21 January 1999 Edition
New in print: Patriotic duties
For Love of Country
By Maurizio Viroli
Published by Clarendon Press
By Maurizio Viroli
Published by Clarendon Press
To be perfectly honest I never gave much time or consideration to to analysing just what the differences were there if any between patriotism and nationalism. If pushed most of us would probably describe patriots as people who obsessed about sport or the more meaningless institutions. You know the people who stop all work because someone is representing Ireland and ``wearing the green''.
Rugby supporters are the example that spring readily to mind or those people who lose the head when someone talks during a rendering of the national anthem.
Defining nationalism was and is a much more difficult proposition. In some ways many republicans shy away from analysis of nationalism because there is a comfortable belief that our definition of nationalism rests partly on our belief in a right to national self determination and partly in the unquestioned dogma that the one of the core elements of republican struggle is the belief that we are better off looking after our own interests collectively. The fact that the 26-County state history has been one of ongoing profiteering and exploitation by vested interests and golden circles running the administration in their own interests is overlooked.
Like many others I have taken comfort in the simple belief that in a united Ireland real class politics would emerge and the socialist republican analysis would have a new resonance.
At another level the writings of Fintan O'Toole, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Ruth Dudley Edwards. Roy Foster et al convinced that Irish nationalism no matter what the definition was something to defend
Then you read a book and within the first four or five pages your world view has not just beeng upended, more like turned inside out, boil washed and tumbled dry.
For Love of Country by Maurizio Viroli is described in its subtitle as An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism. This indeed it is and something more. Within the first pages Viroli outlines a crucial difference between patriotism and nationalism. He says ``the enemies of republican patriotism are tyranny, despotism, oppression and corruption the enemies of nationalism are cultural contamination, heterogeneity, racial impurity and social, political and intellectual disunion''.
Viroli wants us to make a distinction between patriotism and nationalism. He says the crucial distinction lies in the priority or the emphasis: for the patriots, the primary value is the republic and the free way of life that the republic permits; for the nationalists the primary values are the spiritual and cultural unity of the people''.
The conclusions of Viroli's theory are that ``The ideological victory of the language of nationalism has relegated he language of patriotism to the margins of contemporary political thought''. He wants us to create a renewed belief in patriotism that bypasses the negative aspects of nationalism which have characterised nation states in the 19th and 20th centuries.
In the final chapter titled Patriotism without Nationalism Viroli writes that ``Patriotism will result ``in a love of country in its purest form: a love that does not come from excitement and admiration for the greatness and glory of our country, but from the perception of its weakness and fragility''.
Viroli's book takes a lot of concentration when reading but it is well worth the effort. Anyone interested in the ideologies of Irish republicanism or nationalism should give it a read.
BY NEIL FORDE