Consider the following comments on nationalism.
Patriotism is loving your country, nationalism is needing an enemy to love it.
Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first.
Charles de Gaulle
A flag can shelter a frightened people or it can be the cloth they hide their cruelty behind.
Nations are stories so widely believed that we mistake them for geography.
The same pride that builds a country can teach it to despise the world beyond its borders.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A defensible thesis is that nationalism is a tool with no fixed moral charge, capable of binding strangers into mutual obligation or of licensing contempt for everyone outside the line. Open by granting its genuine power, that shared identity lets people sacrifice for those they will never meet, funding schools, defending borders, mourning together. Then complicate it: the very mechanism that builds solidarity inside the nation works by drawing a boundary, and that boundary is easily weaponised into the belief that outsiders matter less. A strong third move separates an attachment that says we owe each other something from one that says we are better than them, since only the second reliably curdles into harm. Caution: resist both the cosmopolitan sneer that all national feeling is bigotry and the chauvinist claim that love of country excuses whatever is done in its name.