Abstract
Nationalism is the belief that to every state should correspond a nation, and that every nation deserves a state. The only legitimate state in its eyes is the ‘nation-state’. This doctrine was born during the French Revolution (1789–1815), and promoted by a number of thinkers in the early nineteenth century, prominent among them being Johann Fichte and Giuseppe Mazzini. During the latter part of the nineteenth century it gained in popularity, and can be said to have become part of the liberal creed. It reached its zenith in the First World War (1914–1918), especially in the principle of ‘self-determination’ as proclaimed in the Fourteen Points of the American President Woodrow Wilson. After the First World War, it reshaped much of the map of Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. Nationalism also became a powerful part of the anti-colonial movement in Asia and, somewhat later, in Africa.
Right from the start there were problems, both theoretical and practical, with the doctrine of nationalism. It was simple, and clear enough, to say that every state should rest on a nation; but who or what constituted ‘the nation’? What were the criteria for membership – birth, ancestry, culture, citizenship? Could one opt to become a member of the nation, or was membership an ascribed quality? How to handle the question of national minorities, which were to be found in practically every formally-delineated ‘nation-state’? How much diversity could a nation-state afford, if it was – in principle – to be founded on a single nationality?
Liberals in particular became alarmed at some of the propensities of nationalism. It could cynically be annexed and manipulated by statesmen who were not themselves committed to the national principle. Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian statesman, was often picked out as a prime example of this strategy, in his employment of German nationalism to unify Germany. Count Cavour, the Piedmontese statesman and architect of Italian unity, was seen as another example. Nationalism, it seemed, was not intrinsically connected to liberalism. It could ally itself with many other ideologies, conservatism, racism, fascism.
The period after the First World War, the 1920s and 1930s, discredited nationalism in the eyes of many liberals and democrats. Even though they were sympathetic to nationalist aspirations among the small nations of Europe, and in the anti-colonial movement in the European empires, they were appalled by the hijacking of nationalism by the extreme right – Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, conservative militarism in Japan. For many liberals, nationalism here showed its true colours, as an intolerant and authoritarian creed. In the years after the Second World War, many liberals felt that nationalism was an outdated and reactionary creed. The future was international; world affairs would increasingly be conducted by international agencies such as the United Nations, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. Human rights would be better protected by international organizations, such as the European Court of Human Rights, than by national governments.
The Israeli scholar Yael Tamir, as a liberal herself, is very aware of this history. She nevertheless feels that nationalism is too important to be left to other ideologies, it must be saved for liberalism. She first attempted this in a spirited book, Liberal Nationalism (1995), which attracted a lot of attention and stimulated a scholarly debate. She has now returned to the fray, with a renewed sense of urgency. A certain strand of populist, authoritarian, nationalism seems to be sweeping the Western world, symbolized by the election of Donald Trump to the presidency in the United States and by the triumph of the Brexiteers – those who want Britain to leave the European Union and go it alone – in the United Kingdom. Tamir feels that it is even more important now, with the resurgence of nationalism, to understand its appeal and to win it for the liberal camp.
The main claim of this book – as in her previous one – is that while nationalism can do without liberalism, liberalism cannot do without nationalism. The liberal tradition that stresses freedom, individualism and universal human rights cannot appeal to humans in all their fullness. It offers only a thin, etiolated form of belonging. It ignores the need to belong to a cultural community, which in modern times can be provided only by the nation, in the political form of the nation-state. The nation provides a home, a sense of belonging. Linked to the state it is a ‘caring entity’, nurturing its members, supplying welfare and a sense of solidarity that cuts across all classes. ‘With the help of nationalism states turn into homelands.’ The nation is like an ‘extended family’, and the emotions it evokes is ‘like falling in love’ (pp. 39–40, 70).
Tamir is concerned that liberalism today has abandoned its historic connection with the nation. On the right, the ‘neo-liberals’ preach the virtues of the free market and welcome globalization. On the left, liberals have turned to ‘identity’ politics, dissolving the nation into a series of categories divided by race, gender, sexuality, age. Neither is concerned with building solidarity across groups; ‘national identity’ is viewed with suspicion, as an ideological trap. Tamir here echoes the charge made against contemporary liberals by the theorist Mark Lila, in his book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (2017).
A fundamental consequence of this turn in contemporary liberalism is that liberals have lost touch with the vast mass of ordinary people who are not attracted to identity politics and who feel left behind by the waves of globalization. It is these people – the working class whites in the American ‘rustbelt,’ the white working class in Britain’s northern industrial regions – who have provided the electoral base for Trump and the Brexiteers. It is these disaffected and alienated people who have revolted, in the name of nationalism, against the cosmopolitan elites who look down condescendingly on the nation as a form of parochialism, if not of tribalism.
Tamir is particularly good on what she calls the ‘nationalism of the vulnerable’, the nationalism of the poor and excluded. She writes with real feeling and insight about their predicament. But she does not advocate nationalism simply to placate these people. Nationalism is for all. In modern times the nation-state is the only entity that has been able to provide the ‘good life’ for its members. Supranational organizations, such as the UN, and supranational groupings, such as the European Union, cannot provide that ‘family feeling’ that is the hallmark of the nation. She quotes the British prime minister Theresa May: a ‘citizen of the world’ is a ‘citizen of nowhere’. A necessary first step, says Tamir, is to make globalism ‘the selfish choice’, and nationalism ‘the moral one’. She calls for a ‘committed nationalism – the nationalism of mutual responsibility that places fellow nationals at the top of one’s social priorities’ (pp. 171, 173). The once popular policy of ‘multiculturalism’ has, in her eyes as in those of many others, clearly failed; but it was wrong, she argues, in its very conception, in turning its back on the nation as the main container of loyalties and solidarities.
Tamir writes clearly and fluently, with many homely references (popular songs, familiar slogans such as ‘Home Sweet Home’). This is a passionate, and rather personal, statement in defence of nationalism. Unlike her earlier book, this is not a scholarly account, more a tract for our times. The sources are few and familiar (and the thinking of Isaiah Berlin, to whom she dedicates the book, is, as with her earlier work, present throughout). Nevertheless, it succeeds well in its main purpose of making liberals think again about nationalism, and in arguing its case that ‘nationalism is a too powerful and flexible tool to be given up’ (p. 182). If liberals give up on nationalism, then authoritarian ‘illiberals’, such as Victor Orbán of Hungary, will only too readily embrace it as their own.
There remain of course serious problems about nationalism. In her final chapter Tamir tries to show how we might tame the new nationalism, make it more tolerant and caring, less exclusive and xenophobic. She urges in particular that far more concern should be shown to social justice, to acknowledging the legitimate fears and resentments of the ‘99%’ who are increasingly left behind as the global elites grow in wealth and power. One has to say that many of her prescriptions are well meaning but, in the current political environment, lack credibility. The populists who have been most successful in exploiting those fears are not egalitarians, whatever their rhetoric.
More seriously, Tamir does not sufficiently face up to nationalism’s historic inability to define the nation, to indicate how one decides on membership. She rejects, as do many others, the traditional distinction between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalism, arguing that the former offers ‘too abstract and legalistic’ criteria for membership, and provides ‘a very thin base for social and political cooperation’ (p. 165). But then what is the alternative? If ‘thick identities’ of culture or ethnicity are the only real bases of the nation, how prevent the slide into exclusiveness and intolerance? We have seen this happen with nationalism, again and again, over the course of its 200-year history. One can and try to tame the beast; but it has a distinct tendency to break loose and create havoc.