What’s the difference between racism and nationalism*?

Considerable progress has been made over the past 100 years to establish that racism is morally wrong and indeed legislation has been passed in many countries to outlaw racial discrimination and generally impose harsher penalties on crimes which show evidence of racial motivation.  The era of apartheid in South Africa has ended and while it would be very naïve to think that there are no longer racial problems in the world you at least seem to be making progress. 

The situation with nationalism however is much less satisfactory at present.  Broadly it seems that racism is discrimination based on who you were born to or the particular ethnicity of others.  Nationalism remains as discrimination based largely on where you were born.  From my position of viewing the planet as a whole the moral distinction your societies generally have between the two seems highly questionable.

It seems likely that nationalism in all its form is just a legacy from existing structures.  Clearly the ruling elite in each country had to take a different approach to both problems:

a)  Racism in a multi-cultural nation was a threat to stability and could lead to violence and therefore it should be outlawed.

b) Nationalism on the other hand must be to a great extent encouraged as the key offering of a nation is to ‘protect’ its citizens from the serious threats posed by foreigners and other countries.  Indeed the whole ethos of a country is to try and ensure its citizens get the best deal and in general that will mean being a little bit unreasonable and exerting power and influence particularly over weaker countries.  There may also be requirements to go to war from time to time to attempt to plunder riches and rewards from other countries and consequently a good deal of national pride must be cultivated.

Furthermore people in every other country are so totally different from your home country that they can neither be trusted nor fully understood.  They seem to want different things and have different priorities because they are on the other side of an arbitrary line on the map and often communicate in a different language that is difficult to understand.  These people were generally born on the other side of that line and so it’s considered quite appropriate to discriminate against them.  We may allow a few of them to adopt our nationality if they pay us some money and have skills that we need.  This can be unpopular with some of our existing nationals but when we have built up such large debts some influx of new people is probably necessary to provide some credibility to our attempts to service them.

When you break through the stranglehold that your existing countries have over all of you it seems likely that nationalism will be judged by history to have been every bit as morally repugnant as many of your enlightened citizens consider racism to be today.  Once again Einstein was on the right lines when he said “Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.”

*Some remarks in this document may be sarcastic