In Defense of Liberal Nationalism

Michael Lind

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 1994

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Summary:  The idea that every nation should have its own state has been the most powerful political force of the past two hundred years. Yet in an age of transnationalism and rising demands for sovereignty, many view secessionist movements as dangerous. U.S. policy harbors a prejudice against nationalism, without distinguishing between benign and malignant strains. Reflexive support for multinational political entities, especially despotic ones, is as misguided as automatically rejecting policies that would create new national homelands. The United States should no longer consider selective support of oppressed minorities as a policy of last resort.

Michael Lind is Executive Editor of The National Interest. This article is adapted from his forthcoming book, The Next American Nation.

THE WORLD?S MOST POWERFUL FORCE

The simple idea that every nation should have its own state, accompanied by the corollary that one ethnic or cultural group should not collectively rule over another, has been the most powerful political force of the past two hundred years. While particular nationalisms vary, this basic nationalist conception of an ideal world order has been remarkably unchanged for well over a century. "The world should be split into as many states as humanity is divided into nations," the Swiss international lawyer Johann Caspar Bluntschli wrote in 1870. "Each nation a state, each state a national being." When he wrote, nationalism as a considered doctrine, with its roots in the thought of Rousseau, Herder, Fichte and Mazzini, was already generations old. National sentiments, of course, long predated the doctrine, despite recent attempts to claim that national feelings are purely modern fabrications.

The nationalist ideal has survived one universalist assault after another: the Concert of Europe, which Metternich saw as a way of repressing anti-dynastic nationalism and republicanism; Hitler?s supranational racist imperialism; the doomed Soviet effort to replace national loyalties with commitment to socialist universalism. Even the failure of the European Community to become a genuine federal state was foreseeable long before the troubles afflicting the Maastricht treaty and the crisis of the European Monetary System. It seems unlikely that liberal universalism will succeed where illiberal universalisms failed, in attempting to transfer loyalties from nations to supranational entities.

Despite all the evidence of the enduring power of nationalist sentiment, many statesmen, scholars and opinion leaders continue to treat nationalism as an anachronistic or dangerous relic of a previous age. Translated into policy, this prejudice against national self-determination usually means supporting the efforts of regimes to suppress secessionist movements by national minorities. The widespread conviction that nationalist secession is in itself dangerous and regressive helps explain the vehemence with which many observers blamed Germany for its allegedly premature recognition of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, and the criticism directed at the United States for allegedly engineering the independence of Eritrea.

This prejudice against nationalism, even liberal, democratic, constitutional nationalism, is a mistake. Reflexive support for multinational political entities, especially despotic ones, is as misguided as the automatic rejection of movements that seek the sovereignty of national homelands. For practical strategic reasons, as well as reasons of principle, the United States should identify itself with the most powerful idea in the contemporary world.

THE GREAT ILLUSION

Having survived so many setbacks since the wars of the French Revolution, will nationalism now end up in the dustbin of history along with its defeated universalist rivals? Scholars and writers (mostly social democrats and classical liberals, but also a few realists, such as E. H. Carr and James Burnham) have been predicting the imminent obsolescence of the nation state for most of the twentieth century. In most cases, they have rested their argument on the economies of scale made possible by advances in technology, the transoceanic cable of yesterday, the computerized stock ...

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