ogy backing it. The glamour of the idea owes something to a confusion between them. First, the nation is thought to be exceptional by its very nature, a nature so consistently high, worthy, and enviable that these qualities shine through all its works. One can’t imagine not justifying and admiring and (if one is a foreigner) wishing to belong to such a nation. “My country right or wrong” becomes the proper sentiment, once this picture has captured us, because we can’t conceive of the nation being wrong. A second sense of the word may seem more open to rational testing. Here, the nation is supposed to be admirable by reason of history and circumstance. It has demonstrated its exceptional quality by adherence to certain ideals peculiar to its original character and broadly appreciable as part of the human inheritance. Not “my country right or wrong” but a more thoughtful sentiment is evoked: “we love our nation not for what it is but for what it can be.” The evidence of what it can be forms a historical deposit with a rich residue in the present. The third version of exceptionalism derives from the commonest sort of affectionate feeling about living in a community, community here being defined on the small scale of neighborhoods, townships, ethnic groups and religious sects. Communitarian nationalism takes the innocent-seeming but illicit step of applying this sentiment of community to the nation at large. It is, in fact, the mingling of the local sentiment with the nationalist and the high-minded idealist senses of the word that has made “American exceptionalism” into such an intoxicating brew. My nation is exceptional to me, this rationalization says, just because it is mine; its familiar habits and customs have shaped the way I think and feel, beyond any wish to extricate myself from its demands. The nation, in this view, is like a family, and we owe it, just as we owe the members of our family, “unconditional love.” This presents itself as the common sense of ordinary feelings. How can our nation help but be exceptional to us? Athens was an exceptional nation, or city-state, as Pericles described it in his oration for the first fallen soldiers in the Peloponnesian War. He meant his description of Athens as exceptional to carry both normative force and hortatory urgency. Athens is the greatest of Greek cities and shows it by its works, by the greatness of its deeds, by the structure of its government, and by the character of the citizens who are themselves creations of the city. At the same time, Pericles is saying to the widows and children of the war dead: “Resemble them! Be like these brave dead! Do more of what
Nations Are Not Exceptions
David Bromwich
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