Protestant Nationalism, Catholic Cosmopolitanism, and US Exceptionalism

While meditating on Richard Rorty, Raymond Geuss takes a curious detour, pausing to recount the educational and religious origins of his rejection of Rorty's 'ultra-nationalist' social democracy. It is odd, after defending American Catholic intellectuals yesterday against the charge of running a right-nationalist cabal, to wake up this morning and critique the left-internationalist Geuss for the limitations of his Euro-Catholic imagination. But here we go.

Here's the nut of Geuss's beef with Rorty's putative American exceptionalism:

Achieving Our Country, though, represented a step too far for me. The very idea that the United States was “special” has always seemed to me patently absurd, and the idea that in its present, any of its past, or any of its likely future configurations it was in any way exemplary, a form of gross narcissistic self-deception which was not transformed into something laudable by virtue of being embedded in a highly sophisticated theory which purported to show that ethnocentrism was in a philosophically deep sense unavoidable. I remain very grateful to my Catholic upbringing and education for giving me relative immunity to nationalism. In the 1950s, the nuns who taught me from age five to twelve were virtually all Irish or Irish-American with sentimental attachment to certain elements of Celtic folklore, but they made sure to inculcate into us that the only serious human society was the Church which was an explicitly international organization. The mass, in the international language, Latin, was the same everywhere; the religious orders were international. This absence of national limitation was something very much to be cherished. “Catholica” in the phrase “[credo in] unam, sanctam, catholicam, et apostolicam ecclesiam” should, we were told, be written with a lower-case, not an upper-case, initial because it was not in the first instance part of the proper name of the church, but an adjective meaning “universal,” and this universality was one of the most important “marks of the true Church.” The Head of the Church, to be sure, and Vicar of Christ on earth, was in fact (at that time) always an Italian, but that was for contingent and insignificant reasons.

What has always seemed patently absurd to me -- and possibly not only because I was never educated by polylingual priests and nuns from various small European nations that never had empires -- is the very idea that there is nothing in any way unique or incomparable about the character of the United States of America relative to that of the many European states and statelets that have appeared or disappeared since the fall of the Roman Empire. At any rate, Geuss's is the more 'interesting' position, I warrant, because mine is obviously plausible and his leaves him with some explaining to do. But as the Bioethics Club, no doubt, can tell you (or Ross or Michael -- or Andrew!), taking one's Catholic faith seriously and properly dogmatically (at least when it comes to the one-true-church component) has little necessary impact on one's concept of the strangeness or relative uncategorizability and therefore the 'specialness' of the United States of America. Indeed, if you want to go there, I think the record of the John Carrolls and Orestes Brownsons of the world pretty much renders Geuss's take on US exceptionalism bunk.

Yet it also seems to me that the reason why Geuss's take on US exceptionalism is so incorrect is revealed by how correct is his take on ethnonationalist exceptionalism generally -- a position which would surely incense Geuss further, because, after all, to state that is simply to restate the basic proposition of US exceptionalism. Right? Well, not quite. Really the argument here I think is an argument about sovereignty: US exceptionalists incline to think that the sovereignty of the US is of great, sometimes even cosmic, importance, whereas the sovereignty of, say, the average random Continental state is not. At all. And here's where Geuss's Catholic spin on state sovereignty takes on its important character. Europe's main problem has been the unity of the Church and the disunity of the many States. After the Reformation, the unity of the States developed into an even more disorienting problem. Geuss is right that Protestantism contributed directly to nationalism in Europe, but it is silly to pretend that, say, Napoleon's effort to conquer Europe without disbanding and destroying the Church was not a nationalist enterprise. Europe has always had no option but to transcend nationalism through nationalism itself, which is silly to notice because critics of US exceptionalism, especially on the right, correctly charge its exponents with the desire to transcend US nationalism through US nationalism itself. Geuss appears not to grasp the subtle commonality.

The bottom line is that even if all of Europe went Catholic again, ethnonationalism would remain a bigger problem on the Continent than it did when all those Irish and Polish and Italian families intermarried over in totally unspecial America. Europe's failure to unify politically is a political problem, and the problem is that European nation-states really are less unique than the United States, yet patriots, nationalists, and chauvinists of all descriptions share some minimum interest in maintaining the sovereignty (as opposed to just some romantic idea of the 'exceptionalism') of their nation-states. Now the even deeper problem is that Europe cannot look to the Catholic model of unity for a path toward politically transcending the relatively less exceptional character of most European nation-states, because the hierarchy and absolutism of the Church cannot successfully be applied to the kind of government all those nation-states and their citizens or subjects can tolerate. Every time this has been tried it has been a calamity of epic proportions. This should be more than enough reason for even a Eurocatholic social theorist of the left to credit the US as 'special' -- it offers a lesson to Europe about how to structure a decentralized large republic and transcend the crippling ethnonationalism that has understandably made cosmopolitan ingrates out of thinkers like Geuss.

Of course a US exceptionalist would be a fool to expect Europeans to whip up a United States of Europe. But at least one European cosmopolitan in a smart tradition of them recognized that the US was a world-historically singular phenomenon that offered Europeans as a collectivity an amazing set of generalizable, transportable, and fungible practices and ideas that could heal the fraud of ethnonationalism which absolutist princely rule cemented into place. It is interesting to note that the cosmopolitans of whom I speak were either Protestants or Catholics of a particularly muted variety. What is important, to sum up, is that Geuss's Catholic contempt for ethnonationalism doesn't supply an answer to Europe's specific problem of unification, which as Geuss himself proves isn't a problem only for those who want Europe to emulate America; and the ideas box that pro-unification thinkers must repair to is the puzzle of American exceptionalism, which a Catholic could just as easily imagine as the Providential gift whereby petty secular allegiances may finally be transcended, in due ironic fashion, in Europe.