1
Does nationalist sentiment increase
fighting efficacy?
A skeptical view from the sociology of violence
Randall Collins
There is a belief among historians that the era of modern nationalism also
promoted more violent wars, as in the levée en masse of the French
revolutionary armies and the World War I binge of national bloodletting.
Nationalism generated patriotic sentiment and more equal and meritocratic military participation; hence the era of mass conscription (and
sometimes enthusiastic volunteer) armies replaced the era of more
limited battles carried out by aristocrats and mercenaries. The dark side
of this nationalist fervor has been exposed repeatedly since the early
twentieth century via ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The problem with this argument is that it fails to parcel out all the
processes that affect fighting efficacy. Several major changes in military
organization, technology, and tactics happened in the period overlapping
with modern nationalism. I will argue that it was these changes that
eventually made fighting more lethal, and that nationalism had at best
an indirect effect, and more on the mobilization of soldiers to be killed
than on their ability to kill others.
The baseline for all analysis of military behavior is that armies
throughout most of history have operated at a low level of efficacy (for
data and sources see Collins 2008). By this I mean that, putting all value
judgments aside, a large proportion of soldiers engaged in combat fail to
use their weapons, and most of those who do manage to wield swords
and spears, or shoot arrows or guns, do so inaccurately; most blows and
shots miss and do little damage. The heroism of warriors in combat has
always been vastly exaggerated, and the reality obscured in mythology.
Tribal warriors made a lot of noise, but only a few rushed forward from
the safety of their own turf for a brief incursion into the enemy’s,
flinging an ill-directed missile, and quickly retreating. Such battles were
ritual displays that usually came to an end when there was a single
serious casualty, postponed to another time by mutual consent. Most
damage in tribal war (and in the era of medieval clan vendettas as well)
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was done not by confronting the enemy but by ambushing isolated and
temporarily outnumbered victims (Spierenburg 2008).
The phalanx style of warfare of ancient Greeks and Romans produced
longer pitched battles, but their tight battle formations operated chiefly
to march troops in an orderly group to the point of confrontation, and
to some extent kept them from running away when fighting started. In
battles described in detail by ancient historians (Xenophon, Julius
Caesar, Plutarch, Appian), attacks were made with ferocious battle
cries. In most cases a battle was won because one side lost its nerve
and ran away before the other side reached them. Rapid retreat often
saved their lives, unless the victors had cavalry who could chase them
down and kill them from behind.1 When well-disciplined phalanxes on
both sides fought each other, the battle was usually a shoving match;
only the front line could do any damage as long as the formation held
up, and at close quarters their weapons had little room for lethal action.
The phalanx with greater physical momentum had a greater chance of
pushing the other back, and conceivably breaking its line. Hence
ancient soldiers placed great emphasis on the advantage of seizing the
heights and attacking downhill, and ancient historians describe situations in which an army was unnerved by seeing its enemy on the
heights above it, and easily thrown into panic retreat before contact
was made.2 Thus ancient war, even where troops were held together by
tight social organization on the battlefield, hinged largely on dramatic
threats to break up and panic the opponent before actual physical
damage was done.3
1
2
3
Xenophon describes many battles (c. 400 BC) in which the Greek phalanx withstood
assaults from less firmly disciplined Persian troops, or routed them merely by advancing
in formation, but the battle ended with few casualties inflicted because the Greeks lacked
cavalry to follow up.
A complication is that very well-disciplined troops, chiefly Roman legions when faced
with undisciplined barbarian armies, were capable of maintaining formation even when
being attacked downhill. Both Greek and Roman soldiers were very aware of the value of
their disciplined formation. The Romans in particular were skilled at building defensive
walls and ditches, even in the midst of being attacked; thus they almost always won the
battle of nerves – the battle of emotional dominance – when their opponents lacked their
own level of organizational solidarity. When Roman legions fought each other in civil
wars, the outcome was often a standoff, or a siege of rival engineering works. Exceptional
battles between Roman troops could produce large casualties, where both sides had a high
level of organization to sustain complex battle tactics.
Ancient armies frequently had auxiliary troops of archers and stone-slingers, but these
missiles were on the whole no more effective than crude long-distance weapons of the
early gunpowder era. A disciplined phalanx of heavy troops – i.e. bearing heavy armor and
shields – could withstand long-distance attacks, although it might not be able to catch the
enemy to reciprocate the violence. The phalanx was always the decisive organizational
core.
Does national sentiment increase fighting efficacy?
33
In the era of modern firearms, frontline performance continued to be
largely ineffective. From their invention around 1500 until the late 1800s
muskets, rifles and other individually operated guns were accurate only
out to about one hundred yards; but even at shorter distances firing was
wild and largely inaccurate and a large proportion of soldiers did not
manage to fire their guns consistently. The basic problem was what
I have called confrontational tension/fear (CT/F): the pattern of all
face-to-face violence, where human confrontation raises emotional stress
to such a level that fighters become clumsy, and are either paralyzed or
wildly incompetent in using their weapons. In combat of all kinds, the
height of courage is usually just to keep oneself from running away.
Small-scale gang fights today, which resemble the undisciplined troop
formations of earlier times, thus mainly have the pattern of loud bluster,
brief encounters of wild firing, and rapid retreat.
Military technology over the centuries has become more lethal, in
principle. Rifles have become accurate out to hundreds of meters, and
automatic weapons have raised the sheer volume of firepower and have
thus increased the rate of casualties inflicted, although the ratio of
number of bullets per casualty has jumped vastly upwards – i.e. machine
guns are not fired more accurately but make up for it by firing more and
raising the level of random hits. Nevertheless, sociological studies in
World War II and the Korean War found that only about 15–25 percent
of frontline troops were regularly firing their guns at the enemy (Marshall
1947; further references and analysis in Collins 2008); most were nearparalyzed by CT/F. This was well into the era of full-scale nationalism; it
was precisely the national, mass-conscript armies that looked the worst
from the perspective of combat competence.
The key developments that made combat more effective, in the military sense, were in the realm of social organization. The first of these was
the development of troop discipline through marching in formation.
These paradeground armies not only inculcated some degree of group
consciousness,4 but were also designed to move troops around the
battlefield while keeping their cohesion, and, by practice of drill, to make
soldiers fire their guns en masse in a steady rhythm of firing and
reloading. In practice, however, paradeground formations had trouble
keeping up a steady fire, often shooting wildly and then breaking down
into sporadic firing and uncoordinated participation. On the whole, these
marching formations were most successful in keeping soldiers in place,
keeping them from running away, and thus making them better targets
4
The point is stressed by McNeill 1995, but he exaggerates the value of this innovation,
since he fails to see the persistence of CT/F.
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for enemy fire, especially long-distance artillery. This social innovation
was better at enabling soldiers to stand and be killed than to kill others.
A second type of social innovation was the bayonet charge. As
Anthony King (2007) has argued, troops under the stress of prolonged
combat tend to lose morale, especially if they lose initiative and are
pushed back by the enemy. Historically, one way of restoring emotional
energy was to take the offensive, and to do so in a fashion that coordinated soldiers’ bodies in a collective outburst of mutual entrainment:
rushing at the enemy with fixed bayonets was more a way of keeping
up one’s own morale than of harming the enemy. In effect, it was a return
to pre-firepower weapons, fighting with spears rather than guns. The
bayonet charge was a way of remedying CT/F and the tendency for
troops to fail to fire or to fire inaccurately; if fine motor coordination
failed, the strategy was to put bodies into gross motion in order to get
them in the faces of the enemy so that the latter felt more CT/F than the
attackers. But it combined the main social technique of pre-modern
fighting, the noise and intimidation of frenzied attack, with the discipline
of modern organization. In the event, bayonet charges rarely led to socalled hand-to-hand combat, because the enemy faced with a bayonet
charge that succeeded in getting close to them would usually break
and run. Thus bayonet charges (notable in the US Civil War and World
War I) were largely modes of counterattack. In the large combat formations of those wars involving tens of thousands of troops, commanders
held troops in reserve, and sent them into action when assault had broken
part of the front. Often this was successful in restoring the front line, in a
pattern of reciprocal flows of attack (when the defense was emotionally
overwhelmed and retreated) and counterattack (when the enemy
advance lost momentum to a more coherent force advancing from
deeper in defensive territory, and thus tended to flee back towards its
starting point).5 As in ancient warfare, battle among disciplined troops
capable of keeping up some degree of formation in combat was largely a
matter of imposing momentum on the enemy, scaring him into giving
ground and losing social organization.6 But in the more complex armies
of modern war, generals took account of the tendency for parts of the
army to break down, and sought to remedy this by designating reserve
5
6
The crucial point at the battle of Gettysburg, where Union troops counterattacked with a
bayonet charge against the Confederate attempt to turn the line at Little Round Top, was
of this character.
Scaring is not entirely the right word. The process was more like imposing momentum in
the way that an athletic team imposes its momentum on its opponent – a phase of the
game when one side is energized, well-coordinated, taking the initiative, while the other
becomes sluggish, uncoordinated and ill-performing.
Does national sentiment increase fighting efficacy?
35
troops for counterattacks. Ancient battles tended to have one simple
swing of momentum; modern battles might have many.
Historically, bayonet charges were most prominent in the era of
nationalism. Does this mean that only troops motivated by national
feelings could use them? I think it is a coincidence in time. The key
social feature is the technique of warfare itself – the micro-interactional
pattern of the soldiers with their fellows while carrying out a bayonet
charge – rather than whatever national feelings there are in the background. As we know from sociological studies of troops in World War
II, ideologies of whatever sort were rarely important for the motivation
of frontline troops in any of the contending armies. Soldiers were
mostly cynical about abstract rhetorics and fought largely out of feelings of loyalty to their immediate comrades (Holmes 1985; Stouffer
et al. 1949).This plays into a third social innovation of modern warfare.
The technique of moving troops on the battlefield by large paradeground marching formations was becoming notably unsuccessful by
the time of World War I; machine guns used by defensive troops
inflicted heavy casualties on mass assaults, even when they relaxed
strict paradeground order in crossing no-man’s-land. By the end of
the third year of war, late 1917, it was apparent that full-scale assaults
were largely suicidal. All armies more or less simultaneously hit upon a
solution: to break up formations into small groups specially trained to
infiltrate trenches (Biddle 2004: 83–89; Gudmundsson 1989). In the
German army, these were called Stosstruppen: shock troops. The veteran
Ernst Jünger, in his book that became famous in Germany in 1920, In
Stahlgewittern (In the Storm of Steel; 1920/2003), describes how these
troops regarded themselves as elite, superseding even the traditional
ranking of officers over enlisted men. The small-group tactics of men
given local initiative did indeed succeed in breaking up the static lines of
trench warfare, and in 1918 the Western front became more fluid again;
but since both sides adopted the technique, the result was continued
heavy casualties and the war’s end through attrition. The Stosstruppen did
indeed have high morale, but what motivated them was not national
identity per se. They were an elite within the national army, not simply
those who were most patriotic.
The name morphed into Sturm Abteilung (Storm Division), which
was later appropriated by the Nazi militia. As Stefan Klusemann
(2010) has shown, the Nazis were not simply one manifestation of
nationalism among many. That was so, but precisely because there
were so many nationalist movements in the post-war period, the Nazis
had to innovate to stand out from the others, to attract attention and
recruit more members by generating more emotional momentum,
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and one of their devices was to seize on the high-prestige identity of
group formations inside the World War I army.
At the height of nationalist mobilization in modern history – World
War II – all the devices of modern nationalism were operating full bore:
propaganda, recruitment, and the total mobilization of populations on
the home front for war support. There was also an explicit ideological
sector of self-reflexive nationalism, so that some troops were explicitly
called Nationalists.7 But when we look at the organization of combat
itself, we find that armies on the whole relied on other devices for
motivating troops to perform in violent confrontation, such as the
German army’s technique of trying to keep small groups of friends
together through their military experience (Shils and Janowitz 1948; for
a controversial critique, see Bartov 1991). Less planned versions of this
tended to happen as well in the Western armies, while the Communist
armies used techniques of parallel hierarchy for surveillance and threat.
Nazi troop formations additionally built up the status of elite divisions
(the SS) within the military. Nationalism was more the rhetoric of
politicians and the home front, while soldiers in combat were motivated
and manipulated by small-group loyalties, coercion, or honorific elite
standing inside the military itself.
I have been arguing, then, that the era of nationalism paralleled the era
of modern warfare, but that the latter derived its effectiveness through
innovating largely on the small-group level, away from overarching
ideologies. In the latter half of the twentieth century in most Western
countries a reaction against nationalism set in; this happened especially
with the period of decolonization and domestic civil rights movements
with their ideology of promoting ethnic subgroup identities and rejecting
assimilation to a national identity. The Vietnam War was probably the
most demoralized war fought by the US, in part because it happened at
the height of domestic racial struggles, which also took place within the
7
Among other reasons, to distinguish themselves pointedly from internationalist brands of
ideology, notably communism, socialism, and to an extent, democracy. Peculiarly, the
various nationalist movements tended to be international allies among themselves,
showing that they were not simply localist or ethno/cultural-particularists. We thus need
to distinguish among different brands of nationalism: (a) a naive, unreflective group
identity (not necessarily primordial, but promoted ideologically during periods of state
unification, monopolization of force, and state penetration into society); (b) ideologically
reflexive nationalism, which sees itself on a more abstract level as a type of ideology
combating other ideologies that it considers to be undermining the virtues of local
solidarity. Paradoxically, the success of this ideological appeal tends to undermine or at
least complicate its layer of naive nationalism. As Klusemann (2010) shows, the militant
ideologically reflexive nationalists competed with naive nationalists for recruits and
prominence in the political attention space.
Does national sentiment increase fighting efficacy?
37
military itself. But the US military also created a rotation policy for its
troops that directly negated the lesson of World War II that troops
fought especially out of loyalty to their buddies. Instead, every soldier
was assigned for one year in the combat zone, giving soldiers an individual orientation and destroying group cohesion. Soldiers would commonly ask each other, “What’s your number?,” meaning “How many
days do you have left before you rotate out?” (Gibson 1986). Both
micro-interactional structures and national ideology were undermined
at the same time.
I have been placing emphasis on frontline infantry troops, since this is
where the problem of CT/F is strongest, and the innovations in social
organization that I have discussed were solutions above all for infantry
fighting morale. Another long-term trend is technological, but it also
plays into the social interactions of combat. CT/F exists at the most
human level of confrontation: where fighters can see their enemies as
human beings. Thus another solution to CT/F has been to improve the
technology of fighting at a distance. Artillery is as old as infantry guns.
But the earliest cannon were clumsy and inaccurate; they could be used
most effectively to demolish fortresses, thereby bringing an end to medieval warfare with castles and sieges of walled towns. Thus the early effect
of artillery was to produce more infantry battles out in the open. Artillery
became more mobile (when horse-drawn) and more accurate, and
proved to be quite lethal against paradeground infantry formations. At
the same time, infantry reduced the traditionally elite cavalry to a minor
factor, since horses could not stand up to concentrated fire. But the real
success of artillery lay in the fact that it solved the problem of CT/F, at
least for its own gunners. They fired from so far away from the enemy –
by the early nineteenth century at distances up to a mile – that they could
no longer see the men they were killing. Artillery service was not regarded
as very heroic, probably for the very reason of firing at an impersonal
distance, but the success of Napoleon’s armies was due above all to his
appreciation of rapid deployment of light, mobile artillery around a
battlefield. In effect, the French realized that paradeground infantry
formations were chiefly a way to move large numbers of troops into
combat, and to keep them from running away, but that flexible use of
artillery caused most of the casualties and broke down enemy organization. I would not particularly stress Napoleon as an individual in bringing
about this style of combat; the fact that he was an artillery officer implies
that it was this combat branch that was coming to the fore.
The nationalism of the French Revolution and its levée en masse coincided with a technical development in the organization of combat, but
examined more closely, it appears that it was “Napoleonic” organizational
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innovations that made the French armies so effective. Nationalism was
more a phenomenon of the home front, affecting combat because it
produced much larger armies, allowing French generals to carry out
lengthy wars on far-flung battlefields, and to absorb large casualties with
strategic confidence of replacing them. By the time the Revolutionary/
Napoleonic Wars had gone on for twenty years, French opponents had
developed a number of tactical and organizational innovations of their
own such as the guerrilla tactics avoiding pitched combat in Spain, and the
Russian strategy of avoiding battle and relying on French logistics attrition; by the time of Waterloo, English and Prussian armies had caught up
with and surpassed the French in staff organization and logistical support,
as well as the effective use of mobile artillery (Black 2010).
Technical innovation in the military was most important when it
also facilitated social innovation. The long-term trend has been
towards more and more distant combat. By World War I, siege guns
on land, and naval guns offshore or in naval battles, had ranges of up
to ten miles and carried enormous explosive power. These gunners
did not suffer from CT/F, and although their guns were not terribly
accurate, the sheer volume of firepower laid on over a period of time
could cause considerable destruction. In this sense, warfare – as killing
power, and also as power to demoralize an enemy into defeat –
became more efficient. There is also an aspect in which successful
military innovations tend to cancel each other out; what one side
develops to its proven advantage soon becomes imitated by rival
armies. Just as Stosstruppen were adopted on all sides to end
the impasse of trench warfare, long-distance artillery was similarly
imitated. Imitation of the most effective combat techniques (both
material and social) means that opponents tend to neutralize each
other’s advantages; wars become prolonged contests of mutual attrition. Hence modern-era wars have tended to become longer and more
costly, both in lives and materiel. This has an indirect effect upon
nationalism, since wars demand more resources extracted from
the social base. In this respect, I am inclined to emphasize the reverse
pathway: innovations in military technique (social/material) increase
political pressure for national mobilization.
There are some further feedback loops from military innovations to
the ideology of war, especially on the home front. Air power is the
epitome of long-distance fighting, thus it solves the problem of CT/F
for the fighters, and allows both a more heroic side of war to reemerge,
and more devastating involvement of civilians, who become military
targets. Take the heroic side first. Air power began as flying surveillance,
and quickly became flying artillery. But since air power can be used as
Does national sentiment increase fighting efficacy?
39
defense against air power,8 World War I soon invented the aerial
combat or “dogfight.” This was romanticized into duels in the sky
(although in fact fighters flew in larger formations and got much of their
success from coordinated tactics). Fighter pilots became the military
specialty with the highest morale and the greatest public adulation. The
high morale came from low levels of CT/F – avoiding the gruelling life of
the front line, while flying home to base in the rear area after every
successful mission. Scoring systems were devised to count the number
of aerial kills, giving ranks as “aces,” and sports-like record-keeping
contests over who was the highest-scoring ace. The jaunty, deathdefying fighter pilot became publicized as the chief hero of modern
wars, especially in World Wars I and II. Here again military technique,
interacting with the social conditions of combat, allowed certain military
specialties to be singled out and presented to the civilian population as
idealized representations of the nation at war. The adulation of pilots
was prominent in most belligerent nations, including Germany, France,
England, the US, Russia, and Japan.
The downfall of this heroizing of the fighter pilot came about because
of the shift to the era of asymmetrical wars. From the Korean War
onwards most wars were fought between armies of vastly different technological capacity. US and UK fighter jets were so superior to Russian
(and sometimes French) jets used in Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf Wars
that the system of aces went into abeyance. By the latter wars, there were
too few enemy planes willing to risk combat for victorious pilots to build
up sufficiently high scores. The trend was also abetted by long-distance
electronic control of targeting, so that individual pilots had less autonomy; by the 1990s, fighter jets were used mainly as flying artillery, an
unglamorous task of impersonal destruction at long distance.
Turn now to civilian involvement. One might argue that the twentiethcentury trend towards the mass bombing of civilian targets was the result
of the intensified nationalism of that period. But it has a technical
rationale, as the emphasis of modern war turned to destroying enemy
logistics and economic base. Bombing economic targets makes large
numbers of civilians victims of war, and in that sense makes war more
literally a war on the nation. There may be a feedback loop here, such
that civilians subjected to such attack adopt a more stridently nationalistic attitude towards enemies and call for retaliation in kind; this loop
played itself out in German attacks on Britain in World War II, which in
8
It isn’t clear that aerial combat is the best defense against aircraft attack; anti-aircraft
ground fire itself accounts for some portion of EAD (enemy aircraft destroyed), at levels
of effectiveness that have changed considerably over the last one hundred years.
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Randall Collins
turn fuelled the fire-bombing of German cities. Consciousness of the
European experience probably increased the motivation for the US to
use atomic bombs against Japan (among many other motivations). But it
is not clear that nationalism is the fundamental starting point of this loop;
military techniques, following their own momentum, brought about
actions that at least temporarily exacerbated nationalist hatreds. But on
the whole the aftermath of the civilian bombing tactics of World War II
was a revulsion against this kind of nationalist excess, and surprisingly
rapid reconciliation between the peoples of the once-belligerent nations.
To bring the survey up to the present, the trend of war-making in the
post-Vietnam era has been the advance of two kinds of techniques: on
one hand, a shift towards the even greater depersonalization of combat
by long-distance technologies, and, on the other, the increasing use of
local, small-group social techniques for generating combat morale. Both
increase the efficiency of fighting, while reducing reliance on nationalism, perhaps to a minimum.
Particularly in the most advanced militaries (the US and UK), the
trend has been towards high-tech weapons systems that integrate many
components in delivering firepower to the target. Surveillance is carried
out by satellites, aircraft, and increasingly by drones whose operators may
be thousands of kilometers from the battlefield. GPS coordinates, infrared sensors, laser tagging of targets, as well as computer analysis of aerial
photos and video feed, divide the labor between those who seek the
targets and those who physically service the weapons; many humans
and machines cooperate before frontline troops fire a weapon that actually kills someone. Computer connections, radios, and cell phones make
each combat vehicle or weapons platform (in current parlance) part of a
large web of communications links. Whether this increases the efficacy of
combat depends on one’s criteria; the system combining long-distance
sensors, information analysis, command-and-control, and execution on
the battlefield may result in the misidentification of enemy targets and
hitting civilians (or ostensible civilians, given the tendency to hide in
civilian areas and disguise). If battle criteria are expanded to include the
“hearts and minds” of a potentially hostile population, high levels of
efficacy are elusive. By more old-fashioned criteria (eg. those of World
War II), high-tech warfare is capable of causing a great deal of damage to
personnel and materiel. Among other reasons, high-tech computerlinked combat diffuses authority and makes most weapons into groupoperated weapons, and this is the type of fighting that has always had the
highest firing rate, where social support overcomes CT/F.
But my chief analytical question is whether high-tech combat efficacy
is correlated with nationalism. The answer is no. In today’s military the
Does national sentiment increase fighting efficacy?
41
predominant atmosphere is professionalism, or at least bureaucratic
routine. For the great majority of combat participants, fighting is at a
distance from enemies who have no human character and impose little
self-sacrifice; no ideological fervor is called for.
This is similarly the case with the motivational techniques used in
contemporary military training and in daily life in a war zone. The US
military is one of the few organizations that have paid serious attention to
social science findings. Low firing rates among World War II infantry
were recognized and met by training reforms that emphasized realistic
combat situations rather than artificial target practice on the firing range,
and that relied on the technology of high-volume automatic weapons.
Modern soldiers are taught to lay down a heavy fire rather than to aim.
Small-group cohesion is now given great emphasis. Rigid lines of authority from higher officers have been largely deemphasized in favor of
initiative by low-ranking officers on the spot, and combat operations
are designed and enacted in a spirit embodying the principles of interaction rituals (King 2006). All of this means that the modern military is
more emotionally and morally self-sufficient than the mass conscript
armies of the early and mid twentieth century. Soldiers in today’s allvolunteer army might be viewed as mercenaries, insofar as they take on
the work of fighting for wages rather than for ideology or through compulsion, but military organization has done quite a good job at motivating
them. Besides techniques of small-group solidarity and the dispersion of
authority, many frontline combat soldiers are given elite status through
the proliferation of specialized troops: Marines, Navy SEALS, Special
Forces, Rangers, Delta Force, etc. This is not to say that troops in today’s
high-tech military are totally lacking in patriotic/nationalist rhetoric (or
indeed in some degree of cynicism and burnout), but nationalist ideology
per se appears to be a negligible component in what makes them fight.
The bottom line is that today’s high-tech armies have much higher
fighting efficacy than any previous army historically. On a man-for-man
basis, the delivered firepower of today’s military is orders of magnitude
higher than it was sixty years ago. The Western troops that fought in the
1991 Gulf War and subsequent wars are probably the least nationalist
troops that the US or England has had since the eighteenth century, and
arguably they are the best fighters.
One question that dangles is whether nationalism has affected the
performance of the guerrilla-style armies of recent times. Such armies
have fought against Western high-tech armies in asymmetrical wars. They
have also fought against each other in symmetrical low-tech wars (such as
many wars in Africa up through the Libyan Civil War), and these are the
armies of contemporary ethnic cleansing. Is nationalism important either
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for mobilizing them, or for their performance in combat? There are two
sub-questions: are Iraqi insurgents, Afghani Taliban, and similar guerrilla
fighters motivated to join because of nationalist sentiments? And are such
sentiments important in whatever fighting success they have?
Impressionistically, it appears that guerrilla armies have been recruited
for many different reasons and ideologies. Religious justifications vary
from the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa (with its horrific
techniques for coercing child soldiers) to the pan-Islamism of Al-Qaeda.
Nationalism is one rhetorical strand among others. As to their fighting
efficacy, something like nationalism (or another idealistic ideology) may
be important in resistance wars against Western high-tech armies. Here
the insurgents operate without airpower, armor, and long-distance firing
and command-and-control systems. This means that they must have a
very different motivational and organizational system than the professionalized Western armies. I suspect that small-group loyalties are crucial, as is perennially the case. But the nature of an asymmetrical war
fought against an occupying enemy army has one advantage to the
defender: it needs only hold out sufficiently long, intermittently doing
continuous small-scale damage to the invader’s logistics and isolated
outposts, until the political will to maintain the invasion dwindles.
Hypothetically, nationalism could provide the motivating ideology to
hold out for a long period of time; empirically we just don’t know if this is
true. The key factor might be that the small-scale victories of guerrilla
resistance support small-group morale enough so that the movement
sustains itself over time.
In conclusion, there is little evidence that nationalism makes troops
fight better. The main problem of combat is overcoming confrontational
tension/fear. Nationalism, like all other ideologies, simply ignores the
problem, and covers it up in practice by rhetoric and mystification.
Troops motivated chiefly by nationalism and unsupported by workable
techniques of combat performance tend to lose their nationalist fervor
fairly soon (probably within a year) and to become cynical or alienated. It
is not surprising that the peak level of non-firing in combat was found in
the bureaucratic armies of World War II, at the peak of mass democratic
nationalism. On the contrary, it has been those armies that emphasized
small-group coordination and morale, and other techniques of social
support and prestige within the military, that have been the most effective
fighters – effective at killing and destroying, at any rate.
But nationalism may well have played an indirect role in making some
nation-states win wars. It is one thing to recruit troops, another thing to
get them into effective action on the battlefield. Something like nationalism or patriotism was important in motivating large numbers of volunteer
Does national sentiment increase fighting efficacy?
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troops in the US Civil War of 1861–65 (on the Confederate side as well,
although this was a suddenly constructed nationalism), and idealistic
appeals of the nation-state were at the center of the mass recruiting drives
of World War I, and to an extent in World War II. On the whole, national
appeals created the huge armies capable of winning by years of attrition.
Given the relatively ineffective performance of such troops in combat,
nationalism made it easier to be killed than to kill others – easier to lose
than to win in combat. But given enough troops mobilized from the
nation, sheer numbers would tell. Nationalism has lost many battles but
won some massive wars.
RE FEREN CE S
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