Katerina recently posted a good piece on Patriotism and Importance of Memory. As one of the Vox Nova contributors who has written on the subject of patriotism/nationalism regularly, I didn’t want her post to go by without highlighting it. The type of patriotism she describes — rooted in authentic community, solidarity, and memory — is one that I can indeed recognize in myself, only not so much as a citizen of the United States, but as having most of my history rooted in the region of the United States called Appalachia.
Why one and not the other? I tend to agree with thinkers like Alastair MacIntyre, Benedict Anderson, and William T. Cavanaugh who all assert that the United States is, in Anderson’s words, an “imagined community” more than a real community. The United States, mostly because of its sheer size, is held together as a “community” by something other than an authentic communal memory. Or, drawing from the political theology of Fr. Johann Baptist Metz, one could say the United States is held together by a selective memory and a narrow solidarity. Last term wrote a paper (.pdf) on Metz’s theology of memory comparing it to the U.S.’s theology of memory, especially after 9/11. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t adapt that paper for a series of posts here, as I find his fundamental theology helpful for reflecting on these issues.
In light of this critique of the nation-state’s potential to be an authentic community, I’m wondering what Katerina, our readers, and our other contributors think of the idea of a “regional patriotism.” After all, although I have my suspicions of “nation-based” patriotism and have expressed them here a number of times, our Church nonetheless calls us to patriotism of a patricular kind, expressed in the John Paul II quote that we have seen here on the blog a number of times:
Patriotism is a love for everything to do with our native land: its history, its traditions, its language, its natural features. It is a love which extends also to the works of our compatriots and the fruits of their genius. Every danger that threatens the overall good of our native land becomes an occasion to demonstrate this love…I believe that the same could be said of every country and every nation in Europe and throughout the world. (John Paul II, Memory and Identity, 65-66)
A “regional patriotism,” as I am defining it here, would take the best elements of JPII’s thinking on patriotism, as well as the emphasis on solidarity and subsidiarity in Catholic social doctrine, and a more recent emphasis on localism as articulated so strongly in the two pastoral letters of the Catholic bishops of Appalachia. A regional patriotism — rooted in the social doctrine of the Church and linked with contemporary critiques of nationalism — has the potential to punch gigantic holes in the myth of the nation-state that I have so fiercely opposed while holding on to what Americans seem so afraid to lose if they reject the notion of patriotism altogether. Thinking in terms of local regions rather than of the nation could also bear fruit for ecclesial praxis (and not only our theory!) in assisting a return to authentic and sustainable local communities in a nation that, ironically, continues to rely on the cancer of individualism in order to survive.
I write this as someone who comes from a region of the United States with a strong, but diverse, sense of identity. What of those who do not come from such a place? What if all they can “settle for” is the patriotism of the nation-state (with these crtiques in mind, can we call it anything other than nationalism?) whose authenticity can be easily critiqued?
Catholics would do well to remember that, although the Church encourages a patriotism of a certain type (described well by JPII and his interpreter Katerina), the nation-state concept has only been with us for about two-hundred years, while the Church has been with us for two-thousand years. Catholic teaching on “patriotism,” the love of the gift of our land and the authentic communities that inhabit them, can and must transcend the fleeting and false community of the nation-state and sink its toes into the soil of real authentic, local solidarities.
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