Liberalism and Nationalism: The Other Half of Yoram Hazony's "The Virtue of Nationalism"

I posted about one half of Yoram Hazony's critique of contemporary liberalism in Liberalism's Latest Critic (And Why It's Not Quite Enough). The other half of Hazony's agenda is the restoration of a legitimate place to nationalism, rightly understood. Unlike the editorial boards of The Economist and The New York Times, nationalism is not a dirty word. In simplest terms a nation is a family writ large. A nation is that group of people with whom we identify as a result of the intersection of a series of factors such as geography, ancestry, language, religion, and culture. Humanity, the largest of all human groupings, is certainly real but "humanity" represents such an abstraction from the felt experience of our lives that appeals to it cannot carry the same affective weight as "our nation". And those who give short shrift to the nation in favor of humanity (or, more likely, internationalist organizations like the EU or the UN) often do so in service of an ideology of individual sexual autonomy or free-flow financial capitalism. (For more about the former read Not So Fast: The Right Side of History Might Be Wrong and about the latter, "The Third Pillar".)

As I observed in Liberalism's Latest Critic, Hazony responds to anti-nationalism by observing that, practically, the warrant for a polity's continued existence comes from within its lived experience, not from an abstract ideology. And that "within" is fully human, not a deracinated brain on a stick. Hazony goes on to frame the virtues of the nation in terms of its opposite, the empire.

Rather than commenting on Hazony's contrast between nations and empires I'll direct my readers' attention to an excellent piece by Jake Meador, Nations and Nation-States: A Question for National Conservatives. A couple of quotes. On the one hand,

Hazony seems to envision ’empires’ as being a set mode of organizing political society and ‘nations’ as being another fixed mode such that any given polity can be either an empire or a nation, but never both. Yet the distinction between the two in practice seems to be one of policy rather than administration, such that a polity can behave like a nation at times and like an empire at other times. ... He conflates the naturally occurring communities following from humanity’s natural sociability with ‘nations’ and the coercive tyrannies that follow from humanity’s greed and lust for power with ’empires.’

Moreover,

The nation-state is not a universal good. Rather, to succeed nation-states must arise organically from the life of people bound together by mutual loyalties and mutual loves. Yet globally speaking this refers to a relative minority of the world’s nation-states. The majority of nation-states, it seems, are synthetic forms imposed upon peoples by outsiders.

It is difficult for American to perceive the truth of Meador's observation. After all, America as a nation is the beneficiary of the long, organic growth of European nations. Much of the rest of the world is not. Nation-states in many parts of the formerly colonized world are concatenations of multiple nations. In other words, they are empires writ small.

As did I, Meador does not dismiss Hazony's work. Jake agrees that there is much good in it and that Hazony has done all of us well by resuscitating the idea of the nation and a discussion of the virtues of nationalism. More remains to be done but for one I am thankful that Hazony has helped begin the process.

(For my earlier, pre-Hazony comments on nationalism you can read Religion and Nationalism.)