Why do countries encourage nationalism?

Question

Coming from the subcontinent I was raised to love and defend my country no matter what (e.g. in discussions always say that no matter what my country did not do anything wrong).

I am now living in Germany. Because of its past the Germans are a bit sensitive with this topic. And here my eyes opened to the fact how dangerous or irrational nationalism can be.

I know it is a powerful tool used by the government/establishment to control people in masses. Are there also other reasons for governments to encourage nationalism? What would it take for people (especially in my part of the world or even the US) to realize the concept of nationalism is flawed?

UPDATE: the word patriotism was replaced with nationalism after reading most of the answers. The word nationalism is more appropriate for this question.

Answer 1

This is more sociology and even evolutionary biology than politics, in some way. Pretty much any un-cited statements in this answer are likely cited in one way or the other in Dawkins' "Selfish Gene".

People (as in, the actual species of homo sapiens) evolved in a way that make their circle of caring very small - we mostly care about well-being of our own genetic family, which is usually a pretty small unit (unless you are Genghis Khan :).

Beyond that, we are a social animal that is tribal, with the biggest social tribe our brains able to accommodate as a close social circle being in low 3 digits (I can dig up research, but IIRC it's something like 150 or 250 people tops).

As such, people "naturally" don't perceive others outside their family/tribe as "mine", on nearly the same level. Therefore, in order to motivate people to be social on a larger scale - including sacrificing something up to and including your life for the benefit of the larger society and individuals in it - you need other forms of motivation.

Typically, historically, there are three such motivations:

1. Force.

   If you don't do what you ought to for the larger society, its rulers (or rather their enforcers) will go all enforceful on you, to make you pay your taxes, or go as a soldier to war, or follow the laws of the rulers.

2. Leverage the above-mentioned familial/tribalism built in mechanisms, by subverting or diffusing them:

   • Royalty used to marry off their kids to other royalty to cement diplomatic alliances. You may not care to defend a neighboring kingdom as is, but if your nephew rules it, it is in your interest to do so.

   • In modern world, you try to social engineer people by faking these relationships - from "brothers" concept when referring to one another in many religions, to "comrade" salutation in socialist movements as the two obvious examples.

3. Or, you can subvert the genetic influence that limits your caring about socialization to family/tribe, by overriding it with memetic influence.

   The last bullet point in #2 is the beginning of that. The concept of "nation" and "patriotism" is the end point of that - you create a memetic system that postulates as an axiom that "your social circle is the whole country". If it's sticky enough - either memetically or socially or both - you get the people right where you (as a ruler/society) need and want them, mentally.

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P.S. To address the "What would it take for people (especially in my part of the world or even the US) to realize the concept of patriotism is flawed?" sub-question:

this is premised on the assumption that "the concept of patriotism is flawed" - which is debatable (and hard to debate either way since "flawed" isn't exactly well defined). However, one should take great care to not confuse the tool (patriotism) with the use of the tool (patriotism can be used to send Apollo 11 to the Moon or to lift millions out of poverty - or to send millions of young men to slaughter each other in the trenches of Europe).

Nor, to confuse the concept of "patriotism" (I care about my "larger tribe" of a nation) with "chauvinism" - or whatever else negative "ism" - which entails disliking/being antagonistic to other nations and their people's. Just as you can be proud of your child for winning a sporting event without hating or wishing ill will on your child's competitors - as per the above write-up, both kinds of feelings are rooted in the same exact origins.

Answer 2

I think you're mixing up patriotism and nationalism and a while ago I found an interesting quote that describes the difference:

"The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.", Sydney J. Harris, Source: Purely Personal Prejudices - Strictly Personal (1953)

Answer 3

Power, plain and simple.

The more patriotic the people in general, the more power the State has. The State is, after all, the single institution most representative of a country. It's easy to conflate the two, especially on purpose.

Note that this is true even if the State is benevolent. If you're running a government and your true objective is to raise the well-being of the people in general, you'll still want power with which to achieve that objective.

Answer 4

As answered by Noam Chomsky:

Question:

What in your view are the main reasons for patriotic feelings in the USA? Do you believe that such feelings can ever be justified? Do you think such feelings exist on a similar scale (in a similar manner) outside the USA, and do you think they can be justified in other countries?

Reply:

The questions are serious and important, and merit reflection and analysis.

To begin with, we have to be more clear about what we mean by patriotic feelings. For a time when I was in high school, I cheered for the school athletic teams. That's a form of patriotism — group loyalty. It can take pernicious forms, but in itself it can be quite harmless, maybe even positive. At the national level, what "patriotism" means depends on how we view the society. Those with deep totalitarian commitments identify the state with the society, its people, and its culture. Therefore those who criticized the policies of the Kremlin under Stalin were condemned as "anti-Soviet" or "hating Russia". For their counterparts in the West, those who criticize the policies of the US government are "anti-American" and "hate America"; those are the standard terms used by intellectual opinion, including left-liberal segments, so deeply committed to their totalitarian instincts that they cannot even recognize them, let alone understand their disgraceful history, tracing to the origins of recorded history in interesting ways. For the totalitarian, "patriotism" means support for the state and its policies, perhaps with twitters of protest on grounds that they might fail or cost us too much. For those whose instincts are democratic rather than totalitarian, "patriotism" means commitment to the welfare and improvement of the society, its people, its culture. That's a natural sentiment and one that can be quite positive. It's one all serious activists share, I presume; otherwise why take the trouble to do what we do? But the kind of "patriotism" fostered by totalitarian societies and military dictatorships, and internalized as second nature by much of intellectual opinion in more free societies, is one of the worst maladies of human history, and will probably do us all in before too long.

With regard to the US, I think we find a mix. Every effort is made by power and doctrinal systems to stir up the more dangerous and destructive forms of "patriotism"; every effort is made by people committed to peace and justice to organize and encourage the beneficial kinds. It's a constant struggle. When people are frightened, the more dangerous kinds tend to emerge, and people huddle under the wings of power. Whatever the reasons may be, by comparative standards the US has been a very frightened country for a long time, on many dimensions. Quite commonly in history, such fears have been fanned by unscrupulous leaders, seeking to implement their own agendas. These are commonly harmful to the general population, which has to be disciplined in some manner: the classic device is to stimulate fear of awesome enemies concocted for the purpose, usually with some shreds of realism, required even for the most vulgar forms of propaganda. Germany was the pride of Western civilization 70 years ago, but most Germans were whipped to presumably genuine fear of the Czech dagger pointed at the heart of Germany (is that crazier than the Nicaraguan or Grenadan dagger pointed at the heart of the US, conjured up by the people now playing the same game today?), the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy aimed at destroying the Aryan race and the civilization that Germany had inherited from Greece, etc.

That's only the beginning. A lot is at stake.

Answer 5

People will always form groups, be they natural (family) or not (programming language), and they will generally prefer their group over others (in-group preference). Neutrality when you belong to one of the groups (or even out-group preference) is quite rare.

Heritage/ancestry is one of those criteria humans base their groups on, as is who your favorite sports team is, what programming language or framework to use, which political party you like best, who is the best James Bond actor, or how potato is pronounced.

While a single human cannot maintain social relations up with every other individual of a large group, it's usually very easy to decide if an unknown person is "of one's kind" or not, and I think you'd need to prove that this is something artificial that is used by "the government" to control people.

Answer 6

Wikipedia explains a phenomenon known as in-group favoritism as follows :

In-group favoritism, sometimes known as in-group–out-group bias, in-group bias, or intergroup bias, is a pattern of favoring members of one's in-group over out-group members. This can be expressed in evaluation of others, in allocation of resources, and in many other ways.

This interaction has been researched by many psychologists and linked to many theories related to group conflict and prejudice. The phenomenon is primarily viewed from a social psychology standpoint. Studies have shown that in-group favoritism arises as a result of the formation of cultural groups. These cultural groups can be divided based off seemingly trivial observable traits, but with time populations grow to associate certain traits with certain behaviour, increasing covariation. This then incentivises in-group bias.

Two prominent theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of in-group favoritism are realistic conflict theory and social identity theory. Realistic conflict theory proposes that intergroup competition, and sometimes intergroup conflict, arises when two groups have opposing claims to scarce resources. In contrast, social identity theory posits a psychological drive for positively distinct social identities as the general root cause of in-group favoring behavior.

In layman's terms, in-group favoritism is a social phenomenon that consists of people associating and identifying with certain collectives and then favoring members of that collectives over people who are not a member of that collective. At the psychological level, this phenomenon can be traced back to a general need to feel part of something greater. At a higher level, it appears to have grown out of the necessity to cope with millennia of inter-group competition between different tribes, clans, etc.

Now, this "group" could be based on anything that unites people. It could be shared gender, shared religion or shared race. But it could also be a hobby you share with others. Anything that you have in common with other people can result in a group identity among members of the group and therefore in favoritism between members of that group vis-a-vis non-members of that group. Ideologues and political leaders who understand this mechanism manipulate this mechanism to create cults around a certain group of shared characteristics.

If you look at all inhabitants of a country, there's but a single trait shared between all members of that country. Thus, for the leader of said nation, membership of that nation is the one characteristic you want to emphasis to create a sense of "belonging part of a greater whole", especially if you want to unite your population against a certain enemy. This is what is known as civic nationalism. However, other forms of nationalism exist based on different criteria. Religious nationalism, for example, puts its emphasis on a shared religion and ethnic nationalism on a shared ancestry.

Whichever form of nationalism is prevalent in a region largely depends on that nation's ethnic and religious composition and the main causes of conflict between different groups within that region. However, each form of nationalism shares the same roots in in-group favoritism and political leaders using it for their political agendas not just with each other but also with eg. Feminism or Marxism, where respectively gender and class are the main characteristics of group identity.

Whichever characteristic is used as the basis of group identity, the more one's own individual identity is intertwined with one's group identity, the more one is willing to both die and kill for that group and everything it stands for! And the more fanatics any group has, the more powerful it becomes.

Answer 7

Survival and natural selection. If people aren't patriotic, they won't fight to defend the country well. If they don't defend the country well it will eventually be subjugated by a country whose people do fight for their country. The country that takes over, once in charge, will teach the people to be patriotic to them and if they remain in charge long enough that teaching will take hold. Thus non-patriotic countries are replaced by patriotic countries and the all countries end up being patriotic.

Answer 8

I don't know about "countries" and I don't know that I agree with that statement. What I do know is that showing pride in your country, your town, your village, your locale, and your family is just an extension of showing pride in yourself and your own people, which is an extremely healthy and some might say, morally good instinct. Having a high self esteem is a good thing for all manner of reasons, and this is just an extension of that same thing.

I think you'll find that a lot of people who dislike nationalism were influenced by the anti-nationalist Communist and Communist-Anarchist thought of the past, during the 1600s or so, which was specifically created and written by exiles, undesirables, and other people who did not have a community to which they belonged to. So lo and behold - naturally, they sought to downplay the idea of nations, because to them the idea of a nation has been nothing but a pain, and encouraged radical egalitarianism, where everybody who is basically not a dog or a cat is "my fellow human", which is just stupid, because that's not the only thing that makes a human a human, his cultural baggage, the values, his biology, race, sex, society and economic performance do.