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Boasting Of Our Country's Smallness

True patriotism is defined by the boundaries of your affection, not the boundaries of a real or potential political unit: Your country can extend just 20 miles from your home or all the way to Ottawa, depending on your roots, mood, and experiences.  Nationalism can transcend borders as well, but it does so in a […]

True patriotism is defined by the boundaries of your affection, not the boundaries of a real or potential political unit: Your country can extend just 20 miles from your home or all the way to Ottawa, depending on your roots, mood, and experiences.  Nationalism can transcend borders as well, but it does so in a much bloodier manner. ~Jesse Walker

On the whole, I agree with this.  Here are some of the main differences between the two things.  One is the difference between the immediate and particular on the one hand and the distant and the abstract on the other.  Another is the difference between the patriot, who typically does not have designs of someone else’s territory, much less justifying those designs on the grounds that the land “really” belongs to his nation.  A Mexican patriot is interested in the welfare of Mexico and has no cause to start fights with anyone, but the irredentist dreaming of Aztlan will have expansionist ambitions that can readily lead to conflict if enough people embrace that goal.  Patriots are typically content to take pride in their own country, while nationalists tend to need to triumph over someone else.  (There can be exceptions, but these seem to be pretty reliable general statements). 

Euskadian patriots could find Basque nationalism to be a threat to their country, and would reject groups such as ETA because they love their country.  That points to something else important: patriots are not necessarily compelled to seek political independence, while for nationalists it is almost a requirement.  Nationalists usually aspire to a state of their own, and nationalist historiography places great emphasis on the periods that included past “national” states as the best periods of specifically national history.  A history of one’s country, however, might include much that nationalist historiography wants to obscure or erase, especially if it involves settlement of the land by other peoples, and a patriot would, I think, be able to acknowledge and take account of these other parts of the story more readily than a nationalist, or rather you can tell the difference between the two positions based on their responses.      

Patriotism entails attachment to and affection for a certain piece of ground and the people who live on it, and it requires you to desire the good of your country.  We can imagine how either a centralising or expansionist nationalist or an invading irredentist could threaten your country and try to divide it with political boundaries on the basis of old historical claims, the ethnic make-up of the population or simply in terms of expansion and conquest.  In those cases, the patriot will defend his piece of ground, but there is no way that I can see that a patriot would ever wish to start a war for any reason.  Nationalists seem often to be on the lookout for pretexts for picking fights, perceiving threats where they don’t exist and exaggerating them when they do.  Countries can straddle political boundaries, but it is usually the mark of the nationalist to want to align political boundaries to include multiple different countries, either in part or in full, within a single state.  Nationalism advances  at the expense of numerous local patriotisms.  (The unification movements in Italy and Germany are good examples of this, and the experience of southern Italy and Sicily at the hands of the liberal nationalists is typical of regions that resist consolidation.)

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