Are you a Nationalist?

Very often, I hear people talk and write about nationalism as if it's some rather extreme doctrine, like anarchism or communism or complete pacifism.

Personally, I don't think this is true of nationalism at all. I think most people have been nationalists throughout history, even if they didn't use the word.

In my view, if you can answer "Yes" to the following two questions, you're a nationalist:

1) Do you think the nation-state should be the basic unit of international politics, rather than a World Government, or supranational organizations, or empires, or some other system? Do you think nations should have fundamental sovereignty?

(People sometimes quibble about sovereignty, pointing out its inevitable limitations. Everything has limitations. I don't think this is a serious objection.)

2) Would you prefer that national cultures should persist? That the French should continue to speak French and make celebrities of bad philosophers, that the Irish should continue to play hurling and apologize every six seconds, and so on?

(Tiresome objections that "you can't preserve a culture in aspic" are often advanced here. The question is not: "Would you prefer that national cultures should never change or evolve?". The question is whether you would prefer them to substantially persist through those changes.)

I think most people would answer in the affirmative to these two questions, and that most people are therefore nationalists.