The Nationalism of Great Powers

Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer

It may not be a good thing for the international community that the three mightiest nations on the planet are, arguably, also the three most nationalistic.

China, Russia and the United States all consider themselves to have world-historical missions to enlighten or save the world. They all view themselves as exemplars for other, “lesser,” states.

America was founded by Calvinist Protestants who considered themselves chosen by Providence to create a republican commonwealth in the New World: in the words of the Puritan leader John Winthrop in 1630, a “city upon a hill.”

America would become a “promised land,” a replica of the Old Testament covenant between God and the Israelites. It would thus become the country’s “manifest destiny” to expand across the continent and emerge as the world’s most powerful nation.

As a nation defined by a creed and sense of mission, Americans tend to equate their interests with those of humanity, which in turn informs their global posture. They consider themselves the “indispensable nation,” the country that “makes the world safe for democracy.”

The sense that the history and mission of the U.S. makes it superior to other nations is sometimes referred to as “American exceptionalism,” and it allows the country to see itself as the standard to which other states should be judged.

Russian nationalism, too, emerged from a religious base, in this case Russian Orthodox Christianity. Under the tsars, the Russian Empire was sustained by three pillars – autocracy, Russian ethnicity, and Orthodoxy.

Byzantine missionaries brought Christianity to Russia and it became an Eastern Orthodox state in the 10th century.

At the time, Constantinople was the “second Rome,” being the seat of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. But when Byzantium fell to the Muslim Ottoman Turkish Empire in 1453, the Russians saw themselves as having inherited the mantle of the faith.

They now deemed themselves the “third Rome,” stewards of the purest form of Christianity. “Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there will be no fourth,” proclaimed the Russian monk Philotheus of Pskov, in 1510.

In Russia, religion and state were fused, because of the Byzantine model known as Caesaro-papism. It was now a “holy empire.”

Those Russians who considered Russia as uniquely favored by God, known as Slavophiles, opposed the influences of Western Europe in Russia and were determined to protect Russian culture and traditions.

The Bolshevik revolutionaries who seized power in 1917 were nominally “anti-nationalists” and, of course, atheists, yet the Soviet form of nationalism, too, privileged the country above all others.

Moscow, now the capital of international Communism, remained a beacon for all those fighting for socialist revolution. The Soviet road to Communism was the path others needed to follow.

Today, of course, all that is gone, yet Vladimir Putin’s Russia remains an intensely nationalistic country, with religion again playing a part in buttressing the sense of Russian greatness.

Putin was determined to restore Russian dignity after the chaos that followed the collapse of the USSR and many Russians still dream of a reconstituted, though non-Communist, successor to the old Soviet state.

China is, of course, an ancient culture, one that, until a few centuries ago, was paramount in East Asia, and technologically superior to any other on earth.

Some form of a Chinese state has existed for some four millennia, and the Chinese concept of the world was largely a division between the civilized world and the “barbarians” beyond its frontiers, who as vassals of the empire were supposed to acknowledge Chinese suzerainty.

The intensity of Chinese nationalism therefore stems from the almost permanently dominant position occupied by the Chinese Empire within the world with which it maintained relations.

Humbled and humiliated by western powers after the 17th century, it has re-emerged as a great power. Ostensibly Communist, it is once again the “Middle Kingdom,” the centre of the world.

And it intends to make certain other countries acknowledge that status. Nor will it rest until it reclaims all the territories lost when it was weak, including Taiwan.

In his 1998 book Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, political philosopher Richard Rorty asserted that “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals.”

Still, too much of anything may be a bad thing. These three powers, given their historical and ideological traditions, may be headed for a collision of one sort or another. The rest of the world watches, worries, and waits.