Chapter 14 - Patriotism, Nationalism, Globalism

Summary

This essay considers the literary and, more broadly, cultural memory of World War II in the later Cold War years. It contends that the ideals associated with patriotism, nationalism, and globalism, while often colliding and contradictory, were not just rivals in the discourse of the era but divisions of affiliation within the everyday citizen’s outlook toward self and world, within the ideological braid that commentators referred to as one’s multivalent “character structure.” The various guiding logics of that knotted cluster would come to be called Cold War liberalism. Its outlook valorizes both an inward-turning retreat into radical individualism on the level of the atomistic, autotelic self arrayed, and against a pugnacious outlying dimension – cosmic in scale, physical and metaphysical – of tragic and unchanging global conditions: the epistemological stasis of the Cold War’s “containment” rationale.