The ancient version of the “universal nation" was inward looking. The Chinese regarded the world outside the empire as necessarily barbaric, while the very word “barbarian” comes from a classical Greek expression imitating the allegedly uncouth language of non-Greek speakers. The Romans likewise considered other cultures to be essentially inferior, unlettered tribes in Europe and Africa or unstable if sometimes powerful kingdoms in Asia.
The modern rational version of this outlook, dating from the Enlightenment but no doubt tinged with Christian evangelism, takes the form of a civilizing mission. It was prevalent among the builders of the British empire, though sometimes tempered by a dawning appreciation of other cultures and societies. But it is in countries which have undergone a clean revolutionary break with an ancien régime that we find the purest expression of the secular missionary idea.
Hence the France which emerged from the revolution saw itself – and some would say sees itself – as the universal nation par excellence, the model of a society and culture based on secular reason which all other countries must eventually converge upon, and pending that admire. More recently we find a similar and in many ways equally dangerous illusion in the fetishisation of the Soviet form of communism following the Russian revolution. Thus the communist parties of other countries, even those with very different social structures, felt great difficulty in sketching so much as a pathway to the new society which differed from the Russian experience, something illustrated by successive versions of our own CP’s The British Road to Socialism.
In Iran too, some see the Islamic Republic as more than the product of imperialistic pressures and Iranian traditions, indeed as a model to be exported to the world at large.
But the most egregious case of the universal nation ideology is certainly to be found in the United States, another polity forged in revolution. We have previously noted the US neocon belief in America’s sacred mission (They (still) have plans for you, 5th September 2006), but we must remember that this has informed US foreign policy from the earliest days through Woodrow Wilson’s benign 1919 version up to the aggressive militarism of the present day.
It is therefore reasonable to ask whether the frontrunner in the current US presidential campaign buys into this ideology. Certainly Barack Obama has had the courage to articulate progressive policies on domestic American issues, but in the 2004 speech that made his name he called for a “renewal of American military, diplomatic, and moral leadership in the world”. In similar vein Jonathan Raban’s penetrating though sympathetic analysis of his rhetoric in last Saturday’s Guardian suggests that for Obama “the true divinity is America itself”, a mystical entity that holds out “a promise of miraculous liberation”.
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