350
PARTISAN REVIEW
External aggression, not merely against tribes or peoples but against
large societies unified by religion, or obedience to a single constituted
authority, has, after all, occurred often enough in all parts of the globe.
Yet neither in Europe nor in Asia, neither in ancient times nor
medieval, has this led
to
a specifically nationalist reaction: such has not
been the response to defeat inflicted on Persians by Greeks, or on
Greeks by Romans, or on Buddhists by Muslims, or on Graeco-Roman
civilisation when it was overrun by Huns or Ottoman Turks, quite
apart from all the innumerable smaller wars and destruction of native
institutions by conquerors in either continent.
It
seems clear, even to me who am not a historian or a sociologist,
that while the infliction of a wound on the collective feeling of a
society, or at least of its spiritual leaders, may be a necessary condition
for the birth of nationalism, it is not a sufficient one: the society must,
at least potentially, contain within itself a group or class of persons
who are in search of a focus for loyalty or self-identification, or perhaps
a base for power, no longer supplied by earlier forces for cohesion–
tribal, or religious, or feudal , or dynastic, or military-such as was
provided by the centralising policies of the monarchies of France or
Spain, and was not provided by the rulers of German lands. In some
cases, these conditions are created by the emergence of new social
classes seeking control of a society against older rulers, secular or
clerical.
If
to this is added the wound of conquest, or even cultural
disparagement from without, of a society which has at any rate the
beginnings of a national culture, the soil for the rise of nationalism
may be prepared.
Yet one more condition for it seems necessary: for nationalism
to
develop in it, a society must, in the minds of at least some of its most
sensitive members, carry an image of itself as a nation, at least in
embryo, in virtue of some general unifying factor or factors-language,
ethnic origin, a common history (real or imaginary)-ideas and
sentiments which are relatively articulate in the minds of the better
educated and more socially and historically minded, and a good deal
less articulate, even absent from, the consciousness of the bulk of the
population. This national image, which seems to make those in whom
it is found liable to resentment if it is ignored or insulted, also turns
some among them into a conscious ideological group or movement,
particularly if they are faced by some common enemy, whether within
the state or outside it-a church or a government or foreign detractors.
These are the men who speak or write
to
the people and seek to make
them conscious of their wrongs as a people-poets and novelists,
