Savour International

Americans are among the most patriotic people in the world. It’s all a matter of upbringing: they can be wherever they want, as long as they remain true to America.

Just before the 2004 U.S. presidential election, a German friend of mine was getting all worked up about the overweening patriotism Bruce Springsteen had exhibited in a New York Times op-ed piece opposing Bush’s reelection, by saying “the country that we all carry in our hearts”.

According to various surveys, Americans are the most patriotic people in the Western world, and Germans the least patriotic. The latter phenomenon can, of course, be chalked up to history. World War II, Hitler and the Holocaust have made many Germans so leery of patriotic feelings that you count on Germans to evince horror whenever such feelings are expressed.

But many of my American friends also have a hard time with the patriotism of their countrymen, and are genuinely put off by the flags fluttering in the breeze in front of so many houses, the God Bless America signs on highways, the “proud to be an American” bumper stickers, and books with titles such as Flag, Faith and Family authored by men with well trimmed beards, innocent looking cowboy hats, and pearly white teeth.

In Salem, Illinois, I once saw an inflatable flag the size of a queen-sized mattress that was standing upright in the front yard of a well taken care of house. This only seems fitting in a country that defends itself with Patriot missiles and whose citizens are watched over by laws such as the Patriot Act.

But you’ve got to have empathy for a superpower like the U.S. if you want to understand the things about America that make you uncomfortable. And this is all the more the case in view of the fact that it was Europe’s wars of religion that got the ball of American patriotism rolling. For, according to America’s Founding Fathers, such conflicts were to be banished in the New World thanks to religious, political and cultural freedom. Thus the rebirth of Europeans as Americans, the beginning of a new life free of the old burdens, was a quasi-religious act.

At least that’s how the myth goes – a myth that has lost none of its potency. For America, “the last best hope of earth”, as Abraham Lincoln called it, still attracts immigrants from all around the world. These immigrants have made America a cultural melting pot; a country where everyone can lead a blessed life after his own fashion – as long as he abides by the Constitution.

In an essay titled What it means to be an American, the philosopher Michael Walz discussed the particularities of the U.S. as a political nation of cultural nationalities. Americans, Walz contends, have a “dual identity”: one the one hand, they are citizens of the United States, and on the other, the are immigrants from elsewhere: Germans, Italians, Iranians, Slovaks, Asians, Mexicans, Jews, Muslims – you name it. Americans are permitted to live out this otherness precisely because they are Americans.

In contrast to the French doctrine of national-cultural unity, Americans are permitted to retain their ethnic identity and practise the customs and traditions of their cultural heritage. Assimilation of the type promulgated by the French concept of the Grande Nation (“great nation”) is simply not part of the American mindset; but what is very much on Americans’ minds is the duty to abide by the Constitution and the amendments thereto such as the Bill of Rights. The naturalness to Americans of such doctrines is clearly reflected by their amazement at European controversies over wearing the burka or building minarets on mosques.