As Anzac day approaches, Australian flags start flourishing in our streets and on the young as fashion statements. To many, this display of patriotism/nationalism is inoffensive and appears even as a sign of cohesion. But it may also be a worrying facet of the growing appeal found in exclusionary identity politics.
As defined by Benedict Anderson, nationalism rests on the idea of an 'imagined political community'. Although the tensions which accompany the idea of a nation and of a national feeling are evident, most would associate this feeling with some kind of innate strength.
Most of us would have felt this irrational pride at the exploits of some sportsperson or actor. That they live thousands of kilometres away, perhaps even overseas, that they earn far more than the average person, and that our chances of meeting them are extremely low, does not seem to matter. We may still feel closer to them than to the friendly salesperson of 'foreign' background at the corner shop.
Nationalism forces us to identify with people with whom we have nothing in common but a birth place and a government; this birth place can extend, as in Australia, as far as a continent.
Supporters of nationalism would reply that we share much more. Fellow citizens share a common history: they are bound by the dead, by a common heritage and destiny. But what helped nationalism to survive, apart from people's wish to belong to defined and limited communities, was the possibility of selecting what enters one's heritage. The argument for shared history as the basis of nationalism takes into account primarily the glorious elements of one's country. At best, it twists the darkest hours in order to give them a veneer of respectability.
The appraisal of the role of France during the Second World War by the French is telling. The Vichy regime gave birth to the 'Vichy syndrome': denial became the tagline and General De Gaulle praised an abstract 'eternal France' for having freed itself. From this myth was derived an apparent unity against the enemy and the rejection of the Vichy regime as illegitimate. Vichy was a mere parenthesis, an unfortunate accident: it was alien to France.
An important part of the French population found morally reassuring the idea of this quasi-universal Resistance. When Robert Paxton rightfully argued that Vichy had collaborated en masse, willingly and ideologically, the reaction from France was extreme and the