Notes on Nationalism (1945)

Orwell defined what he was meaning exactly, in the second paragraph...

> By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

The sentences I quoted above resonate with me today, here in Scotland, pertaining to the Scottish National Party and especially with their rather foaming-at-the-mouth Nationalism. To see their behaviour - despite the 2014 Independence referendum in which the people of Scotland voted against breaking away from the United Kingdom - is to behold exactly the kind of irrational and in my view outright dangerous form of nationalism Orwell is writing about.

I consider myself a Scottish patriot, not a nationalist. I also consider myself a British patriot, not a nationalist, and it is for those reasons that I voted against Scotland becoming independent, breaking away from the UK, and it is also the reason why in my opinion the quicker the SNP lose their minority government in the Scottish parliament - they are being propped up by a handful of Scottish Greens who themselves demonstrate a propensity towards Communistic ideals hiding behind a thin veneer of "green" - the better.

I just wanted to comment on your use of "irrational". That's a bad definition (meaning no connection with how people use the word). Every nationalist in every nation attacks others for things that they themselves would do if it benefited them. If the attacks work it's very rational.

I recommend reading the seemingly unrelated The Knowledge by Lewis Dartnell. It describes the skills that would be necessary to rebuild civilisation after a hypothetical global cataclysm. Why is it relevant? If you read it, you will realize that all of civilization is fundamentally based on global markets and the global shipping of crude oil and other resources. Without these, nearly all technologies of daily life would break down in a very short time frame, including agriculture and medicine. The connections and dependences between countries are massive and completely unavoidable at our current level of technological development. In the long run, all countries have to work together or modern society will fail. (It may also fail because the resources dwindle extremely fast, viewed at an evolutionary time scale. Expanding mankind into space is unavoidable, or at least robot mining will be needed.)

Add to this the fact that we can communicate in real-time with the whole world and get news about distant events and politics within minutes, and patriotism starts to appear in a completely different light - as a silly appeal to traditions with no substance. Bear in mind that nations are entirely artificial entities and territorial conflicts have become (almost) impossible due to the global trade dependences.

This doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with mild forms of patriotism, of course, just that there are no particular advantages to it in the long run.

In a nutshell, we live in an essentially transnational society and this cannot change unless you're willing to give up almost all of modern technology.

People said the same thing in the late and early 20th century before ww1 and ww2. They were wrong.

> If you read it, you will realize that all of civilization is fundamentally based on global markets and the global shipping of crude oil and other resources.

Modern nations are dependent on oil for sure. That's what ww1 and ww2 was fought over.

> In the long run, all countries have to work together or modern society will fail.

That's fundamentally not true. Certain nations, like the US, don't have to work with anyone. We are one of the few nations who have enough resources ( including oil ) to keep our civilization running. If you expand the US to include the anglo-nations ( Canada, Australia, etc ), then we are more than able to keep our society running without the rest of the world.

> In a nutshell, we live in an essentially transnational society and this cannot change unless you're willing to give up almost all of modern technology.

What? Maybe if you are denmark or iceland, but that doesn't hold true for the US.

Also, your entire argument is about international trade, not transnationalism. You need nations to have international trade.

And as I said, your argument isn't new. It's been long debunked. The same argument was made in the midst of pax britannica before ww1 and ww2. People argued that nations were too dependent on each other for wars to break out. Hell, people argued that germany would never attack the soviet union since most of germany's oil/resources came from the soviet union.

The current international system will continue as long as nations deem it beneficial to themselves. If it ceases to be, then it will end.

There is nothing inherently good or bad about any system. And I highly doubt china, russia and much of the world will adhere to the US/European led international system for much longer.

Pax americana will come to an end like all "pax" in the past. Instead of clinging to silly utopian transnationalism, we should be preparing ourselves for a multipolar nationalistic world.

The post ww2 era is an anomaly in human history where one nation ruled the world. The only comparable situation in human history was the mongol empire where mongol's established direct or indirect control over pretty much all of eurasia. That system crumbled also.