Nationalism

Would those Catholics promoting integralism instead of liberalism support a nationalist-isolationist foreign policy, or empire?

We shouldn’t redraw existing borders carelessly. But when trying to hold a state together becomes more disruptive to international order than allowing it to break apart, when one group mistreats another within a state, when a government loses the ability and authority to govern, the sensible course is to let that state dissolve.

The current nationalist fervor could actually be a sign of nation-states’ weakness, a gasp that belies a lack of confidence in it as a form of government that can adequately represent a people and govern them fairly.

Cosmopolitanism can be a particularly pernicious temptation because it invites us to love the idealized reality of humanity above our actual flesh and blood neighbors who live next door.

Christians should remember this: any political theology that treats its own people as a divinely chosen political community treads on heretical soil.

While there is enormous merit to Michael Doran’s binary and overall thesis in his First Things essay, there are some complicating factors that obscure the “wondrous chasm” between Jacksonianism and Progressivism.

Born a hundred years ago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would write The Gulag Archipelago, a blistering account of the Gulag system under Stalin. George Kennan called this novel “the most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever to be levied in modern times.”

Despite his errors and overstatements, Cavanaugh is helpful for thinking through the perils of nations and nationalism in an era when both seem to be enjoying a renaissance. He is best read as a theologian, not a historian, and a polemical theologian whose strident claims are best met with a healthy dose of skepticism.

The Palestinian national movement is an illusory empire. Constructed on poetry and prejudice and generations of fantasy, it too must come crashing down so that it can be rebuilt, this time on a more solid basis.