I love it when I can use a “YouTube Drama” video to talk about an important topic. So imagine my delight when Johnny Harris, a YouTube star I’ve critiqued once before, dropped a half-learned video on nationalism. It wasn’t THAT bad a video. There were some fairly egregious errors, that I addressed, but what bugged me most was the general attitude. According to Harris, all that matters about nationalism is its potential for disaster. That’s an important part of the story, but there’s a lot more to nationalism than just that. Like the independence of almost every country on the planet, as just one example. It was fun to make “What Johnny Harris Gets Wrong About Nationalism” and I hope you enjoy watching it.
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Video Transcript after the jump…
Ah Johnny Harris. I am a big fan of his work! He discusses important topics in a way that’s so engaging he gets millions of views every week. Millions of views for geopolitics videos. I clearly have a lot to learn from the guy. But I also suspect he’s got a lot to learn from me, a suspicion that has been renewed by his recent video on nationalism. There was a lot to like in the video, even though it sometimes seemed like a conversation between two college sophomore stoners who just read Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.
“I often wonder” clip
While I do wish Johnny Harris and fellow New York Times Alum Max Fisher had credited Benedict Anderson’s book, the obvious inspiration for their analysis, I think it’s really great to see a video talking about the history of nationalism get over a million views. Nationalism is one of our world’s building blocks, and Harris and Fisher have provided a very worthwhile introduction to the topic. I even enjoyed and can happily co-sign Harris’s concluding thoughts on the topic.
“Nations just ideas” clip
That sounds right to me. So what’s my problem, why am I making this video? Well, I think the story they provide is too Eurocentric, which is unsurprising for a pair of white guys, but they also get the European story wrong in very important ways. Nationalism has been responsible for a lot of horrific stuff, which we should all acknowledge. But this video’s focus on nationalism’s evil is an annoyingly standard view in a global North that has reaped massive rewards from nationalism’s good sides. We call nationalism’s better products by nicer names, like patriotism, rule of law, and a social safety net. While insisting that all the poor countries that don’t have those things yet should steer clear of nationalism.
“Not Europe” Clip
So those 45 seconds, 20 minutes into a 27 minute video are pretty much only mention we get of the nationalist decolonization efforts of the 20th century. And Harris segues directly from this quick mention to images of Russia invading Ukraine and pogoing Israeli genocidaires. This is a weird choice, because I would argue that the 20th century independence of most countries on this planet is a hell of a lot more important in a history of nationalism than rehashing the story of a few nasty dictators like Napoleon and the 20th century’s most famous German.
History’s most famous vegetarian and Napoleon are, of course, inextricable parts of the story of nationalism, but what rarely gets acknowledged is that nationalism didn’t just create these guys, nationalism defeated them. Harris’s potted history of the Napoleonic wars leaves out the famous Battle of Nations, in Leipzig in 1813, where a bunch of European countries that were learning the lessons of French nationalism destroyed much of the Napoleonic armies that hadn’t already been sacrificed to Russia’s winter and Russia’s burgeoning national consciousness. In the 1940’s Germany’s most famous failed painter was stopped by Russian nationalism, and the fact that he had to bail out his Italian ally after Mussolini’s failed battles with Greek and Yugoslavian national ideas.
We should always be conscious of the risks of nationalism, but Harris’s video neglects almost everything nationalism has been up to since 1945. What nationalism’s main significance is, is as an antidote to invasion. Nationalism is the reason why the United States can’t conquer anybody anymore, despite being almost infinitely more powerful than the British Empire that conquered basically everyone. Nationalism is what defeated us in Vietnman, Iraq and Afghanistan. Ukrainian nationalism is what’s humiliating Russia in Ukraine right now. Nationalism is the greatest weapon of the weak against dominating empires that the world has ever seen. Is it surprising that a couple of establishment US journalists don’t seem to like it much?
“So much conflict” clip
I don’t want to be unfair to these guys. I think both Harris and Fisher have made admirable efforts to get away from Washington, DC groupthink over the course of their careers. I know less about Fisher, but I believe he’s provided some accurate coverage of Gaza, which is vanishingly rare among people with big US platforms. Harris has made videos on Julian Assange, and a range of US policy failures. He recently made a video, that I sadly missed entirely, that violated Washington, DC orthodoxy on the Ukraine war & NATO so strongly that his sponsors made him take it down. But in this video, I think Harris & Fisher have gotten caught up in a broader US & European prejudice against the nationalist ideologies that mostly function to get in the way of our conquering stuff. This prejudice can be seen in the way that Harris talks about the birth of Nationalism & Napoleon, which is just wrong. He starts out well, but then goes off the rails
“French Revolution” clip up to Bonaparte
Harris is very likely right to say that the French Revolution is where modern nationalism starts. I’d agree with that, anyway. But he then goes on to attribute all the bad parts of nationalism, the standing armies, the national conscription, and the invasions of places to Napoleon the dictator. That’s emotionally satisfying, but that’s just wrong. Napoleon wasn’t fully in control of French politics until 1801, and he wasn’t a factor at all in French politics in the early 1790s, when all the things Johnny Harris says he did actually happened.
The Levee en Masse, national conscription, the idea that everybody should join the national army as a sacred duty, dates to 1793, when Napoleon was just some Italian officer in the revolutionary armies. And national conscription didn’t come about as the brain child of some nasty dictator, it was about saving the French people from the crushing of their revolution, and their national will. In 1792, the monarchies that ruled the rest of Europe had had enough of three years of revolution, and decided to team up to invade France, snuff out the revolution, and save the King and his family. This was a massive failure on all fronts. By the end of what became known as the war of the first coalition in 1797, Revolutionary France had fully weaponized nationalism with mass conscription, the French armies had swallowed up most of modern Belgium, the Netherlands, and significant chunks of Italy, and much of the French royal family had been publicly executed.
From the start, Modern nationalism was about defending a people and a territory from invasion. The fact that the French revolution figured out this social technology a little earlier than everybody else in Europe is what led to the massive expansion of revolutionary France into other people’s territories. The Napoleonic wars of the 1800s and 1810s were the process of the Russians, Germans & other European peoples figuring out how to weaponise nationalism against France. The next two centuries of world history are pretty much the same dynamic. In the 1800s Europe used weaponized nationalism to conquer the world, then in the 1900s the rest of the world figured out how to weaponize nationalism right back, and now nobody can conquer anything anymore. That oversimplifies the story a great deal, but it is an important part of why the world is the way it is.
France’s Italian campaign in the 1790s was massively successful, in part, because of a dashing young general named Napoleon Bonaparte, who would go on to play a tremendously important role in world history. But Napoleoan didn’t start Revolutionary France’s invasions, he didn’t start the revolution’s propaganda about France, he didn’t start mass conscription, and he did not invent modern nationalism.
Napoleon Clip
None of that was originated by Napoleon. He piggybacked on top of ten solid years of revolutionary and national development, and channeled it to his own uses. Napoleon was also a reactionary, who turned a titanic revolution into a crappy little dictatorship, that ended up losing all the territory the messy revolutionary armies had conquered. Harris’s description of Napoleon’s interactions with the Church may be the worst part of the video.
Napoleon Church Clip
I really don’t understand this video’s erasure of the French Revolution. Yes, Napoleon was less respectful of the Church than the Bourbon monarchs of the 1780s, but there was a little thing that happened in between there. Napoleon was actually the French leader who made peace with the Church after 12 years of revolutionary fervor that stripped the Church of its lands, executed its priests, and attempted at some points to set up an entirely new religion. Napoleon getting coronated in a Church, with the Pope in attendance, was tremendously reactionary after the 1790s, not some big break with Christendom. Napoleon signed an 1801 agreement with the Pope that invited the Catholic Church back into France.
This meme, turning Nationalism into a Napoleon thing rather than a Revolutionary thing is surprisingly common. I noticed the same mistake being made in a Roy Casagranda clip I listened to recently. The West hates nationalism for some very good reasons, like the 1940s, but I think if we’re being honest, we also hate it because it’s kept us from getting what we want the way we used to be able to back in the 1800s, in Vietnam, Iraq, Algeria, and the rest of the world. So it’s become common to associate nationalism with nasty dictators like Napoleon, who was pretty much Europe’s greatest villain, until the 1940s.
Harris’s video does a fairly good job dealing with the two century long nationalist process of Italian unification, but he feels compelled to introduce it with Mussolini
Mussolini Clip
Another annoying tic of this video is the way that Harris keeps suggesting that nationalism is some sort of new and surprising dynamic, and is therefore less legitimate.
1861!?!? That’s so recent long clip
In what world is 1861, 160 years ago, recent? Everything about what we’re doing here right now, YouTube, Personal computers, one-man film studios is less than thirty years old. The idea of most human beings working in offices or factories instead of fields is like 100 years old, at best, even in most of Europe. How is the 240 years since the founding of modern nationalism in the 1790s a brief period of time? That’s like 12 generations. Nationalism is probably one of the longest standing human institutions we have, outside of religions. And religions, of course, have all transformed entirely over the past 100 years, especially the ones that claim to be the most rooted in the distant past. Nationalism predates, and is arguably the foundation of mass democracy everywhere.
1861, that’s so recent. Short clip
We live in a time of constant flux, as we have done since industrialization, and probably for all of human history.. I think Harris & Fisher are right that our notions of community are changing, and are constantly changing. It’s entirely possible, likely even, that nationalism will be looked back on as a horrifying misstep on the way to global well-being. But that’s a process that’s going to take human lifetimes, not a few years. If we’re going to transcend nationalism’s evils, we need to have a more well-rounded view of what it is, than what Johnny Harris provided in his video.