Americans face a unique challenge today in defining their identities. Globalizing markets have connected us with faraway peoples and places, allowing us to buy cheap goods manufactured in nations with limited labor and environmental protections. Globalization has also spurred heavy migration and a demand for freer international trade. Our identities may follow markets, reducing the centrality of the nation-state in our lives.
Is it a good thing for our identities to be globalized? I would argue no. Progressive politics, including the redistribution of wealth between the well-off and the less so, is predicated on a coherent and vibrant nationalism. Paradoxically, in an age of globalization, our schools must make Americans more aware of their connections to the world while reinvigorating the teaching of our national history.
History’s power is its ability to shape our collective identity. By teaching national history, we help create nationals. All identities are premised on shared stories. To be a member of a community is to identify with its past and to seek to sustain that community in the present to better it in the future. That is as true for nations as for religious, ethnic, and professional communities. As the political scientist Rogers Smith argues in Stories of Peoplehood (Cambridge University Press, 2003), national identities are based on the vitality of shared narratives that place us in the stream of history. Stories make us who we are.
Teaching national history is vital to ensuring a public that is capable of sustaining our democracy. National history promotes patriotism. Readers inclined to dismiss patriotism as a regressive and aggressive ideology may be inclined to dismiss national history for that very reason. We all know the violence that has been committed in the name of nationalism over the past two centuries.
National stories should be both celebratory and critical. Teaching national history does not mean promoting a glorious narrative of America, nor does it mean focusing exclusively on its worst moments. Like the history of any nation-state, American history is full of glory and high ideals as well as their all-too-frequent betrayal. Celebratory stories foster love for one’s nation, while critical stories ensure that love does not become blind devotion. It is the combination of love of one’s nation and awareness of its failures that makes acts of citizenship possible. Without love, who cares? Without critical awareness, how will citizens ascertain the truth about their nation’s actions and seek to make things better?
That point was made by Todd Gitlin in his book The Intellectuals and the Flag (Columbia University Press, 2006). Gitlin’s intellectual roots and passion lie in 1960s activism, yet he argues that the American left has become too infatuated with the “pleasures of condemnation.” It should, he argues, once again embrace patriotism. Patriotism, Gitlin makes clear, is not simply “symbolic displays” and jingoism but “a sense of responsibility.”
Why can’t we just love everyone? That is the ideal for many advocates of cosmopolitanism who blame nation-states for all the horrors of the modern world. If we get rid of nations and embrace the globe as one single human community, we would care about everyone. Think globally, act locally.
No one has made that case more forcefully than the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who, in her book For Love of Country? (Beacon Press, 2002), urges America’s schools to abandon their emphasis on national history to foster a global cosmopolitan identity. Nussbaum condemns the idea that we might give Americans “a special salience in moral and political deliberation, and pride in a specifically American identity and a specifically American citizenship a special power among the motivations to political action.” If all human beings are created equal, how can we love some more than others?
Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism is a noble dream, and like all dreams, it discounts reality. Human beings have always been members of communities. The nation-state is a modern invention, a modern community. But all communities are invented. Ethnic, racial, and religious groups are no less the products of historical imagination than nations. There is no inherent reason to privilege ethnic or religious groups over national ones. If we abandon the nation-state, we will not produce a global community but a world divided by other kinds of communities, including the most pernicious of all: class.
Global capitalism has spawned new inequalities and produced its own winners and losers. Nationalism helps connect the rich to the poor in our midst—it ties us together vertically. Liberated from the nation, global capitalism’s elites will no longer feel responsible for those who live in squalor near them. Why should they? They would no longer be emotionally connected to them. Cosmopolitanism will not eradicate human beings’ tendency to organize themselves into groups, it will simply rid us of the nation, the one group that has the power and ability to unite us in ways that make progressive politics possible.
Yet Nussbaum’s point is a good one. We must consider all human beings equal. Can we do so while also teaching our students to take pride in being American? Yes, and the political philosopher Michael Walzer lights the way when he distinguishes between the “thin” and “thick” stories that define us.
Thin stories, Walzer argues in Thick and Thin: Moral Argument at Home and Abroad (University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), are those that connect us to all human beings. These stories remind us of our universal rights and obligations. But our deepest commitments, those that make us act as citizens, emerge through our membership in particular communities to which we feel stronger emotional links. The global community remains too abstract to move us in that way. National histories, however, can foster thick stories, those that unite people into a cohesive community, prompting other-directed acts of good citizenship.
Nationalism gives every citizen a shared inheritance, a common tradition. Globalized identities, like global capitalism, destroy this inheritance in order to liberate individuals, like capital, from national responsibilities. But without nationalism, democratic politics would become nothing but the pursuit of self-interest, and the best-financed interests will emerge victorious. How could it be otherwise if citizens do not have a tradition to which they hold themselves, and their leaders, accountable?
That brings us back to the importance of teaching American history in schools and colleges today. It is precisely because globalization threatens to undermine national borders that we need to act as teachers to save them. Without the love that comes from patriotism, education that emphasizes citizenship is devoid of meaning. Good citizens must learn to love their fellow citizens before civic education can be a productive endeavor.
Emphasizing national history does not diminish the need for America’s students to have a greater awareness of world history and America’s role in the world. These are not mutually exclusive endeavors. Global narratives might remind us of our thin, or universal, commitments. They will also help citizens understand the relationship between their actions at home and American foreign policy. Being a patriotic citizen does not absolve one of the obligation to foster a more just global order. But, unlike the globe, a democratic nation-state is composed of citizens who can take responsibility for their country’s actions on the world stage.
The nation is not the only source of one’s personal identity. We each belong to religious, ethnic, professional, and other communities that shape us and to which we feel responsible. These communities make us complex beings, capable of balancing our obligations to our nation with those to others locally and around the world. But even as we Americans become more aware of our responsibilities to the larger world, democratic politics relies on our shared responsibility to each other.
