Mr. Hyde is the author of “A Primer for Forgetting.”
Aug. 21, 2019
Gravestones at the memorial center of Potocari near Srebrenica, where Serbian fighters massacred about 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian war.CreditCreditDarko Vojinovic/Associated Press
Nationalism comes in many flavors — the ethnic and the civic, the religious and the secular, the right and the left. A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism called for inheritance taxes, a ban on corporate money in politics, workers’ compensation and a living wage. By contrast, the recent National Conservative Conference outlined a “new American and British nationalism” that featured balanced budgets, strong national borders and a return to Anglo-American national traditions: “constitutionalism, the common law, the English language, and Christian scripture.”
There are so many varieties of nationalism that it may be time to pause and ask: What is a nation? A provocative and useful answeronce came from the 19th-century French scholar Ernest Renan: “The essence of a nation is that all of its individuals have many things in common, and also that everyone has forgotten many things.”
What must citizens forget before a nation becomes a nation? Ethnic differences, for one thing: “No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgund, an Alain, a Taifala, or a Visigoth,” Renan said. Ancient differences as to sect or creed must be left in the past. “Every French citizen has forgotten,” Renan claims, that in the 13th century the pope’s armies nearly wiped out the Cathars, a rival Christian sect, and that on St. Bartholomew’s Day in the 16th century, Catholic mobs slaughtered thousands of Calvinist Protestants.
Happily, by Renan’s day, such old conflicts had fallen into time immemorial, and in so doing freed France to become France...
Nationalism comes in many flavors — the ethnic and the civic, the religious and the secular, the right and the left. A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism called for inheritance taxes, a ban on corporate money in politics, workers’ compensation and a living wage. By contrast, the recent National Conservative Conference outlined a “new American and British nationalism” that featured balanced budgets, strong national borders and a return to Anglo-American national traditions: “constitutionalism, the common law, the English language, and Christian scripture.”
There are so many varieties of nationalism that it may be time to pause and ask: What is a nation? A provocative and useful answeronce came from the 19th-century French scholar Ernest Renan: “The essence of a nation is that all of its individuals have many things in common, and also that everyone has forgotten many things.”
What must citizens forget before a nation becomes a nation? Ethnic differences, for one thing: “No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgund, an Alain, a Taifala, or a Visigoth,” Renan said. Ancient differences as to sect or creed must be left in the past. “Every French citizen has forgotten,” Renan claims, that in the 13th century the pope’s armies nearly wiped out the Cathars, a rival Christian sect, and that on St. Bartholomew’s Day in the 16th century, Catholic mobs slaughtered thousands of Calvinist Protestants.
Happily, by Renan’s day, such old conflicts had fallen into time immemorial, and in so doing freed France to become France...
The new nationalism seems to be driven by a hunger for identity, for a solid sense of one’s presence in the world, joined to a style of self-knowing that operates by opposition: I’m British, not French; I’m American, not Mexican; I’m Christian, not Muslim; I’m white, not black. Given that point of departure, nationalism becomes a shorthand for the memory of all such oppositions.
It is always a valuable exercise to freshly imagine what our country means to us, but in doing so we would do well to remember that when it comes to divisions of race, ethnicity and religious belief, the unforgotten is the destroyer of nations. nyt
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