There are many terms in our political discourse that have become so corrupted in practice as to make it virtually impossible to hold a rational discussion of the ideas they purport to reference. While these words may have once had a widely accepted and thus useful meaning, they are now typically employed not as accurate descriptors, but purely for polemical purposes. These include “right-wing,” “neoliberalism,” “racism,” and the one discussed below, “nationalism.”
Accordingly, in order to evaluate its characteristics, we must carefully disentangle the objective, neutral meaning of this term from its pejorative usage. The difficulty of this endeavor is illustrated by the definitions provided by one popular dictionary:
1. spirit or aspirations common to the whole of a nation. 2. devotion and loyalty to one’s own country; patriotism. 3. excessive patriotism; chauvinism. 4. the desire for national advancement or political independence. 5. the policy or doctrine of asserting the interests of one’s own nation viewed as separate from the interests of other nations or the common interests of all interests of all nations.
Of course, this invites the question of what constitutes a “nation,” which the same source defines as, “A large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular state or territory: ‘the world’s leading industrialized nations.’”
The first thing to say, then, about “nationalism” is that it is ancient, yet enduring. While the nation-state is a relatively recent development, a community-wide conviction that it had a distinct identity and interests goes back thousands of years.[1] I am no expert on the Bronze Age, but I think there is abundant evidence, for instance, that the Han Chinese, the Egyptians, and the Yamato people (Japan) regarded themselves as “nations” under the above definition, and saw their interests as separate from those of the surrounding peoples.
The next thing to say about this phenomenon is that it has often taken the malignant form described in definition 3, resulting in human death and suffering on an almost unimaginable scale, most notoriously in Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan. Nothing that follows should be construed in any way as an effort to minimize the mortal threat that nationalism can pose when manipulated by unscrupulous leaders.
However, it is also important to recognize that nationalism need not instantiate the virulent ethnocentrism that produces the horrors noted above.[2] For example, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland are prosperous, successful nation-states, each comprised of many different ethnicities. In fact, almost by definition there are as many varieties of “nationalism” as there are nations.
Historically, it seems clear that the classical Athenians, Spartans, and allied city-states regarded themselves, plausibly, as having a distinctive and superior culture to that of their Persian arch-enemy, and that this consciousness played an important role in their willingness to fight the Greco-Persian Wars. Much more recently, a rising nationalism motivated English resistance to King Phillip of Spain. The nation that defeated his mighty armada had lived under the Magna Carta for almost 300 years and would, within a century, declare the Bill of Rights. Its citizenry had generally embraced the Reformation, and it was the land of Bacon, Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare, and Donne. The English correctly felt themselves to be a “nation,” with their own culture, traditions, and institutions that were preferable to those of Spain, and they would fight to maintain them. See George Trevelyan, A Shortened History of England,” pp. 232-33.[3]
Finally, in present times, nationalism is typically expressed through the nation-state. And, again, there are positive exemplars. The Estonians and citizens of other former republics of the Soviet Union have political cultures that do not include the utter disdain for the rule of law found in Russia, nor its citizenry’s apparently unshakable attachment to a never-ending series of dictatorial leaders, and wish to remain outside that state’s orbit. Such national feelings deserve only praise.
Libertarian thought-leaders are almost uniformly hostile to the nation-state, regarding it at best as a way-station along the road to something better. However, as Dani Rodrik argues in his insightful and provocative essay, “Why Nation-States are Good,” this institution possesses virtues comparable to those inherent in the federalism envisioned by our founding fathers. First, it permits each jurisdiction to adopt laws and institutions that most closely align with its own culture, values and national history.
Second, it is superior from the perspective of institutional design:
[S]ince there is no fixed, ideal shape for institutions, and diversity is the rule rather than the exception, a divided global polity presents an additional advantage. It enables experimentation, competition among institutional forms, and learning from others. To be sure, trial and error can be costly when it comes to society’s rules. Still, institutional diversity among nations is as close as we can expect to a laboratory for capitalism in real life.
Clearly this is a complicated subject, about which much more may fruitfully be said. My sole purpose here is to show that libertarians and others sympathetic to liberal democracy as the best presently available model of governance should not be too quick to see nationalism and the nation-state as its enemy.
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[1] I will leave for another occasion the question whether the historical tendency displayed by groups in coalescing and organizing themselves into recognizable ethnic communities might qualify as a “spontaneous order” of the sort identified by Hayek and other classical liberals.
[2] As argued elsewhere, just as we may rightly favor—all other things being equal basis—the needs and interests of our friends and family over those of strangers, it is also permissible to favor the interests of our neighbors, community members, and even fellow citizens if we believe they confer some benefit on us.
[3] He writes there:
For centuries past many different forces had been slowly drawing the English towards a national or patriotic conception of man’s duty to society, in place of obedience to cosmopolitan orders and corporations which had been inculcated by the Catholic Church and the feudal obligation. Among the forces creative of the sense of nationhood were the English Common Law; the King’s Peace and the King’s Courts; the frequent intercourse of the representative of distant shires and boroughs in the national council of Parliament…The Elizabethan age is at once intensely national and intensely individualistic.
