National love derives from assimilating the nation to unchosen natural ties

Evidence

Something of the nature of this political love can be deciphered from the ways in which languages describe its object: either in the vocabulary of kinship (motherland, Vaterland, patria) or that of home (heimat or tanah air [earth and water, the phrase for the Indonesians’ native archipelago]). Both idioms denote something to which one is naturally tied. As we have seen earlier, in everything ‘natural’ there is always something unchosen. In this way, nation-ness is assimilated to skin-colour, gender, parentage and birth-era – all those things one can not help. And in these ‘natural ties’ one senses what one might call ‘the beauty of gemeinschaft’. To put it another way, precisely because such ties are not chosen, they have about them a halo of disinterestedness. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 546

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains how ‘the beauty of gemeinschaft’ and the ‘halo of disinterestedness’ name the mechanism by which national attachments feel unchosen and thus pure.
• XREF: The ‘everything natural is unchosen’ move and disinterestedness echo the scaffolding Anderson builds toward racism’s naturalizing logic later in the chapter; also connects to the Halbwachs-style collective identity literature. — connects to: Nationality persists as attachment even after citizenship and state loyalty are severed; Societal ills stem partly from separation from reciprocal land love — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 441