“The English, the English, the English are best. I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.” Thus sang the English satirists Michael Flanders and Donald Swann in the 1960s.
Their ditty encapsulated the dangerous absurdity of nationalism. It is a mentality that goes beyond the assertion of a right to self-determination of a group of people who identify together. It involves a collective sense of superiority over other tribes, races, creeds or religions.
Nationalism is about keeping other people out or down, and pursuing national advantage at the expense of others. It is the midwife of other “isms” such as jingoism, militarism, protectionism and, yes, racism. In today’s Europe, it is often directed against immigrants in general and Muslims in particular, although it is no longer respectable to say the same things about Jews.
In the 21st century, nationalism is the enemy of the national interest, which requires working with others to manage trade, the climate and security. That means making compromises and sometimes agreeing to be outvoted in a community of democracies.
The give-away about nationalists is that they tend to abhor other people’s nationalism, even as they feed off it. Nigel Farage, UKIP’s leader in the European Parliament, refused to join forces with Marine Le Pen’s Front National because of what he called “prejudice and anti-semitism” in the French party.
Conservative Brexiters who idealise a free-trading “Global Britain”, even as they distance the UK from its biggest export market, are understandably uncomfortable with Donald Trump’s “America first” protectionism, which stands in the way of their chimera of a tariff-free Anglosphere.
If we fear muscle-flexing Chinese or Russian nationalism, condemn Hindu nationalism when it discriminates against non-Hindus, or Buddhist nationalism when it fuels persecution of Muslim Rohinga in Myanmar, why should we feel differently about British nationalism?
On the left, “socialism in one country” nationalism has endured beyond the death of Stalin. The hard left advocated Brexit in the belief that by leaving a neo-liberal capitalist club, Britain would be free to pursue an interventionist economic policy.
Nationalism may have been a progressive force in the 19th century, when fragmented or oppressed peoples such as the Germans, Italians or Greeks fought for unification against monarchies or foreign rulers that had divided and ruled their countries. But it fuelled colonial rivalries and wars of conquest that wreaked devastation in Europe and around the globe.
The EU was established to make such conflicts impossible by spinning a web of economic and political interdependence to the mutual benefit of its member states and peoples.
In the current stand-off between Catalonia and the Spanish national government, Catalan nationalists say they are pursuing independence – in breach of the Spanish constitution – because they are the victims of Spanish nationalist discrimination.
Like Scottish separatists, the Catalans seek sympathy across Europe by proclaiming that unlike the UK nationalists who drove the campaign for Brexit, they are fervent pro-Europeans. Catalonia wants nothing more than to take its seat in a federal EU, they say.
Yet their nationalism – linguistic rather than ethnic – is just as suspect as other brands. It is built on historical myths or half-truths, on a sense of economic and cultural superiority over other parts of Spain, and on a distorted conflation of modern Spain’s democratically elected conservative government with Franco’s fascist dictatorship. The risk of violence is never far away.
In his final address to the European Parliament in 1995 in the midst of the wars of Yugoslav succession, French President Francois Mitterrand appealed for Europeans to overcome ancient prejudices and enmities. “What I am asking of you is almost impossible because it means vanquishing our history,” he said. “And yet if we do not overcome it, you must realise that a general rule will prevail: nationalism is war.”