There are significant transaction costs, in lives and in freedoms, associated with experimenting with untried or previously failed political orders. In principle, the nation-state is an institutional means precisely to democratize the international system. It allows peoples, by region and sub-region, to be represented by peoples closer to them materially, culturally, in terms of institutional models, and otherwise.
A nationalist, then, is someone who believes that the interests of segments of the world are better represented in chunks smaller than continents or empires in an admittedly imperfect world. Patricia Sohn is associate professor of Political Science at the University of Florida, and undergraduate coordinator for the Center for Jewish Studies. She has interests in religion and politics, courts, and gender politics; micro-level politics; state-society relations; historical institutionalism; international political sociology; political ethnography, qualitative methods, in-depth interviews, and phenomenological analysis of politics.
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This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Nationalisms in this wider sense can vary somewhat in their conceptions of the nation which are often left implicit in their discourse , in the grounds for and degree of its value, and in the scope of their prescribed obligations.
Liberal nationalists see liberal-democratic principles and pro-national attitudes as belonging together. Of course, some things have to be sacrificed: we must acknowledge that either the meaningfulness of a community or its openness must be sacrificed to some extent as we cannot have them both. How much of each is to give way is left open, and of course, various liberal nationalists take different views of what precisely the right answer is.
They both see the feeling of national identity as a feeling that promotes solidarity, and solidarity as means for increased social justice Tamir , in particular ch. Liberal nationalists diverge about the value of multiculturalism. Kymlicka takes it as basic for his picture of liberalism while Tamir dismisses it without much ado: multicultural, multiethnic democracies have a very poor track record, she claims Tamir lists two kinds of reasons that guarantee special political status to nations.
The historical development of liberalism turned it into a universalistic, anti-communitarian principle; this has been a fatal mistake that can be and should be corrected by the liberal nationalist synthesis.
Can we revive the unifying narratives of our nationality without sacrificing the liberal inheritance of freedom and rights? Liberal nationalism answers in the affirmative.
Interestingly, Tamir combines this high regard of nation with an extreme constructivist view of its nature: nations are mental structures that exist in the minds of their members Is liberal nationalism implemented anywhere in the present world, or is it more of an ideal, probably end-state theory, that proposes a picture of a desirable society?
Judging by the writings of liberal nationalists, it is the latter, although presented as a relatively easily reachable ideal, combining two traditions that are already well implemented in political reality.
The variations of nationalism most relevant for philosophy are those that influence the moral standing of claims and of recommended nationalist practices. The central theoretical nationalist evaluative claims can be charted on the map of possible positions within political theory in the following useful but somewhat simplified and schematic way. Nationalist claims featuring the nation as central to political action must answer two crucial general questions. First, is there one kind of large social group that is of special moral importance?
The nationalist answer is that there certainly is one, namely, the nation. Moreover, when an ultimate choice is to be made, say between ties of family, or friendship, and the nation, the latter has priority. Are they based on voluntary or involuntary membership in the group? On the philosophical map, pro-nationalist normative tastes fit nicely with the communitarian stance in general: most pro-nationalist philosophers are communitarians who choose the nation as the preferred community in contrast to those of their fellow communitarians who prefer more far-ranging communities, such as those defined by global religious traditions.
Before proceeding to moral claims, let us briefly sketch the issues and viewpoints connected to territory and territorial rights that are essential for nationalist political programs. Its primary importance resides in sovereignty and all the associated possibilities for internal control and external exclusion.
What about the grounds for the demand for territorial rights? Nationalist and pro-nationalist views mostly rely on the attachment that members of a nation have to national territory and to the formative value of territory for a nation to justify territorial claims see Miller and Meisels These attachment views stand in stark contrast to more pragmatic views about territorial rights as means for conflict resolution e.
Another quite popular alternative is the family of individualistic views grounding territorial rights in rights and interests of individuals.
We now pass to the normative dimension of nationalism. We shall first describe the very heart of the nationalist program, i. These claims can be seen as answers to the normative subset of our initial questions about 1 pro-national attitudes and 2 actions.
We will see that these claims recommend various courses of action: centrally, those meant to secure and sustain a political organization for the given ethno-cultural national community thereby making more specific the answers to our normative questions 1e , 1f , 2b , and 2c.
Finally, we shall discuss various lines of pro-nationalist thought that have been put forward in defense of these claims. To begin, let us return to the claims concerning the furthering of the national state and culture. These are proposed by the nationalist as norms of conduct.
The philosophically most important variations concern three aspects of such normative claims:. Universalizing nationalism is the political program that claims that every ethno-nation should have a state that it should rightfully own and the interests of which it should promote. Particularistic nationalism is the political program claiming that some ethno-nation should have its state, without extending the claim to all ethno-nations.
It claims thus either. The most difficult and indeed chauvinistic sub-case of particularism, i. Serious theoretical nationalists usually defend only the universalist variety, whereas the nationalist-in-the-street most often defends the egoistic indeterminate one.
Put starkly, the view is that morality ends at the boundaries of the nation-state; beyond there is nothing but anarchy. Recall the initial normative question centered around 1 attitudes and 2 actions. Is national partiality justified, and to what extent? What actions are appropriate to bring about sovereignty? In particular, are ethno-national states and institutionally protected ethno- national cultures goods independent from the individual will of their members, and how far may one go in protecting them?
The philosophical debate for and against nationalism is a debate about the moral validity of its central claims. In particular, the ultimate moral issue is the following: is any form of nationalism morally permissible or justified, and, if not, how bad are particular forms of it?
In some situations they seem plausible: for instance, the plight of some stateless national groups—the history of Jews and Armenians, the historical and contemporary misfortunes of Kurds—lends credence to the idea that having their own state would have solved the worst problems. Still, there are good reasons to examine nationalist claims more carefully. The most general reason is that it should first be shown that the political form of the nation-state has some value as such, that a national community has a particular, or even central, moral and political value, and that claims in its favor have normative validity.
Once this is established, a further defense is needed. Some classical nationalist claims appear to clash—at least under normal circumstances of contemporary life—with various values that people tend to accept. Some of these values are considered essential to liberal-democratic societies, while others are important specifically for the flourishing of creativity and culture. Liberal nationalists are aware of the difficulties of the classical approach, and soften the classical claims, giving them only a prima facie status.
Such thoughtful pro-nationalist writers have participated in an ongoing philosophical dialogue between proponents and opponents of the claim. Further lines of thought built upon these considerations can be used to defend very different varieties of nationalism, from radical to very moderate ones. For brevity, each line of thought will be reduced to a brief argument; the actual debate is more involved than one can represent in a sketch. Some prominent lines of criticism that have been put forward in the debate will be indicated in brackets see Miscevic The main arguments in favor of nationalism will be divided into two sets.
The first set of arguments defends the claim that national communities have a high value, sometime seen as coming from the interests of their individual member e.
The first set will be presented in more detail since it has formed the core of the debate. It depicts the community as the source of value or as the transmission device connecting its members to some important values. The general form of deep communitarian arguments is as follows. First, the communitarian premise: there is some uncontroversial good e. Then comes the claim that the ethno-cultural nation is the kind of community ideally suited for this task.
Then follows the statist conclusion: in order for such a community to preserve its own identity and support the identity of its members, it has to assume always or at least normally the political form of a state.
The conclusion of this type of argument is that the ethno-national community has the right to an ethno-national state and the citizens of the state have the right and obligation to favor their own ethnic culture in relation to any other.
Although the deeper philosophical assumptions in the arguments stem from the communitarian tradition, weakened forms have also been proposed by more liberal philosophers. A liberal nationalist might claim that these are not the central values of political life but are values nevertheless. Moreover, the diametrically opposing views, pure individualism and cosmopolitanism, do seem arid, abstract, and unmotivated by comparison.
By cosmopolitanism we refer to moral and political doctrines claiming that. Confronted with opposing forces of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, many philosophers opt for a mixture of liberalism-cosmopolitanism and patriotism-nationalism.
In his writings, B. Hilary Putnam proposes loyalty to what is best in the multiple traditions in which each of us participates, apparently a middle way between a narrow-minded patriotism and an overly abstract cosmopolitanism Putnam The compromise has been foreshadowed by Berlin and Taylor , , [ 19 ] and in the last two decades it has occupied center stage in the debate and even provoked re-readings of historical nationalism in its light.
Here are then the main weakenings of classical ethno-nationalism that liberal, limited-liberal, and cosmopolitan nationalists propose. First, ethno-national claims have only prima facie strength and cannot trump individual rights. Second, legitimate ethno-national claims do not in themselves automatically amount to the right to a state, but rather to the right to a certain level of cultural autonomy. The main models of autonomy are either territorial or non-territorial: the first involves territorial devolution; the second, cultural autonomy granted to individuals regardless of their domicile within the state.
Finally, any legitimacy that ethno-national claims may have is to be derived from choices the concerned individuals are free to make.
Consider now the particular pro-nationalist arguments from the first set. The first argument depends on assumptions that also appear in the subsequent ones, but it further ascribes to the community an intrinsic value.
The later arguments point more towards an instrumental value of nation, derived from the value of individual flourishing, moral understanding, firm identity and the like.
Taylor concluded that it is not separateness of value that matters. We are forbidden to make judgments of comparative value, for that is measuring the incommensurable.
Assuming that the ethno- nation is the natural unit of culture, the preservation of cultural diversity amounts to institutionally protecting the purity of ethno- national culture. David Miller has developed an interesting and sophisticated liberal pro-national stance over the course of decades from his work in to the most recent work in He accepts multicultural diversity within a society but stresses an overarching national identity, taking as his prime example British national identity, which encompasses the English, Scottish, and other ethnic identities.
A skeptic could note the following. However, multi-cultural states typically bring together groups with very different histories, languages, religions, and even quite contrasting appearances. One seems to have a dilemma. Grounding social solidarity in national identity requires the latter to be rather thin and seems likely to end up as full-on, unitary cultural identity.
Thick constitutional patriotism may be one interesting possible attitude that can ground such solidarity while preserving the original cultural diversity. The arguments in the second set concern political justice and do not rely on metaphysical claims about identity, flourishing, and cultural values.
They appeal to actual or alleged circumstances that would make nationalist policies reasonable or permissible or even mandatory , such as a the fact that a large part of the world is organized into nation-states so that each new group aspiring to create a nation-state just follows an established pattern , or b the circumstances of group self-defense or of redressing past injustice that might justify nationalist policies to take a special case. Some of the arguments also present nationhood as conducive to important political goods, such as equality.
These political arguments can be combined with deep communitarian ones. More remote from classical nationalism than the liberal one of Tamir and Nielsen, it eschews any communitarian philosophical underpinning. Given the variety of pluralistic societies and intensity of trans-national interactions, such openness seems to many to be the only guarantee of stable social and political life see the debate in Shapiro and Kymlicka In general, the liberal nationalist stance is mild and civil, and there is much to be said in favor of it.
It tries to reconcile our intuitions in favor of some sort of political protection of cultural communities with a liberal political morality. Very liberal nationalists such as Tamir divorce ethno-cultural nationhood from statehood. Also, the kind of love for country they suggest is tempered by all kinds of universalist considerations, which in the last instance trump national interest Tamir ; passim, see also Moore and Gans In the last two decades, the issues of nationalism have been increasingly integrated into the debate about the international order see the entries on globalization and cosmopolitanism.
The main conceptual link is the claim that nation-states are natural, stable, and suitable units of the international order. A related debate concerns the role of minorities in the processes of globalization see Kaldor Moreover, the two approaches might ultimately converge: a multiculturalist liberal nationalism and a moderate, difference-respecting cosmopolitanism have a lot in common. This section will pay attention to right-wing populist movements, very close to their traditional nationalist predecessors.
This corresponds to the situation in the biggest part of Europe, and in the US, where nationalist topics are being put forward by the right-wing populist. Populism, so defined, has two opposites: elitism and pluralism. First, there is the elite vs. The second, horizontal dimension distinguishes the predominantly left-wing from the predominantly right-wing populisms and leaves a place for a centrist populist option.
Take classical strong ethnic nationalism. The relation between right-wing populism and such a nationalism is very tight. The term captures exactly the synthesis of populism and the strong ethnic nationalism or nativism. From nationalism, it takes the characterization of the people: it is the ethnic community, in most cases the state-owing ethnic community, or the ethno-nation.
In his work, Mudde documents the claim that purely right-wing populists claim to represent the true people who form the true nation and whose purity is being muddied by new entrants. In the United States, one can talk about populist and reactionary movements, like the Tea Party, that have emerged through the recent experience of immigration, terrorist attacks, and growing economic polarization. We have to set aside here, for reasons of space, the main populist alternative or quasi-alternative to national populism.
In some countries, like Germany, some populist groups-parties e. Others combine this appeal with the ethno-national one. Interestingly, liberal nationalism is not very attractive to the populists.
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