We might say that nations are numerically distinct and qualitatively distinct as opposed to manufactured objects that are numerically distinct but qualitatively indistinct. Orwell argues that nationalism largely influences the thoughts and actions of people, even in such everyday tasks as decision-making and reasoning. The example provided is of asking the question: "Out of the three major Allies, which contributed most to the fall of Nazism?". People aligned with the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union would consider their country first before they attempt to search for supportive arguments. [6]

Third, liberal nationalists are more concerned with the relationship between the nation and liberal democracy ( Tamir, 1993, 2019). While many classical nationalists were strong advocates of democratic or republican regimes, it was by no means universal. Indeed, core nationalism is compatible with an authoritarian government so long as it is authentic or expressive of the national character. Indeed, some very prominent nationalists were antidemocratic, like Charles Maurras and l’Action française as well as Russian nationalists, who summed up their view as “Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality” ( Riasanovsky, 2005). Pryke, Sam. “Economic Nationalism: Theory, History and Prospects.” Global Policy, September 6, 2012, ttps://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/articles/world-economy-trade-and-finance/economic-nationalism-theory-history-and-prospects. Faced with this question, Hugh Seton-Watson admits that there is nothing else to say save that a nation exists when enough people within a community believe that they belong to a nation or act as if they do ( Seton-Watson, 1977). Others like Rogers Brubaker deny that the nation is a particular kind of object. Instead, we should consider the “nation” as a category of practice rather than a form of community with set properties. Hence his proposal to “think about nationalism without nations” ( Brubaker, 1996, p. 21). nationalists also put themselves into a category or ‘unit’, but exempt this from values like good and bad. A fourth variant considers nationalism to be the response to the discontentment brought by modernity. Powerfully articulated by Elie Kedourie, this view presents nationalism as a civic religion, complete with a narrative of the fall, a path to redemption, and exhortations to sacrifice and purification. This creed was birthed by disillusioned marginal German intellectuals and then exported worldwide ( Kedourie, 1960, 1971).Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent — though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one — was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who whose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians.’ Every book that he wrote, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond the possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealisation of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it — as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine — had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous overestimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton's battle poems, such as Lepanto or The Ballad of Saint Barbara, make The Charge of the Light Brigade read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.

Orwell writes that patriots believe their nation or way of life to be the best in the world, but don’t feel the need to force that on anyone else. Nationalism, however, is: “inseparable from the desire for power”. ii) Anti-Semitism. There is little evidence about this at present, because the Nazi persecutions have made it necessary for any thinking person to side with the Jews against their oppressors. Anyone educated enough to have heard the word ‘antisemitism’ claims as a matter of course to be free of it, and anti-Jewish remarks are carefully eliminated from all classes of literature. Actually antisemitism appears to be widespread, even among intellectuals, and the general conspiracy of silence probably helps exacerbate it. People of Left opinions are not immune to it, and their attitude is sometimes affected by the fact that Trotskyists and Anarchists tend to be Jews. But antisemitism comes more naturally to people of Conservative tendency, who suspect Jews of weakening national morale and diluting the national culture. Neo-Tories and political Catholics are always liable to succumb to antisemitism, at least intermittently.

Author’s Notes

Obviously there are considerable resemblances between political Catholicism, as exemplified by Chesterton, and Communism. So there are between either of these and for instance Scottish nationalism, Zionism, Antisemitism or Trotskyism. It would be an oversimplification to say that all forms of nationalism are the same, even in their mental atmosphere, but there are certain rules that hold good in all cases. The following are the principal characteristics of nationalist thought: