Isaiah Berlin

Critics of recent philosophical analyses of nationalism suggest that nationalism is a unique social phenomenon that cannot, and need not, be theorized. Are there, indeed, some special features constitutive of nationalism that might defy theorization? Those answering this question in the affirmative point to the plurality and specificity of national experiences, as well as to the emotional and eclectic nature of nationalist discourse.

To answer, or even consider, the question ‘Is nationalism legitimate?', whether from the sociological or ethical, philosophical point of view, it is first necessary to define what nationalism is or, in other words, to understand its nature and the source of its appeal. As concerns nationalism's definition, there are several points, in regard to which there exists among the students of the phenomenon more or less general agreement, but which, nevertheless, should be emphasized at the outset:

1. Nationalism is a modem phenomenon: for most of its recorded history humanity has not known it; it emerged quite recently and therefore cannot be seen as an automatic response to some universal need; its very historicity presupposes that it is essentially a cultural and not a psychological phenomenon, and that, as any cultural phenomenon, it can develop, take various forms within certain limits, and disappear.

This essay will discuss the feelings and behaviour of presumably oppressed ethnic, national, and religious minorities. I will set aside definitions of ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ for the moment, trusting that their meaning will become clear as the argument proceeds. The literature on this topic is, of course, enormous. I once pressed the button for ‘nationalism’ on Widener's new computer catalogue and got back the answer that there were some four thousand items on this topic in Widener's holdings. That response brought to mind a remark of Anton Chekhov, who was trained as a doctor. He said that if a disease has many cures, that is a sign that the disease is incurable. Perhaps we should transfer this little gem of wisdom to the social sciences and history. If there are many books about a problem, that is a sign that the problem is insoluble.

In the last three decades, we in the West have seen nationalism turn from an apparently progressive force, as in Cuba, Vietnam, and many countries in Africa, into a negative force of degenerating chaos, as in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Sri Lanka, and Rwanda. Elsewhere, during the same decades, the record of nationalism has been, or at least been perceived to have been, more mixed, for example in Belgium, Canada, and India. The assessments themselves are uncertain and suspect, however. Maybe nationalism was not so clearly progressive or so clearly retrogressive where we had previously thought it so. Maybe we misjudge its ambivalence elsewhere. Maybe we are not even dealing with the same kind of phenomenon.

More generally, we have yet to understand the role of nationalism in two world wars and countless imperialist incursions. We have only the vaguest ideas of its connection to social ideologies and movements like racism, fascism, and Nazism and little understanding of its relevance to economic systems like capitalism and socialism.

In 1789 Sieyès defined the nation as “un corps d'associés vivant sous une loi commune et représentés par la même législature.” In so doing, he gave expression to an idea that would follow a remarkable historical course and develop a complex and ambiguous logic. In this study we attempt to clarify this ambiguity, thereby gaining some insight into the complicated relationship between democracy and nationalism.

The revolutionary idea of the nation, expressed by Sieyès, did not come out of thin air, but arose within a process of social and political transformation which began long before the French Revolution. By attempting to establish its sovereign power and found a state, the French monarchy came into conflict with regional and other traditional powers with whom it had previously shared power as primus inter pares. The absolutist state founders discovered how important it was to have the community united behind them, so they sought to create feelings of national unity that would transcend the old regional loyalties and make France a ‘patria’ in the minds of the people, with the king as its incarnation and guarantor.

The Nation as Philosophical Problem

The problem of the nation is well articulated in a speech given in 1985 by then president of the Federal Republic of Germany, R. Von Weiszäcker:

This is not a psychological comment. It is not about the deep-seated need of people to express feelings of collective identity. The question of the nation here is asked from a normative perspective. That will also be the starting point of this study.

The political and scientific debate surrounding the concepts of nation, ethnicity, and nationalism is so deeply loaded with values and passions that it should be the sociologist's highest priority to define those terms as precisely as possible in order to distinguish a new debate from the common discourse and to subject the definitions to scrutiny. It is often acknowledged that a clarification of the terms used in the debates of ethnicity, the State, the nation and nationalism is necessary, but such work is rarely done. It is important to make a distinction between the term ‘nation’ and other terms with which it is often confused — and differently in the different nations — and to clear up the ambiguities that affect the political, ideological, and scientific discourse. In the common discourse and even in the scientific literature, such terms as ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ are often used indifferently, and the ‘nation’ is subject to contradictory criticisms as it is sometimes understood as referring to the ‘nation’ and sometimes to the ‘ethnic group.’ There is always a connection between the concepts used by a given author and that author's theoretical frame of reference.

Asserting the relationship between liberalism and nationalism is no easy matter. Liberal philosophers have been very suspicious of the phenomenon of nationalism, partly for historical reasons (e.g., national socialism) and partly for philosophical ones (amongst which a belief that liberal principles would override people's need for identification with ethnocultural communities). But even if some still consider the expression ‘liberal nationalism’ to be an oxymoron, most of current Anglo-American liberal work on the subject leans toward a more nuanced approach, trying to specify how hospitable liberalism should be to nationalistic claims. The challenge, from this point of view, is to explain why and how political philosophy can incorporate national attachments to a moral argument on people's identity and distributive justice. In fact, it seems that nationalist rhetoric has found in identity politics a rather safe (even if narrow) way of entering liberal discourse.

The secession issue appears to many contemporary thinkers to reveal a fatal flaw in the idea of national self-determination. The question is whether national minorities who come to want to be politically self determining should be allowed to separate from the parent state and form one of their own. Here the idea of national self-determination may lead us in one of two opposing directions. If the minority group in question regards itself as a separate nation, then the principle seems to support its claims: if the Québécois or the Catalans come to think of themselves as having national identities distinct from those of the Canadians or the Spanish, and to seek political independence on that basis, then if we are committed to national self-determination we should support their claims. But we then face the challenge that once national identities begin to proliferate there is no feasible way of satisfying all such claims, given elementary facts of geography and population spread.

Until quite recently, most Anglo-American political philosophers have had little if anything to say about national self-determination. However, a growing number of prominent political philosophers are now endorsing national self-determination. This new-found enthusiasm is surprising if not ironic, since it comes at a time at which genocidal ethno-nationalist conflicts (in the Balkans, in Rwanda and Burundi, etc.) might seem to lend credence to the view that the doctrine that every nation should have its own state is both impractical and dangerous, and that the nationalist mentality is often racist, xenophobic, exclusionary, and morally regressive. In this essay I will question the wisdom of this new-found enthusiasm for national self-determination. I will probe what I shall call the Strong National Self-Determination Thesis (or, more briefly, the Strong Thesis). This is the assertion that every nation as such has a right to some substantial degree of self-government and there is a presumption that every nation as such has a right to its own independent state (where this includes the right to secede from another state). I call this the Strong Thesis because it is more robust than the thesis that nations have a right to some form of self-government.

The principle of national self-determination has usually been justified by extending to national groups an entitlement that individuals are regarded as having, namely, to the conditions necessary for their self development. In order to extend the concept of self-determination to nations in this way, an argument that it is important for nations to exist within their own political communities must be given. In this essay, I describe and criticize one type of argument for such a principle of national self-determination – what I will call the communitarian argument.

Contemporary communitarians (such as Michael Walzer and David Miller) usually contend that determining who rightfully has membership in a political community must precede the allocation of rights and responsibilities between members. Community is understood to mean a national community; membership in communities therefore results from the ascription of national identities to individuals and to the consequent sorting out of loyalties that follows from this ascription. A right of self-determination for nations is required, on this view, in order to ensure that political communities are legitimately formed in accordance with national identities.

Until quite recently, political philosophers routinely ignored nationalism. Nowadays, the topic is very much on the philosophical agenda. In the past, when philosophers did discuss nationalism, it was usually to denigrate it. Today, nationalism elicits generally favorable treatment. I confess to a deep ambivalence about this turn of events. On the one hand, much of what has emerged in recent work on nationalism appears to be on the mark. On the other hand, the anti- or extra-nationalist outlook that used to pervade political philosophy seems as sound today as it ever was, and perhaps even more urgent in the face of truly horrendous eruptions of nationalist hostilities in many parts of the world. What follows is an effort to grapple with this ambivalence. My aim will be to identify what is defensible in the nationalist idea and then to reflect on the flaws inherent in even the most defensible aspects of nationalist theory and practice.

A recent resurgence of interest within analytical political philosophy in the status of ethnic and national minorities coincides with the re-emergence of national identity as a primary organizing principle of political conflict, and with an increasing attentiveness to identity and recognition as organizing principles of political struggle. The recent theoretical literature within political philosophy has focused very much on recognizing the importance of national identity, and allowing attention to national sentiment to inform the design of social institutions.

In this paper I shall state the case for a version of the position which Will Kymlicka has dubbed ‘benign neglect’ toward cultural identities. Benign neglect is the position that the state should, as far as possible, be neutral among the cultural (and hence national) sentiments of its citizens. The position is, I think, implicit in the theoretical work of many contemporary liberals, and also in much socialist theory and some socialist practice. But it is rarely defended explicitly. Liberal theory is generally developed on the unrealistic assumptions that the society to be regulated is closed and coincides with the membership of a single nation.

My main concern in this paper will be with questions of national identity, multiculturalism, and aboriginal rights as they have emerged in Australia, especially over the past twenty or so years. The issues are not, of course, unique to Australia: similar questions have arisen in other places, including Canada, New Zealand, and the United States. However, each place has specific problems, and while I hope that much of what I say has relevance to these countries, I will not try to establish this here.

The paper falls into two parts. In the first, I argue for certain limits on the practice of multiculturalism. The basis of this argument is a concern for national identity – especially for what I will call ‘national sovereignty.’ This is a familiar conservative position; however, I hope to show that it is one which liberals and those on the left should take seriously. In the second part of the paper, I distinguish the issue of Aboriginal (or indigenous) rights from multiculturalism, and try to establish that the basis of these rights is a principle very similar to the notion of national sovereignty.

Alain Finkielkraut

Savage ethnonationalism, dating back to the end of the eighteenth century, and violent ethnic conflict, as ancient as history, are sometimes viewed as if for the first time in the post-Cold War era. Still, it is the case that the end of the discipline imposed by the bipolar international system has permitted temporarily repressed ethnic and nationalist passions to reassert themselves. In response, a vast literature has sprung up discussing what states should do about genocide and ethnic cleansing, the gravest human rights abuses. In what follows I will consider barbarous nationalism in the context of the liberal international order put into place at the end of the Second World War, the roles of politics, law and morality forming a sub text to that discussion.

Nationalism is generally associated with sentiments, ideologies, and social movements that involve strong commitments to a nation, conceived as a potentially self-sustaining community of persons bound together by a shared history and culture. Recent empirical and normative discussions have been concentrated on revisionist instances of nationalism, that is, on sentiments, ideologies, and social movements that aim to gain power, political autonomy, or territory for a particular nation. I will here take a somewhat broader view of nationalism, focusing on persons who have a bland and conservative commitment to their own country. Quite content with the status quo, these persons view it as legitimate and even admirable that they and their political leaders should show a pre-eminent concern for preserving and enlarging their own collective advantage. Most citizens of the affluent countries – however condescendingly they may regard the revisionist nationalisms of the Serbs, Kurds, Tamils, Irish, and Québécois – are nationalists in this sense, and extreme ones at that.

Given the immense mobilizing power possessed by the rhetoric of nationalism, as well as the many resources which can be tapped by groups which successfully establish national claims, it is not surprising that we have recently seen such a resurgence in nationalist discourse. One of the things which may surprise us, however, is the growing breadth in the types of groups which now launch such claims. No longer is the discourse of nationalism limited to use by ethnic groups and territorial populations. Recently it has come to be deployed by groups which we would normally tend to look upon as social movements. There has been a growing realization of the way in which constituencies such as Blacks, gays and lesbians, Chicano/as, and so on, make up distinct peoples, with cultures, public institutions, dialects, tastes, and social practices that set them off from the people or peoples around them.

In Eastern Europe, when someone dies, the custom is to drape mirrors in the house with black muslin or a dark sheet. According to folklorists, this is done so that the deceased, who is believed to wander through his or her house for nine days saying goodbye to friends and family, will not be frightened when he or she cannot find his or her reflection in the mirror. While it is easy to scoff at such superstitious customs, there is much to learn from them. The draping of the mirrors is a vivid metaphor, but it is also useful when it comes to making a counterintuitive point: namely, little systematic attention has been paid to the role of economic preferences, markets, and the pace of development in shaping Quebec's nationalist objectives and strategy. And it is this failure to comprehend the impact that economics, from a microscopic and macroscopic level, has had on ‘nation-building’ and, more concretely, on the October 30th referendum (where in answer to the question “Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign, after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new Economic and Political Partnership, within the scope of the Bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12, 1995?”, 49.5 percent of Quebeckers voted ‘Yes’) that is tantamount to a ‘draping of the mirrors,’ of providing an incomplete explanation about the bases of Quebec's nationalism.