The Patriotism Issue

Volume 9 Issue 6, February 2010

In the grand scheme of things, the creation of the nation-state has been a relatively recent event. The world wasn’t always divvied up into parcels of land, their people labeled according to the segment of the earth they “belonged” to. Nationalism was a top-down phenomenon; national histories were, and continue to be, written by those in power, and are taught to populations through elementary school curriculums, national exhibitions, ceremonies, and newspapers. This happens even in Canada, where our Canadian history courses in high school begin with European and Indigenous contact. Anything that happened before this contact in the territory we now call Canada is labeled ‘pre-history’, as if Indigenous histories are irrelevant, illegitimate.

Considering the recent development of the nationstate and the top-down creation of national identities, the concept of patriotism becomes strange indeed. What does it mean to be proud of our nation, when the concept itself was artificially created? What do we really have in common with the people who are in our shared borders? This depends, as is illustrated on page 5, on our level of privilege in society, if we are among those who national laws were created to service, or if we are among the ‘undesirables’.

In this issue we have a story of Olympic disillusionment (page 12), a photo essay that explores the idea of living under occupation in Palestine (page 7), and personal stories of belonging (or not belonging) to a national whole. Patriotism, like any other imposed sense of pride, should not be taken for granted.

- Erin Epp, Editor-in-Chief