Nationlism editorial - Essay Example

Nationalism There is a wide-spread western point of view that nationalism is a dirty word in the United s, viewed with disdain and associated with Old World parochialism and imagined supremacy. "Yet those who discount the idea of American nationalism may readily admit that Americans, as a whole, are extremely patriotic. When pushed to give details about the difference between patriotism and nationalism, those same skeptics might concede, reluctantly, that there is a distinction, but no real difference.

Political scientists have labored to prove such a difference, equating patriotism with allegiance to one's country and defining nationalism as sentiments of ethno-national superiority" (Pei 31). Today's controversies on this topic are an eerie echo of the debate over immigration and assimilation that gripped the nation in the opening years of the 20th century. Henry James, touring New York City in 1906 after nearly a quarter century in Europe, visited Ellis Island - "the first harbour of shelter and stage of patience for the million or so of immigrants knocking at our official door" (cited in Brimelow 33).

The scene was overpowering to James. He wrote that it brought home to the observer "the degree in which it is his American fate to share the sanctity of his American mind, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien" (ibid.) James himself now felt alien in his native land, as if the newcomers had taken "settled possession" and natives had lost it - "the implication of which, in its turn, is that, to recover confidence and regain lost ground, we, not they, must make the surrender and accept the orientation" (ibid.).What James found troubling, others found bracing.

In widely read essays and books, Horace Kallen suggested a model of "cultural pluralism" to replace the idea of the melting pot. Writing in the Nation in 1915, Kallen challenged both the fact and wisdom of the assimilation of immigrants to Anglo-Saxon America. He argued that the very process of Americanization produced "dissimilation" by bringing to light "permanent group distinctions" (Wortham 270). What was needed was not unison - everyone "singing the old Anglo-Saxon theme 'America'" - but rather agreement, in which the older theme might well be dominant but nonetheless "one among many.

" Such themes, according to Kallen, were "ancestrally determined." In his famous phrase, we can change our politics, philosophies, and spouses, but we "cannot change [our] grandfathers" (cited in Wortham 271). Thus, the task before America was to offer "conditions under which each may attain the perfection that is proper to its kind." Intellectual and essayist Randolph Bourne took a third position. He was enthralled by the possibilities presented by the immigration of new groups to America. American culture and traditions had always been supplied by immigrants.

"The Anglo-Saxon was just the first immigrant" whose "predominance in America [is] little more than a predominance of priority" (cited in Aleinikoff 80). New groups that sustain and expand their cultures here add something distinct to America: "The foreign cultures have not been melted down or run together, made into some homogeneous Americanism, but have continued to be distinct but cooperating to the greater glory and benefit, not only of themselves but of all the native 'Americanism' around them" (ibid).

Bourne noted the absence in the United States of the nationalist brutality occurring elsewhere in the world. The mix of groups that produced awful bloodshed in Europe was "somehow non-explosive" in America. The United States has been witnessing, "however unappreciativelya thrilling and bloodless battle of Kulturs" that "has been played out peacefully here in the mind" (cited in Aleinikoff 81) Remarkably, America had achieved "a cosmopolitan federation of national colonies, of foreign cultures, from whom the sting of devastating rivalry has been removed" (ibid.). "As long as we thought of Americanism in terms of the melting-pot," Bourne wrote, "our American cultural tradition lay in the past.

It was something to which the new Americans were to be moulded. In the light of our changing ideal of Americanism, we must create the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future. It will be what we all together make out of this incomparable opportunity of attacking the future in a new key" (ibid.).Has the world of James, Kallen, and Bourne returned We live in tender times, when statements of subnational or transnational affiliations are too frequently read as disloyalty and claims about the value of the nation-state are too frequently deemed nativist.

We would do well to heed Bourne's call for an open-minded and optimistic view of America. "The failure of the melting-pot, far from finishing the great American democratic research, means that it has only just begun," he wrote. "Whatever American nationalism turns out to be, we see already that it will have a color richer and more exciting than our ideal has hitherto encompassed" (cited in Aleinikoff 82). That confidence ought to inform our view of migration and our country. Works CitedAleinikoff, T.

Alexander. "A Multicultural Nationalism." The American Prospect Jan.-Feb. 1998: 80.Brimelow, Peter. "Time to Rethink Immigration." National Review 22 June 1992: 30.Pei, Minxin. "The Paradoxes of American Nationalism." Foreign Policy May-June 2003: 30.Wortham, Anne. "The Melting Pot, Part 2 - America's Cultural-Institutional Core." World and I Nov. 2001: 269.