Theories of Nationalism

Abstract

In ‘The Home Guard and You’, published in 1940, Orwell wrote that ‘We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary’ (12:309–12:311). The statement illustrates his attempt, following the outbreak of Second World War, to integrate patriotism in his political thinking. In part this was a pragmatic process, initiated by the ‘strange’ wartime conditions. England, the country with which Orwell himself identified, was the site of relative political freedom within Nazi-dominated Europe. As he insisted in ‘Fascism and Democracy’, its citizens at least possessed, for example, ‘the knowledge that when you talk politics with your friends there is no Gestapo ear glued to the keyhole, the belief that “they” cannot punish you unless you have broken the law, the belief that the law is above the State’ (12:376–82:378). This point was reinforced in The Lion and the Unicorn, in which he described England as a place where ‘such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth’ (397) continued to determine popular opinion. His emphasis on patriotism in this period can, therefore, be identified with the defence of an England that retained civil liberties eradicated in occupied Europe. However, his insistence that the revolutionary must be a patriot implies that patriotism involves not only the defence of established freedoms but the potential for future social transformation. This aspect of his statement is concerned not only with his conception of England, but with patriotism as such and its political implications. As Stephen Lutman wrote, patriotism was both ‘part of the defence against totalitarianism as Orwell saw it during the war, and a hope for the future’.¹