The Maccabaean

ONE of the most serious obstacles in the way of international peace and of the international organization which must precede it is the prevalent confusion of mind on the subject of nationality. There has been much talk in the last hundred years on both sides of the Atlantic about the principles of nationality and the rights and destinies of nations, but very little attempt has been made to subject the conceptions "nation" and "nationality" to any strict analysis. Men are not purely logical animals, and there are few spheres where they are less logical than in politics. It is not surprising that they should be ready to spend their devotion and pour out ther lives in thousands for a cause or a principle of which they have never tried, and would not be able, to give a rational account. There is indeed a natural reluctance to submit what we feel to be intimate and sacred to the cold analysis of reason or to "peep and botanize" in a field where other men have shed their blood without doubt or question. Nor should I venture to suggest discussion on the matter at all had I not come to feel that it is only after having grasped the distinctive meaning and value of nationality, and having disentangled it from other conceptions with which it has unhappily become associated, that men will ever begin to see their way towards a better political organization of the world and the effective prevention of war.

There are two great difficulties which confront the inquirer into the meaning of nationality. The first is the difficulty of nomenclature. The whole question has become confused owing to the loose use of words. Different words are used to express the same idea, and the same word is used to cover several different ideas. For instance, the most vital distinction in the discussion is that between citizenship and nationality—between the perfectly clear and definite conception of legal and moral obligation conveyed by the words citizen and civc, and the vaguer and more intimate conception of nationality. The distinction is really a very simple one, and is familiar to every thinking person who lives, as English-speaking people do, in a community in which nationality and citizenship are not co-extensve; it is familiar, in fact, to everyone who has not what I make bold to say is the misfortune to live in the confined atmosphere of a “national state.”

Yet this perfectly simple distinction is obscured by the fact that the words state and nation have become specialized for Americans in a way exactly contrary to that in which British citizens, whether English or Canadian or Indian, are beginning to think of them. If the British commonwealth is ever federalized it will not consist of United States but of Dominions ; and no one is ever likely to speak or think of its component members, spread over five continents, as a “British nation.” British nationality is a non-existent thing. The British commonwealth, like the Americans, consists of a congeries of nationalities, many of which, like the French Canadians, the Dutch South Africans and the Indian Moslems, have close national affinities, racial, linguistic or religious, with nationalities outside. A distinguished English thinker wrote a book the other day under the title “Towards International Government,” making proposals for the enlargement of The Hague tribunal after the war. But in reality international government is a thing which we have long had with us. English-speaking people on both sides of the Atlantic are perfectly familiar with the exercise of author-

ity by a single government and a single system of law over peoples of many different races and languages and at many different levels of intellectual development. It is only the backward or backsliding governments of Central and Eeastern Europe which find it difficult to recognize the duty of meting out equal justice to the different nationalities under their sway. The problem before The Hague is to organize not international government—for that concerns the internal policy of the various sovereign states— but interstate government. And the way to promote its solution is not attempting to minimize the inherent differences between nation and nation, or to empty the conception of nationality of all its wealth of traditional meaning and association, but to disentangle from it the clear and familiar conception of civic obligation, and so to enable men, whatever their nationality, more and more to think of themselves as citizens of the world and responsible, through the actions of their government, for the welfare of the world as a political whole.

ea u el ee a re er ec There is a second difficulty. The real reason why nationality has never been clearly analyzed is because its manifestations are so various and disparate as to defy definition. We speak of the “sentiment” or the “principle” of nationality. But sentiments and principles, as the psychologists tell us, are not ultimate things. They are compounded or have grown up, under the influence of environment, out of instincts and dispositions which are inherent in man’s nature. The sentiment of nationality is thus in every case a composite growth, due partly to innate qualities and partly to a social tradition in which environment has played its part. Thus no two manifestations of nationality are really identical. Mother-love is mother-love all the world over. We need no knowledge of history or literature to explain to us how an Irish or Polish or Jewish mother feels towards her children. But without a knowledge of Irish and Polish and Jewish history and social traditions, and without a deliberate and difficult imaginative effort based upon that knowledge, it is impossible for us to understand or appreciate the complex social forces which are roughly summed up in the words Irish, Polish, and Jewish nationalism. National consciousness is in fact a Prateus; it is always changing its form and substance, it varies from place to place and from age to age. Sometimes, as in the eighteenth century, Italy, seems to be entirely submerged as a driving force; sometimes, as the history of the Roman Empire shows, it dies out or can be educated out altogether or improved away out of recognition ; yet it is strangely tenacious and has unexpected possibilities of hidden life and sudden re-emergence, as is shown not only by the nineteenth century experience of the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary, but by recent developments in the British Empire and the United States.

This is not the place to analyze why some nationalities have died and others survived. When Paul the Jew spoke in Greek to an audience of Lycaonians, as a man might speak in English to an audience of immigrants in America to-day, the simple folk were so much stirred that they cried out in their native language —emphatically no Kultursprache. Lycaonia was a nationality then. But it has long since passed into the limbo of history, and the descendants of that audience have become just nameless "Anatolians," though scholars think they can trace a faint connection, the very ghost of a social tradi-