Why such zeal in celebrating the state?
Except in banana republics, the mother of all national day celebrations must be Bastille Day, celebrated last week in France. The July 14 military parade, attended by U. S. President Donald Trump, illustrated again that nothing matches the pomp and majesty of the French state.
It is, of course, all about stoking national pride. Before France’s July 14, there is America’s July 4, and Canada’s July 1, among others. A visitor landing from Mars in July would have a good chance of touching down in the middle of some pageant of national pride.
But why does national pride exist? Why are ordinary people proud of a country where they didn’t choose to be born, to which they have likely contributed nothing especially significant, and which is often not really altogether better in many respects than other countries of which other people are equally blindly proud?
As with every social phenomenon, national pride is a product of supply and demand. Look at demand first. Humans have inherited tribal instincts from evolution, and are tempted to transfer these instincts to groups larger than tribes. But modernity, we would think, has taught people to dampen these instincts in favour of a more individualist identity, within what Friedrich Hayek, the 1974 Nobel economics prizewinner, saw as an abstract social order. So demand for national pride should be low in a modern, advanced country.
Canada knew little national pride until Pierre Elliot Trudeau fuelled it. There had been a sort of national pride that did smoulder in Quebec, reminding us that “national” is a matter of definition; and some old British imperial pride survived in English Canada. But there was not even an official national flag — a blessing. Even today, Canadians would rather watch American TV than “national content.” In the U. K. too, national pride and the flag have historically been kept relatively discreet.
As Leonard Cohen sang, America is “the cradle of the best and the worst.” Although the military seems everywhere in that country, there is no central military parade like in France — although reportedly Trump was tempted to have one for his inauguration. Independence Day celebrations are a decentralized, local affair, including for some local military events.
Even in France, I suspect that Bastille Day celebrations would be sparse and low-key if left to private initiatives and local governments. In July, half of the French crash on the beaches and couldn’t care less about the republic and national pride.
The point is that the market of national pride is first and foremost a supply phenomenon, a product of state propaganda. National pride is a state business, pushed by those who benefit from it. If you are looking for a case of demand creation against the consumer’s interest, don’t look at capitalism, look at the state.
The state — that is, the network of politicians and bureaucrats manning government institutions — has a direct interest in national pride. It helps persuade citizens to pay “their” taxes more or less cheerfully, to obey minute regulations, and to agree to become cannon fodder for the state in times of war.
Like everything (or at least nearly everything) government does, its national-pride business creates winners and losers. It makes some citizens gleam with pride, but others blush in shame. The Vichy regime used a selective version of national pride to persecute France’s Jewish citizens during the Second World War.
We get glimpses of the other side of national pride in everyday life. One- third of Americans see Trump as an object of American pride; another third hate him. Criticizing a new protectionist measure against takeovers of Dutch companies by foreign firms, an investor is quoted by the Financial Times as saying, “I am feeling ashamed as a Dutchman.”
Can national pride or at least patriotism be useful? At times. Remember the scene in Casablanca, when the French patrons at Rick’s Café start singing La Marseillaise to drown German officers singing a patriotic song of their own? Some states may help preserve a space of liberty in a liberticidal world. In general, though, national pride makes the state great, and making the state great means making individuals small.
The bottom line is that we need to be wary of those peddling national pride. There are few consumer-protection laws in that business. I fear that Trump — with his lapel-pin flag as conspicuous as a shield — will have got in France a few bad ideas about how to make himself great again.