Left-wing nationalism

Left-wing nationalism (also occasionally known as "socialist nationalism") refers to any political movement that combines left-wing politics with nationalism.

Europe

In Europe, a number of left-wing nationalist movements exist, and have a long tradition.

Canada

In Canada, left-wing nationalism is represented by the Bloc Quebecois, a Quebec Sovereignty party.

Australia

During the 1940s and 1950s radical intellectuals, most of whom joined the Communist Party of Australia, combined their philosophical internationalism with a "radical nationalist" commitment to Australian national culture. This type of cultural nationalism was possible among radicals in Australia at the time, in part because of the CPA's patriotic turn in line with Comintern policy from 1941, and in part because the most common understanding of what it meant to be "patriotic" at the time was a kind of pro-Empire Anglo-Australian "race patriotism". To promote an anti-British nationalism was, until the late 1960s, a "radical" activity. At the same time, this "radical nationalism" dovetailed with a growing respect for Australian cultural output among intellectuals, which was itself a product of the break in cultural supply chains - lead actors and scripts had always come from Britain and the United States - occasioned by the war.

The post-war radical nationalists promoted a type of national culture which had been canonised during the 1890s by writers including Henry Lawson, Joseph Furphy and Banjo Paterson. This culture was informed by the "bushman" myth, which held that Australians were naturally egalitarian and "practical" and anti-authoritarian. All this was represented in the "outback" working-class tradition of "mateship". The post-war radical nationalists interpreted this myth, or tradition, as having implicitly or inherently radical qualities: they believed it meant that working-class Australians were "naturally" democratic or even socialist. The apotheosis of this line of thought was in Russel Ward's book The Australian Legend (Melbourne, 1958), which sought to trace the development of this ethos from its convict origins, through bushranging, the Victorian gold rush, the spread of agriculture, the industrial strife of the early 1890s and its literary canonisation. Other significant radical nationalists included the historians Ian Turner, Lloyd Churchward, Bob Gollan, Geoffrey Serle and Brian Fitzpatrick, whom Ward described as the "spiritual father of all the radical nationalist historians in Australia", and the writers Stephen Murray-Smith, Judah Waten, Dorothy Hewett and Frank Hardy.

The radical-nationalist tradition did not survive the 1960s, as the New Left came to interpret much of Australian history - particularly labour history - as fundamentally racist, sexist, homophobic and militarist. The bushman myth, however, has survived the modernisation of Australian culture and its economy. Having informed a significant amount of cultural output during the period of the new nationalism, the "Australian Legend" was "raided" by the third-time Liberal Party leader John Howard for the conservative political Right during the 1990s.

References

• Milner, Henry and Sheilagh Hodgins (1973). The Decolonization of Quebec: An Analysis of Left-Wing Nationalism, Toronto : McClelland and Stewart, 257 p. (online)