National identity

“ And in the first place I say, that wherever there is in the Christian and civilized world a nationality of character—wherever there exists a nation of sufficient knowledge and wealth and population to constitute a Government, then a National Government is a necessary and proper result of nationality of character. ”

“ As we shall become a nation, I trust that we shall also form a national character, and that this character will be adapted to the principles and genius of our system of government: as yet we possess none; our language, manners, customs, habits, and dress depend too much upon those of other countries. Every nation, in these respects, should possess originality; there are not, on any part of the globe, finer qualities for forming a national character, than those possessed by the children of America. ”

“ What is the ideal which we must set before us? The first and foremost is the ideal of nationalism. Now what is Nationalism? It is, I conceive, a process through which a nation expresses itself and finds itself, not in isolation from other nations but, as part of a great scheme by which, in seeking its own expression and therefore its own identity, it materially assists the self-expression and self-realization of other nations as well. Diversity is as real as Unity. ”

“ The Central People's Government shall authorize the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to issue, in accordance with law, passports of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China to all Chinese citizens who hold permanent identity cards of the Region, and travel documents of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China to all other persons lawfully residing in the Region. ”

“ Still more powerful, in the opinion of our author, has been the spirit of intense and exclusive nationality which has in the present generation arisen in so many countries and which seeks to expel all alien or heterogeneous elements, and to mould the whole national being into a single definite type. ”

“ Nationalism as an historical phenomenon of a people with a common language and culture and with the consciousness of a common destiny was raised to a mythical, meta-historical plane. The essence of national unity was discovered to reside in race and soil; the cultural and spiritual creations of the nation were attributed to man's biological resources. ”

“ What is wanting is, that we should recognise a corresponding attachment to nationality as legitimate in every other people, and understand that its absence is a privation of the greatest good.
For, to repeat, not only the nobleness of a nation depends on the presence of this national consciousness, but also the nobleness of each individual citizen. ”

“ Take our own or any other country as an instance; where millions of brains, many of them by no means first-rate in power, go to form a national character, the highest (as each nation is apt to think of itself) in the world. ”

“ Nationality is expressed not merely through language, but through the entire culture—science and philosophy, jurisprudence and politics, morality and religion, art and technical science; custom and manners vary according to nationalities. For that reason national characteristics are felt and determined unequally. Not all nations are equally enlightened and determined to defend their nationality and its cultural contents against another nationality ”

“ The spirit of nationality represents the highest development of the idea of self-preservation. Its growth can be traced from the individual to the family, thence to the tribe and city, until the formation of the political state is obtained. In the last stages of this process, nationality attains perfection through homogeneity of its component individuals. ”

“ We shall never be in a better position than at the close of the war to insist upon a thorough understanding of matters and adoption of a uniform practice in international citizenship. [Pg 125] We now have citizenship matters to settle nationally and internationally for which we are ill prepared. ”

“ The civilization—the nationality—the institutions, civil and religious—and the mission of the United States, are all eminently American. Mental light and personal independence, constitutional union, national supremacy, submission to law and rules of order, homogeneous population, and instinctive patriotism, are all vital elements of American liberty, nationality, and upward and onward progress. ”

“ This is the origin of the American nationality, which did not spring from one family, one tribe, one country, but incorporates the vigorous elements of all civilized nations on earth.
This fact is not without great importance. It is an essential link in the chain of historical development. The student of history cannot fail to notice that when new periods of civilization break upon humanity, the people of the earth cannot maintain their national relations. New ideas are to be carried out by young nations. ”

“ Would it be reasonable to throw so great a burden on the individuals distinguished by their philanthropy and patriotism?
The object to be obtained, as an object of humanity, appeals alike to all; as a national object, it claims the interposition of the nation. It is the nation which is to reap the benefit. ”

“ In the highest civilizations the individual citizen is raised above himself and made part of a greater life, which we may call the National Being. He enters into it, and it becomes in oversoul to him, and gives to all his works a character and grandeur and a relation to the works of his fellow-citizens, so that all he does conspires with the labors of others for unity and magnificence of effect. ”

“ The problem of nationalities and cultures. What new schemes of attitudes and values, or what substitute for the isolated national state as an instrument of cultural expansion, will stop the fight of nationalities and cultures? ”

“ From the analysis of the idea of nationality as given above, it is evident that nationality and language, given by nature and history, cannot be reduced either to the economic or to the political factor—nationality is an independent social force. ”

“ A little over 100 years old, the nation-state was the most tangible product of the political practical experience in the pragmatic context whose underlying structure is so well reflected in literacy. Together with the nation-state, the modern notion of nationality was defined and became a major force of political life. As part of the political consciousness in the age of industrial production, national consciousness played a very precise role, ultimately expressed in all forms of nationalism. ”

“ Sincerely do I pray that your sentiment of nationality may never have occasion to be less—that the national pride in being the citizen of a great country, whose flag is known and respected on every sea and on every land, may increase with increasing years, and grow with growing strength. ”

“ When ideals which really lie at the root of our being are first proclaimed, all that is external in life protests. So were many great reformers martyred, but they left their ideals behind them in the air, and men breathed them and they became part of their very being. Nationality is a state of consciousness, a mood of definite character in our intellectual being, and it is not perceived first except in profound meditation ”

“ And in order that the unity of the world may be established it is essential that each nationality should proceed on its own lines and find fulfilment in self-expression and self-realisation. The Nationality of which I am speaking must not be confused with the conception of nationality as it exists in Europe to-day. ”

“ We must rely on the ideas common among our people, and on their power to discern among their countrymen the aristocracy of character and intellect.
Civilizations are externalizations of the soul and character of races. They are majestic or mean according to the treasure of beauty, imagination, will, and thought laid up in the soul of the people. That great mid-European State, which while I write is at bay surrounded by enemies, did not arrive at that pitch of power which made it dominant in Europe simply by militarism. ”

“ Indeed, what most needs fostering through the hundred years to come, in all parts of the United States, north, south, Mississippi valley, and Atlantic and Pacific coasts, is this fused and fervent identity of the individual, whoever he or she may be, and wherever the place, with the idea and fact of AMERICAN TOTALITY, and with what is meant by the Flag, the stars and stripes. We need this conviction of nationality as a faith, to be absorb'd in the blood and belief of the People everywhere, south, north, west, east, to emanate in their life, and in native literature and art. ”

“ All these ideals of freedom, of brotherhood, of power, of justice, of beauty, which have been at one time or another the fundamental idea in civilizations, are heaven-born, and descended from the divine world, incarnating first in the highest minds in each race, perceived by them and transmitted to their fellow-citizens; and it is the emergence or manifestation of one or other of these ideals in a group which is the beginning of a nation ”

“ It is the living nation—the nation organized for its historical mission—the nation of yesterday and of to-morrow." A nation, that is, is a people in so far as they are united by traditions and purposes; and national Sovereignty implies an attachment to national history and traditions which permits only the very gradual alteration of these traditions in the direction of increasing democracy. ”

“ My purpose has been to exhibit the European nations as a group of historic individuals with purposes, opportunities, and limitations analogous to those of actual individuals. An individual has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed. A national state is capable of development only in relation to the society of more or less nationalized states in the midst of which its history has been unfolded. ”

“ If we enquire what is the character of a nation, what is the essence of nationality, we may be told that it is to be discovered in one or in several of the before-mentioned departments, or in the complex of them all. ”

“ In a word, I am an American citizen. I have a heritage in each and every provision incorporated in the Constitution of my country, and should this heritage be attempted to be filched from me by any man or body of men, I should deem the provocation sufficiently grievous to stake even life in defense of it. I would plant every colored man in this country on a platform of this nature—to think for himself, to speak for himself, to act for himself. This is the ideal citizen of an ideal government such as ours is modelled to become. ”

“ And by far the best and the most useful leverage for this purpose is the appeal to nationality: because nationality is more than a creed or a doctrine or a code of conduct, it is an instinctive attachment. ”

“ In every intense and distinctive development of a nation, there dwells the actuality or the potentiality of some great gift to the common good of mankind; and I rejoice, I am sure we all rejoice, to see, in these days of clashing and crashing empires, that the clear idea of nationality, as if by the wonderful recreative power that is in nature, is rising in the esteem of good men all over the world, above and beyond the specious and seductive appeal of what has been called "the wider patriotism." ”

“ A State may in course of time produce a nationality; but that a nationality should constitute a State is contrary to the nature of modern civilisation. The nation derives its rights and its power from the memory of a former independence. ”

“ Thus the common historical fate hammers all people into a common character and at the same time builds the sentiment of national homogeneity—national feeling. This national feeling in the beginning is nothing else than a pure recognition of a certain homogeneity of certain group in contradistinction to others. ”

“ PROFESSOR MUENSTERBERG once defined the three stages of a nation's development as provincial, cosmopolitan, and national, and placed America—if we remember rightly—in a phase of transition between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. ”

“ If true nationality existed only in the externals of government, in an army, navy, commerce, a public seal and flag, and recognition by foreign powers, further discussion would clearly be useless, and the subject might as well at once be dropped. ”

“ But what are they? white men, fighting for their own country and flag, for their own rights of manhood and citizenship, for a present for themselves and a future for their children, for honor and fame. ”

“ When we analyze the strong feeling of nationality which is so potent at the present time, we recognize that it consists largely in the idea of the pre-eminence of that community whose member we happen to be,—in the pre-eminent value of 208its language, of its customs, and of its traditions, and in the belief that it is right to preserve its peculiarities and to impose them upon the rest of the world. ”

“ But it is, I think, fair to say that the value of nationality is at the origin, the bottom. Nationality is like the essential underground roots of a tree; the tree itself springs up into the universal air. Thus, in all countries national prejudices are strongest among the uneducated and the half-educated; whereas the more men become truly cultivated, the less marked in them become their national differences. ”

“ To all general purposes we have uniformly been one people each individual citizen everywhere enjoying the same national rights, privileges, and protection. ”

“ But the one universal expression for the entire community is in nationalism, the assertion of selfhood as a people. Religious revivals no longer draw the mind of the mass people. But the idea of nationality sweeps them. ”

“ Modern means of communication made possible the achievement of a cultural unity among the dismembered parts of nations ruled by various states—nationality became a conscious force, language its practical exponent, and social literature in its widest meaning became the expression and the most valuable organ of nationality. ”