Patriotic duties
For Love of Country
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
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