July 2006 America’s Uncomfortable Relationship With Nationalism Graham E. Fuller focused on issues of the Muslim world, the Soviet Graham E. Fuller served as an overseas operations offi- Union, problems of nationalism and political Islam, as cer with the CIA for 20 years; he later was named vice- well as issues of democratization. He is the author of chair of the National Intelligence Council at CIA dozens of articles and seven books on various aspects of responsible for global long-range strategic forecasting. politics, ethnicity, and sectarianism across the Muslim After leaving government, Fuller served as a senior world. His most recent book is The Future of Political political scientist at the RAND Corporation where he Islam (Palgrave, 2004). Policy Recommendations seriously block and stymie our own goals and • The rise of strong nationalist feelings anywhere is that we sometimes cannot prevent short of war. the smoke before the fire, a sign of latent trouble. It represents an important indicator of a society • We need to acknowledge that the way Islamist stirred by powerful emotions and grievances that movements view and deal with the United could push it in difficult or dangerous directions States reflects “nationalist” motivations as much against us. Therefore, when we witness the emer- as, or more than, religious extremism per se. gence of strong nationalist sentiments, they need to be treated with some caution—to fly in their • Policymakers and analysts are not doing their face is to court trouble as we inevitably then duty if they do not attempt to place foreign encounter “irrational behavior.” issues in a reversed US context: “How would the United States react if Britain or France • This does not mean that nationalism must be pla- invaded the United States to stop the US Civil cated, but the United States must examine its War or stayed on to occupy the country until roots and sources carefully before undertaking order was established?” or “How would we feel confrontation with it. Efforts at intimidation of the if China launched a preemptive attack on the nationalists will usually be counterproductive. United States out of fear that the United States represented a military threat to China’s emer- • Confrontation of other nationalisms with gence in East Asia?” Meaningful parallels can American nationalism operating as a superpow- always be found that at the least help explain er is a particularly volatile combination. The where other societies and countries are coming United States needs to work with broad and from in their actions. credible international coalitions representing something of a global consensus in handling • As the sole global superpower, we must remain such situations. The United States as sole global alert to a natural tendency of the powerful superpower must walk a great deal more softly toward insensitivity or blindness toward nation- if it is to avoid creating a bandwagoning of alist emotions in other states and peoples; international forces against it—forces that can awareness of this potential blind spot is the first step toward coping with the problem. The United States has a big problem with national- national myth to the contrary, American patriotism in ism: it’s uncomfortable with everybody else’s. Yet relation to the outside world is in fact functionally a there’s a great irony here: the United States seems form of nationalism in most respects. Furthermore, quite unaware of the fact that it is one of the most despite our own multicultural character as a society, at enthusiastically flag-waving, nationalistic countries of the popular level we remain quite ambivalent about the world. More remarkably, it regularly miscalculates the real implications of multiculturalism and show the force of nationalism abroad. Today nationalism is some reluctance to abandon our “European,” or even probably the single most widespread ideology in poli- our “Anglo-Saxon,” founding identity. tics across the globe. That the United States should be tone-deaf to this phenomenon in its dealings with From de Tocqueville on, observers of this country have others represents a serious vulnerability in the formu- remarked that the character of American nationalism lation of its foreign policies. differs significantly from that of most other countries, above all in its immigrant origins. In our founding Because of the strongly multiethnic, multicultural national myths, we conveniently overlook aboriginal nature of our own country, we have our own strong peoples and begin our own immigrant society with a national predispositions in the way we understand the “clean slate,” established on territory that has “no his- phenomenon of nationalism. In the United States we tory.” We believe that our immigrant-based society also like to distinguish sharply between what we call ignores ethnic or religious ties as a binding element “patriotism” in the United States and “nationalism” for its society and polity. everywhere else. In reality this distinction is some- what misleading. In the “old countries” of the world, citizenship has been primarily based upon a founding ethnic group If you ask most Americans what they think about that lives in a specific homeland, and upon an alle- nationalism, you’ll likely get a negative response. giance to that group and its longstanding communal Nationalism will be variously characterized as archaic, language and culture. The United States differs from narrow, intolerant, racist, zealous, irrational, uncom- these “old countries” because it bases its concept of promising, a hindrance to the creation of a more glob- national allegiance upon a vision of the Constitution alized world, and an overall danger to the international and a set of shared ideals to form our political culture. order. In short, America would generally like to see Much the same can be said of other immigrant soci- nationalism go away. This brief will look at the roots of eties as well, including Canada, Australia, New American views of nationalism, and the problems that Zealand, and Latin America. these views create. This brief will also study the charac- ter of American nationalism itself, the nature of the It’s long been clear, however, that the image of the United States as a superpower, and how that status United States as a state based purely upon mutually influences our views of nationalism abroad. Finally, we shared ideals has never represented the whole story. will suggest how the United States might more useful- Nor is it true of most of the other preeminently immi- ly address the whole phenomenon of nationalism grant societies that also nominally ignored ethnicity in abroad in order to better manage the issue. their founding ideals. They did all seek to build new societies free of the baggage of the past, but most of American Nationalism or Patriotism? them (except for the Spanish and Portuguese in Latin Before we can understand American views of nation- America, and the French founders of Canada) were alisms abroad, we first need to grasp the character of preeminently of UK origin (Anglo-Saxon/Scottish) in our own. Is there such a thing as American national- their early ethnic makeup. They naturally brought ism, or is it simply “patriotism”? I will argue that, their own native English language with them to Policy Analysis Briefs are thought-provoking contributions to the public debate over peace and security issues. The views expressed in this brief are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Stanley Foundation. The authors’ affiliation is listed for identification purposes only. 2 constitute the founding language of the state and soci- ponents all the way from the ugly chauvinism of the ety. Of course all of these societies ran roughshod over Ku Klux Klan that wants to keep America “white” to their aboriginal peoples—marginalizing, if not out- the elegantly argued theses of Samuel Huntington right eliminating, them. proclaiming the vital necessity of retaining the essen- tials of our British-inherited founding political culture Thus, for all its nominal blindness to ethnicity in its as the indispensable central value system essential to founding values, the United States did possess a de the sound functioning of the United States.1 Indeed, facto founding ethnicity of its own from the start. some American nativists still interpret belongingness This founding culture remained the basis of American in the United States as a basically northern European, culture for a long period, later compelled only by dint “white” thing. Fortunately, their numbers and threat to of ongoing immigration to incorporate newer French, the system are dwindling. German, and Dutch communities—creating then a kind of generalized northern European ethnicity. Even here, a national debate still rages between advo- Through a long, uncomfortable, and bumpy process cates of total assimilation of all peoples into a com- that culture in turn was compelled to incorporate mon founding Anglo-Saxon culture on the one hand other seemingly “unassimilable” minorities such as versus a multiculturalism that permits retention of African, Spanish, Irish, Italian, Jewish, East European, ethnic culture, pride, and language as enriching com- and East Asian ethnicities, not to mention the ravaged ponents within American society on the other. In fact, and decimated aboriginal Native Americans. This is it misleading to think of either of these views as process of integration has been painful, often ugly, and absolutes? Both are ideals at opposite ends of a long is still far from complete, smooth, or comfortable. spectrum along which all countries lie in their various American society has been described by some as still mixtures of component identities and (constructed) racist at heart, riddled with de facto discrimination for sense of national homogeneity. all its nonracial ideals. Muslims of course represent the last, presently most controversial, element to seek dis- All this puts the discussion of American attitudes crimination-free integration.