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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

liberal nationalism « Previous | |Next »
December 18, 2006

Many continue to treat nationalism as an anachronistic or dangerous relic of a previous age. Nationalism, they say, should end up in the dustbin of history. Many (rights-based) liberals identify nationalism with chauvinism, violence, xenophobia, and ethnic warfare that tears neighbor from neighbor (eg. as in the former Yugoslavia) and divides countries long united along sectarian lines. Totalitarian tyrannies such as Nazism and Fascism are simply nationalism carried to extremes.

However, the promotion of a common Australian identity is what nationalist sentiments crucially depend on. What then is the core nationalist symbol for Australians? Is it mateshsip? Or solidarity? Or the law of a particular place? Or the idea of constitutionally-protected liberties-- what can be called a liberal nationalism?

If nationalism in Australia has been co-opted by conservatives in terms of their 'war on terror' can we continue to talk in terms of a liberal nationalism? Are nationalist values hidden in the liberal agenda?

Theoretically yes. Liberalism has respect for personal autonomy, equality (of opportunity), reflection, and choice whilst nationalism, emphasises belonging, loyalty, and solidarity. The two sets of values need not be irreconcilable as people generally do exhibit such attachments and allegiances given the need for importance of cultural belonging. The assumption here is that identity matters--people need roots in some cultural soil or other.

So the possibility of a liberal nationalism looks to be an attractive one for some, including J.S. Mill insofar as that, in certain circumstances, nationality supports the achievement of the liberal values of autonomy, reflection and choice. How might this happen?

In his essay 'On nationality’ in Considerations on Representative Government, J.S.Mill argues that democracy can only flourish where 'the boundaries of government coincide in the main with those of nationality’ . His argument in support of this contention is based on an analysis of the necessary conditions for a flourishing democracy: 'Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion necessary to the workings of representative institutions cannot exist’ . A shared national identity based on fellow-feeling is important to a well-functioning liberal democracy. Mill says:

A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality, if they are united among themselves by common sympathies, which do not exist between them and any others--which make them cooperate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves, or a portion of themselves, exclusively. This feeling of nationality may have been generated by various causes. Sometimes it is the effect of identity of race and descent. Community of language and community of religion contribute greatly to it. Geographical limits are one of its causes. But the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.

Thus we have liberal nationalism---one often invoked in Australia in terms of a given national cultures giving rise to 'national character', based on the causes of the sympathy members of a given nation feel for one another.

The liberalism of the academy is entirely different in that it holds that each person should be recognized as free and equal in respect of her rights, regardless of her attachment to a particular culture or of other attributes such as race, religious conviction, sexuality and nationality. Political philosophers, such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, have been engaged in a project of justifying these constitutional arrangements on the basis of claims concerning the universal characteristics of human beings as such.This rights based liberalism derive ultimately from Kantian ethics. This social contract liberalism rejects a too "thick" description of human nature; neo-Kantian forms of universalistic liberalism, for instance, rely on a notion of the self as "prior to its ends," that is, a self that affirms no particular values and can be conceived of as outside of any existing social relations. It presupposes a person in the abstract. Such a liberalism is hostile to nationalism.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 6:24 AM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

Nation-states are certainly more politically equitable than monarchies - and Mill was at the time when nation-states offered that possibility. They only really came of age in the late 19thC and 20thC and ethnic violence has been a problem in the nation-state structure.

Nationalism isn't an issue until it negatively affects individual rights. Usually it places minorities in political danger through political inequity which can lead to violence. I think it has to be recognized that nationalism as it is currently practiced is incompatible with political equality. In that respect minorities are no better off than they were under a monarchy.

I think we have to look at liberalism/republicanism informing the first order effects (intrinsic such as constitutionalism etc) and nationalism being a second order effect (emergant from the intrinsic structure).

In that way it isn't violent towards political equality. If eradication of tyranny is the goal in liberal democracy, then political equality is of primary importance.