Because the United States was founded on Enlightenment ideas, and nationalism is usually connected to romantic notions of terrain, history, and a unique cultural experience, little is ordinarily said about American nationalism. But, of course, the United States is perhaps the most nationalistic society on earth.
China strikes me as its only plausible rival in this respect, insisting that civilization and China are indistinguishable, which resembles the claim Americans are inclined to make about the United States and democracy. The New World settlement was considered providential, and the constitutional origin of the American political nation deliberately broke with Europe.
Thus the United States was thought politically completed at its very start; and ever since, every innovation has to be tested for its conformation to the constitutional order. This has meant that any reexamination of the norms of American society can be and frequently is attacked as anti-Americanism, since American society is considered to represent universal values, if not divine ones.
Even sophisticated critics of American society argue that the idea of an American nationalism seems incongruous, since presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt both "sponsored world organizations whose primary objective was to contain and disperse the aggressive force of nationalism" (I quote the UN's Brian ‘Urquhart). This fails to grasp that both the League of Nations and the United Nations were efforts to validate American nationalism by, in effect, Americanizing the world: "making it safe for democracy" as Wilson said—which of course meant making it safe for the United States. Utopian world organization in both 1919 and 1945 was the American-conceived alternative to American isolationism.
Exactly the same impulse lies behind the ambition of George W. Bush, announced in his second inaugural address, to bring freedom and democracy to the entire world. This is another way of saying that dangerous foreign societies must be made over as American-style democracies, so as to disarm their threat. The implied eventual ambition is to bring them and the established Western democracies together into a new superalliance dominated by the United States. Only then can Americans really feel safe.
American nationalism is the subject of a brilliant new book, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (Oxford University Press), by Anatol Lieven, a British writer who was formerly a Times of London correspondent and is now a visiting scholar in Washington. Of German and Irish origins, he has spent a part of his life in the United States, including a period as an exchange student in Troy, Alabama.
The small-town Southern experience, rare among foreign observers of the United States, is crucial to the originality of his analysis. It has provided him with one of the most important keys to understanding American society, its roots in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scotch-Irish migration to America.
The Scotch-Irish were Calvinist evangelical Protestants implanted in Northern Ireland by Britain in the seventeenth century as part of the suppression of the original Catholic Irish population. Theirs became the original white culture of the American South, and while scattered throughout the Midwest and West in the years since 1865, the white Protestant settlers of the old South have had an enormous influence on American society as a whole, particularly on its modern religious culture.
Theirs is today a culture of resentment against the mainstream Protestant elites formerly dominant in the United States, and against the "liberal elites" of recent years, whom they tend to see as "rootless cosmopolitans" (to use the Stalinist phrase) and enemies of true American values. President Bush is the most prominent current representative of their theological outlook, which sees the United States as the secular agent of divine redemption. Modern American politics cannot be fully understood without taking this into account; just as it cannot be understood without appreciating the primordial insecurity that exists behind the American crusade to change the world (and make it safe).
Lieven writes with Tocquevillean curiosity and detachment about the United States, which undoubtedly is one of the reasons his book has been received with considerable hostility. Americans can write critically about themselves, but usually do so with a certain complacent conviction that, despite all, the United States remains the world's last best hope. Lieven, the foreign observer, does not share that conviction.
The other reason for the hostility is that he writes about Israel's relationship with the United States since 1967 with an equal detachment, neither polemical nor defensive, but clinical. He treats the subject with an impolitic objectivity, concerned with the necessity to explain a phenomenon of great importance to American foreign relations, especially in the now crucial American conflict with much of the Islamic world having much indirect influence on American relations with Europe and Asia.
Lieven admires U.S. democracy, despite its currently demagogic politics and foreign policy. The "tremendous resilience and dynamism of American society" provide the resources for survival and success. But honesty in confronting the American situation is essential, and what Lieven says about American nationalism and its consequences must be taken seriously.
