Critical patriotism: What the past can teach us about our future

By Bethany Pace on June 22, 2021

With the recent Flag Day and impending July 4 celebrations, Americans have an opportunity to consider the virtue of patriotism and its role in our country.

Is there something about it we can learn from other countries and cultures? What if patriotism is less about flag waving and more about the ways in which we connect to one another across communities and experiences?

In his new book “Modernism in Trieste: The Habsburg Mediterranean and the Literary Invention of Europe, 1870–1945,” Salvatore Pappalardo, Ph.D., associate professor in English, explores questions of patriotism and nationalism in 19^th- and early 20^th-century Europe.

The TU Newsroom spoke with him recently about how Americans might consider reframing what it means to be patriotic and how the pursuit of critical patriotism may be the key to creating a more just and inclusive society.

Generally speaking, what is the biggest misconception about patriotism and why might misconceptions exist?

We often think that being patriotic means taking pride in the accomplishments of a group to which we belong. I am not sure, however, that saying “We are the best and the brightest” is necessarily a patriotic gesture. Nor is there much merit in viewing the nation as an exclusive club to which only certain members are welcome. In 19^th-century Europe, the nation was imagined as a community that speaks only one language, has one culture, one religion and is ethnically and racially homogeneous. The problem with this is that this is not how human beings work. We tend to have ties to different cultures.

Monolingualism, speaking one language, is the exception around the world and often the result of targeted policies that discourage the use of multiple languages. Nationalism, therefore, is often the celebration of an exclusionary abstraction. But we need to be more constructive and inclusive than this. What we need is a critical patriotism, a renewed sense of belonging that thinks critically about our shared histories.

You frame patriotism in two related, yet opposing, ways. Can you explain how patriotism can build a community of inclusion?

The idea of the nation promises solidarity among its members. For instance, say you are Italian. Baked into this idea of national belonging is that you feel some kind of affiliation and sympathy with other Italians. Being a patriot means building this community of inclusion by showing concrete and committed solidarity like contributing to the greater good and giving back to your community.

But while patriotism promises inclusion—and we're very painfully aware of this—often it becomes a mechanism of exclusion. “Giving back” all too often focuses on existing strengths and does not cross the lines that divide us from other Americans. To be truly patriotic we need to invest in the public good and contribute across boundaries to include those beyond our immediate communities.

How is patriotism—especially in the context of nationalism—used a mechanism of exclusion?

One way of illustrating this is the relationship between patriotism and the patriarchy. The terms share the same origin—the Latin pater, meaning father—which results in a nation that is imagined as a male space in which women do not enjoy full membership. Nationalists do not tend to be feminists.

Nationalism grips what we usually call the “primary identifications” of an individual. We tend to identify ourselves using certain categories, which can be gender, class, geographic origin, sex, language and religion, which means we all participate in different and intersecting groups. Nationalism claims primacy and absolute supremacy over our categories of identification.

Therefore, before one can recognize oneself as a man or a woman; a Jew or a Protestant; a teacher or a carpenter; gay, straight or non-binary, one has first to be German, Italian, French, American, etc. When the nation becomes this kind of regulatory force, it can easily exclude a particular identification and argue that to be a full member of a given nation, you cannot profess a certain religion, speak a certain language or have a particular skin color.

We need a different way of thinking about belonging and inclusion, and a different way of talking about patriotism and the relationship between citizenship and nationality. These are very urgent questions. We should reimagine a patriotism that tackles our social inequities and allows us to reflect critically on our historical responsibilities as a nation.

How do the multilingual residents of 19^th-century Trieste provide a framework for reimagining American patriotism?

In my book, I show how the inhabitants of Trieste, a port city on the Adriatic Sea, often cultivated different kinds of cultural and national affiliations. Because it was a very busy Mediterranean port and the only major commercial outlet to the sea for the Austrian Empire, people had to speak at least four languages. It did not necessarily mean that you had to speak them equally well, but you had to negotiate differences in your everyday interactions.

What struck me was that people there were able to inhabit different cultural communities and, for a long time, the city kept the rise of nationalism at bay. In Trieste, nationalism had to compete with different ways of belonging: a multicultural and multilingual patriotism, a constitutional patriotism as well as state patriotism that allowed for people of diverse backgrounds to be fully integrated citizens.

Where there is difference, there is going to be conflict. But we need to manage and solve social conflicts in the name of our shared sense of belonging. It is going to be a long road, but we can change, and we can start by having a conversation about the relationship between our individualism and our responsibilities toward others. We need to think more broadly about inclusion and shared leadership. As I said before, think of it as a garden in need of cultivation—the cultivation of an emotional investment and public commitment to the ethics of a critical patriotism.

Media interested in speaking with TU faculty experts, such as Salvatore Pappalardo, can contact Matt Palmer at mpalmer@towson.edu.