On Thu, 4 Jul 2002, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> It is the victory of reaction against revolutionary republicanism that
> created conservative "nationalism" ("as distinct from patriotism," in
> the words of Anderson) with which we are familiar today.
Yoshie, I'm not clear what your point is here. The original question -- rather a light-hearted tongue in cheek one -- was whether there was some kind of natural contradiction between secular humanism and strong feelings of reverance for the nation as evidenced in a fondness for rituals and symbols like flag waving. Your excerpts don't seem at first sight to bear on this point.
If you are saying revolutionary republicanism displayed no flag waving reverance for the nation, I would have to disagree. French revolutionary republicanism probably provides history's most famous examples of doctrinaire atheists explicitly replacing the worship of god with the worship of the nation (or more precisely, reversing their relative positions in the hierarchy of worship, and then elevating the one so that it overshadowed the other). The pantheon was not put in a church by accident. And one where they reinterred Rousseau and Voltaire as saints. The revolutionary republicans were very big on codifying national rituals and symbols.
Now if you are saying that cosmopolitanism was originally an important theme in the Enlightenment, and that it was later eclipsed by nationalism -- which grew out of other enlightenment strands of thought, like that of self-determination and democracy -- then I have no dispute. But I'm not at all sure such Enlightenment cosmopolitanism was an exclusive possession of the left. If anything, it seems the monarchical right was more against nationalism on principle, and many of the Englightenment thinkers were big on princes. Lastly, cosmopolitanism is not necessarily a good in itself. Imperialism has often been very cosmopolitan. Nationalism and cosmopolitanism seem both to be inherently contradictory phenomena, with neither having a pure core that is then hijacked.
Lastly, it is true that revolutionary solidarity crossed national borders. But so did counterrevolutionary solidarity. I'm not sure I see any obvious conclusion to be drawn from this.
Michael