What makes a people a people?

[Thomas Thorne]

Marx was certainly wrong when he stated that the "worker has no country.' Nationalism has been the strongest political force during the past 200 years.

The dilemma of secession by minorities-and I do not confine this to ethnic or religious minorities-from national states in which both sides claim vindication of their national identity requires victory is a constant in modern history. All of us have taken sides in such conflicts and it is very easy to side with the Jefferson Davis in one conflict and the Abraham Lincoln in another . This involves our feelings toward the particular nationalities,religions and ideologies involved.

I remember talking with a very brilliant Indian who was quite eloquent in his denunciation of British domination of India. When asked about the legitimacy of Indian rule over Kashmir, a province whose majority would secede from India if given the chance, he reacted the way Lincoln did to the secession of the Confederate states.

Eva raised an interesting question about the survival of what I would call a sense of Confederate nationalism. I don't believe there is any to any significant degree. Otherwise we might find ourselves in the situation of 2014 Great Britain in which a referendum will be held in Scotland this year to determine if Scotland will secede from the UK, which might well happen.

One of the problems the Confederacy had was the Confederate state antedated a sense of Confederate nationality. David Potter in his sine qua non book about the coming of the Civil War."The Impeding Crisis" gleefully pointed to examples of antebellum fiery nationalistic oratory that were indistingable from each other whether spoken in North or South indicating the strong sense of American nationalism that existed before the war.

In the Scottish nationalist movement today there is a sense of Scottish nationality that should be asserted for its own sake and does not require the genuine dread that white Southerners felt would lead to servile revolt and death and destruction if they did not secede from the Union.

Such a volatile brew which resulted in the catastrophe of war I believe was not conducive to the creation of a deep seated permanent sense of Confederate nationalism. The mystique of "The Lost Cause" while perhaps of great psychological utility to its devotees did not create a post war or modern Confederate Nationalist movement.
Tom