, I regard cosmopolitanism as empty. People can’t develop unless they belong to a culture. even if they rebel against it and transform it entirely, they still belong to a stream of tradition.
