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There are many
conservatives who don't understand the liberal attitude to nationalism.
Why, ask such conservatives, would liberals want to destroy their own
national traditions? Are they being manipulated by hostile outsiders? Are
they unprincipled, or ridden by guilt?
Fortunately, liberal
intellectuals like to record their views, so what we conservatives need to
do is to look into the debates liberals have amongst themselves. By doing
so we can begin to understand what is going on in the liberal mind.
Traditional nationalism
To make
sense of things, what we have to do first is to define the kind of
traditional nationalism supported by conservatives.
Traditional nationalism was nearly always some form of ethnic nationalism.
In other words, it was a nationalism in which people felt connected to
each other by ties of ethnicity: by some admixture of a common ancestry,
language, religion, culture and history.
Over time
ethnic nationalism came to have a negative connotation for liberals. This
is because it is in conflict with the first principle of liberalism.
Liberals
believe that our humanity is defined by our ability to shape ourselves
according to our own will and reason. Our ethnicity, though, is not
something we get to choose through individual will and reason: it is
something we simply inherit.
Therefore, liberals have come to oppose ethnic nationalism as an unchosen
"destiny" rather than a "rational attachment". In their usual style,
liberals like to undercut traditional nationalism by arguing that such
forms of national identity aren't real, but are merely imagined or constructed.
Ignatieff
So,
liberals generally reject the idea of traditional ethnic nationalism. What
though do they suggest should replace it?
One of
the most influential of liberal theorists of nationalism is Professor
Michael Ignatieff. As you might expect of a liberal, he rejects ethnic
nationalism because it suggests "that an individual's deepest attachments
are inherited, not chosen."
What he
proposes instead is a "civic nationalism" which he describes as follows:
"According to the civic nationalist creed, what holds a society together
is not common roots but law. By subscribing to a set of democratic
procedures and values, individuals can reconcile their right to shape
their own lives with their need to belong to a community."
This is
basically the "official" nationalism we have today in most Western
countries. The idea is that we are united by a common commitment to
liberal political values and practices.
The
advantage of this civic form of nationalism for liberals is that it is
something, in theory at least, that we can rationally and voluntarily
consent to. It's a form of community that we choose for ourselves. It
seems to fit in well, therefore, with liberal first principles.
In
theory, nobody is excluded from the civic nation by inherited factors,
such as their ethnicity. As long as you agree to uphold liberal political
practices and values you can choose to belong.
Radical
criticism
From the
conservative point of view, civic nationalism is a very radical imposition
on society. Its adoption means that the political class no longer seeks to
preserve the traditional nation. In the civic nationalist view, anyone can
be a member of the nation, so there can be no principled objections to
ethnically diverse mass immigration.
Conservatives are therefore inclined to look upon civic nationalist
politicians as being at the radical end of the political debate. We don't
understand why the more moderate liberal politicians don't stand up and
oppose the civic nationalists.
But we've
misunderstood things. The civic nationalists are actually, in terms of
liberalism, not at the radical end of the spectrum. They are, in fact,
strongly criticised by more radical liberals for not going far enough.
In a 1996
edition of Critical Review, the editor, Jeffrey Friedman, surveyed
the arguments of the more purist and radical liberals. He summarises their
basic objections to civic nationalism as follows.
For
liberals what is important are the universal qualities which define our
humanity such as our "ability to choose and will freely".
Therefore, our moral obligations can't be limited to some subset of
humans, but must apply to humanity in general. Civic nationalism violates
this principle of liberalism, however, by claiming that we have a special
obligation to fellow citizens.
Civic
nationalism is therefore inegalitarian. In contrast,
"A truly
liberal society would encompass all human beings. It would extend any
welfare benefits to all humankind, not just to those born within arbitrary
borders; and far from prohibiting the importing of "foreign" workers or
goods they have produced, or the exporting of jobs to them across national
boundaries, it would encourage the free flow of labor, the goods, and
capital ..."
To put
this simply, the more radical liberal attitude is that it is not only
wrong to discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, it is also wrong to
discriminate on the basis of citizenship.
Such
liberals believe that we are morally compelled to accept open borders, and
that we should even encourage the export of jobs and the the import of
foreign workers.
How
influential is this more radical version of liberalism? On the left, it
now seems close to being an orthodoxy. For instance, the former Labor
Party Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating, is strongly against
the idea of civic nationalism. He has sharply criticised those whose
"exclusiveness" relies on,
"constructing arbitrary and parochial distinctions between the civic and
the human community ... if you ask what is the common policy of the Le
Pens, the Terreblanches, Hansons and Howards of this world, in a word, it
is "citizenship". Who is in and who is out."
In fact,
it's possible to understand Australian politics in terms of this division
between "conservative" civic nationalist liberals on the right and radical
open borders liberals on the left.
The
right-wing Liberal Party are civic nationalists because they still accept
the legitimacy of the citizenship distinction. This means that although
they support multiculturalism and high levels of foreign immigration, they
still take seriously the task of enforcing the boundaries of citizenship,
for instance, by acting against illegal immigration.
In
contrast, left liberals in Australia typically portray these efforts to
maintain citizenship distinctions as being grossly immoral. It is nearly
always assumed in a middle-class liberal paper like the Melbourne Age
that the "moral" position is the one which undercuts citizenship
distinctions in favour of open borders.
Special
consideration
Friedman
himself seems sympathetic to the radical view that we don't have a
particular obligation to fellow citizens. His argument for this, though,
actually betrays a weakness in the liberal position as a whole. He writes,
"We would
be miserable if we could not treat our friends, spouses, and siblings with
special consideration; but is this necessarily true of our conationals?"
This
argument betrays what liberals are really committing themselves to. For if
it's morally wrong to feel a special connection and a special obligation
to a particular "subset" of humans, then it's wrong as a matter of
principle to favour our own immediate family.
Few
people, though, could really put this principle into practice (Professor
Peter Singer famously tried and failed). So Jeffrey Friedman applies an
unprincipled exception. He simply asserts that what we can do to our
conationals we could never do to our family and friends.
Conservatives would turn this argument around and apply it consistently.
The fact is that we do treat our own family with special consideration
because we are more closely connected and related to it than to others.
Similarly
we are more closely connected to fellow members of our ethnic group than
to others, an ethnic group being like a very large extended family,
related not only by culture, language and history, but also by "biology",
better expressed as "kinship".
Therefore, traditional ethnic nationalism reflects the "special
consideration" we apply even today in our daily lives. Liberal
nationalism, though, leads to the idea that logically we shouldn't have
particular attachments at all: a principle which seems unpalatable and
unworkable even to the most radical liberals.
As I have
tried to explain in this article, though, the difficulty for conservatives
is not so much asserting the greater consistency of our beliefs. The
difficulty is that we don't fully grasp just how far the political class
has moved away from traditional nationalism.
What we
see as a radical civic nationalism is actually the more right-wing or
"conservative" position on the spectrum of liberal belief. We need,
therefore, to stop looking to right-wing liberals for a solution, and
instead begin to reassert our own conservative principles within the
political debate.
Related articles:
What happened to nationalism?
A hollow identity?
Changing nations
Collapsing nationalism
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