ISAIAH BERLIN
345
Before doing so, however, I should like to say something on the
origins of European nationalism as a state of mind. I do not mean by
this national sentiment as such-that can probably
be
traced to tribal
feeling in the earliest period of recorded history. I mean its elevation
into a conscious doctrine, at once the product, articulation and
synthesis of states of consciousness that has been recognised by social
observers as a force and a weapon. In this sense, nationalism does not
seem to exist in the ancient world, nor in the Christian Middle Ages.
The Romans may have despised the Greeks, Cicero and Apion said
disparaging things about the Jews, and Juvenal about Orientals in
general; but this is mere xenophobia. There is passionate patriotism in
Machiavelli or Shakespeare-and a long tradition of it long before
them. I do not mean by nationalism a mere pride of ancestry-we are
all sons of Cadmus, we all come from Troy, we are descended from men
who made a covenant with the Lord, we spring from a race of
conquerors, Franks or Vikings, and rule over the progeny of Gallo–
Romans or Celtic slaves by right of conquest.
By nationalism, I mean something more definite, ideologically
important and dangerous: namely the conviction, in the first place,
that men belong to a particular human group, and that the way of life
of the group differs from that of others; that the characters of the
individuals who compose the group are shaped by, and cannot be
understood apart from, those of the group, defined in terms of common
territory, customs, laws, memories, beliefs, language, artistic and
religious expression, social institutions, ways of life, to which some
add heredity, kinship, racial characteristics; and that it is these factors
which shape human beings, their purposes and their values.
Secondly, that the pattern of life of a society is similar to that of a
biological organism; that what this organism needs for its proper
development, which those most sensitive to its nature articulate in
words or images or other forms of human expression, constitute its
common goals; that these goals are supreme; in cases of conflict with
other values, which do not derive from the specific ends of a specific
"organism" -intellectual or religious or moral, personal or
universal-these supreme values should prevail, since only so will
decadence and ruin of the nation
be
averted. Furthermore, that to call
such patterns of life organic is to say that they cannot be artificially
formed by individuals or groups, however dominating their positions,
unless they are themselves penetrated by these historically developing
ways of acting and thinking and feeling, for it is these mental and
emotional and physical ways of living, of coping with reality, above all .
