Nationalism

1. What is a Nation?

This was the title of a famous lecture delivered by the French liberal thinker Ernst Renan in 1882, and equally famous is the short and metaphorical answer he gave to it: “a nation’s existence…is an everyday plebiscite” (Renan 1882 [2018: 261–2). Before coming to his longer answer, we need to know why the question is important. According to the idea of nationality, nations are groups of people who owe one another special obligations, and who have a claim to practise political self-determination, either through having their own state or through some other form of self-government. Since such claims are often resisted, it may become a matter of controversy whether a particular group counts as a nation or not (consider the dispute between Ukraine and the Russian government over whether Ukraine is indeed a separate nation or merely a region of Russia).

Renan’s longer answer to the question was that for a nation to exist, two conditions were required.

One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. (Renan 1882 [2018: 261]).

In specifying these subjective factors, he was explicitly setting aside as inessential a number of objective group characteristics that have often been proposed as criteria of common nationality: race, language, religion, and so forth. He was in other words taking sides in an ongoing debate with those who take the shared possession of one or more of these features as necessary and sufficient for a nation to exist. But a third view is also possible. Even if Renan was right to insist that shared memories and a continuing will to associate with one another are necessary conditions of nationality, they are not sufficient, since other groups—some religious groups such as the Amish, for example—also have these characteristics. It matters why people believe that they should associate together and practise self-determination. In other words, it matters that the people who form the nation should at least believe that  there is something politically relevant that distinguishes them from their near-neighbours, and that belief cannot be wholly false (even if it may involve exaggerating the differences—a point frequently made by critics of nationality).

But which distinguishing features are relevant? Some defenders of nationalism will fasten on to one of the features dismissed by Renan—thus there can be racial nationalisms, linguistic nationalisms, and so forth. To understand nationalism in general, however, it may be better to follow the lead of J. S. Mill who argued that national sentiment may arise from a number of different sources—he mentions “identity of race and descent”, “community of language”, “community of religion”, “geographical limits” and, “the strongest of all”, “identity of political antecedents”; the latter is further spelt out as

the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past. (Mill 1861: 287; see also here Yack 2012: ch. 3)

He gives concrete examples to show that none of these, however, is either necessary or sufficient for nationality (relying at this point on the reader’s intuitions about which of the groups he refers to count as nations and which do not).

Although not made explicit by Renan, it is one of the existence conditions of a nation that its members should wish to be self-determining—to achieve or retain control of their own affairs, since this is what the will to perpetuate their heritage requires. But should we say that any group that makes a claim to political self-determination should by virtue of that fact alone be counted as a nation? In other words, is the will to be self-determining sufficient, regardless of whatever other properties the group displays? That seems too permissive, since it implies, for example, that if a large majority of Texans declare themselves in favour of independence from the US, that by itself settles the question of whether Texas is a nation. A more subtle view has been proposed by Gilbert (1998), who argues that a nation just is a group of a kind that has a (presumptive) right to statehood—presumptive only, because there might be external reasons for denying a nation the independent state it would otherwise be entitled to. This turns the issue of nationhood into a normative question. But Gilbert’s view can be challenged. Although the questions “Are the Scots a nation?” and “Do the Scots have the right to form an independent state?” are certainly connected, it would be odd to suggest that we should begin by answering the second question, and this will then supply the answer to the first. It is more plausible to start by examining whether and in what respects Scottish people are culturally different, have different collective memories, etc. than people in other parts of the United Kingdom, and then to ask whether the differences are significant enough to make their demand for independence justifiable.

There is a further question that arises here, which is about the nature and strength of the tie between nationhood and the claim to form an independent state. Some writers have drawn a distinction between cultural nationalism and statist nationalism (Gans 2003: ch. 1; see also Tamir 1993: ch. 3). According to Gans, those who endorse cultural nationalism hold that

members of groups sharing a common history and societal culture have a fundamental, morally significant interest in adhering to their culture and in sustaining it across generations. (Gans 2003: 7)

This then gives rise to a demand for political institutions that can protect this culture and allow it to develop, which might or might not mean the cultural nation having a state of its own, depending on circumstances. For those who endorse political nationalism, in contrast,

in order for states to realize political values such as democracy, economic welfare and distributive justice, the citizenries of states must share a homogeneous national culture. (Gans 2003: 7)

It is apparent that the relationship between nation and state is quite different in the two cases. From a cultural nationalist perspective it is loose and contingent—it is possible that in a given case, the national aspiration for cultural autonomy might be satisfied by participating in a multi-national federation—whereas from a statist nationalist perspective the relationship is tight—the political ends that the nation serves to promote require that as far as possible all citizens should share in the same national identity. Since these are both recognizable forms of nationalism, this gives us an additional reason for keeping nationality and the right to form a state apart. The wish to be self-determining, discussed further below, is indeed a distinguishing feature of nationhood, but it need not always be expressed as a claim to form an independent state.

Are there further respects in which nations differ from social groups of other kinds? Several authors have emphasised the modernity of nations, claiming that nations can only exist in tandem with other features of modern society, such as the erosion of rigid social hierarchies (see Taylor 1997, drawing upon Gellner 1983 and Anderson 1983 [1991]; for a dissenting view, highlighting the deep historical roots of nationhood, see Gat 2013). There is an element of paradox here, because in many cases nations think of themselves as having roots deep in the historical past, as standing in a direct line of descent from the first occupants of the territory that now serves as the national homeland. Nevertheless, even in cases in which a contemporary nation was formed around a particular long-standing ethnic group (see A. Smith 1986), what constitutes it as a nation is an imagined collective past—a “story of peoplehood” (R. Smith 2003)—rather than biological descent. So nations could not exist without widespread literacy and the communication media, originally the printed word, that allow large masses of people to participate in the shared culture and the historical narrative that separates them from other nations. Anderson accordingly refers to nations as imagined communities,

imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. (1983: 15 [1991: 6])

Another respect in which nations are an essentially modern phenomenon is that the people who belong to them understand their relationship as one of equal standing, even though along other social and economic dimensions there may be very extensive inequalities between them. This contrasts with earlier social forms in which people belonged in the first place to a sub-group, often organised as a hierarchy, and only through that membership to the larger society (Taylor 1997). Seeing this allows us to understand the connection between nation and democracy, though this is not entirely straightforward. As Greenfeld (1992: 10) puts it, “nationalism was the form in which democracy appeared in the world, contained in the idea of the nation as a butterfly in a cocoon”. The nation does this by providing a solution to the democratic boundary problem, identifying the group of people who will form the demos that can then activate democratic institutions. Of course, not all nations are governed democratically, but even those that are not pay lip service at least to the idea of popular sovereignty, shown in many cases by the holding of rigged elections to legitimise the power-holders. However this identification of “nation” and “people” may be challenged on the grounds that the idea of popular sovereignty requires that the “people” should include all those living under the jurisdiction of the state, whether or not they identify themselves with the nation (Yack 2012: ch. 4). Defenders of nationalism will reply that the very openness of national identities—the absence of any single feature that serves to define membership—can help to bridge this gap by allowing people from outside of the nation’s historic core to add their own stories to the collective narrative that unites the nation. Whether nationality can be a fully inclusive identity is an issue discussed further below.

Recognising the modernity of nations is essential if we are to understand the relationship between nationalism and patriotism, discussed in the section that follows.

2. Nationalism and Patriotism

In popular discourse, but also in the hands of some philosophers, nationalism is often portrayed as the ugly stepsister of patriotism—as an exaggerated and toxic version of an otherwise decent emotion, love of one’s country (see Nathanson 1993: ch. 14; Schaar 1981; Viroli 1995). However this picture of their relationship is far too simple. First, although nationalism is sometimes used to refer to a psychological state, as when we describe someone as an ardent nationalist, it is centrally a set of beliefs, as outlined above. Patriotism, in contrast, is in the first place a character trait, and arguably a personal virtue (MacIntyre 1984). Audi defines it as

a feature of character that entails a significant degree of loyalty to one's country and an associated disposition to take pride in it, to be subject to emotions closely connected with one's perception of its well-being, and to give some degree of preference to its needs and interests over the needs and interests of other countries. (2009: 367–8)

The last part of this definition alerts us to the fact that the issue of compatriot partiality—the extent to which it is permissible to prioritise the interests of fellow-countrymen over those of outsiders—arises in much the same way for both patriotism and nationalism. But there are further respects in which the two ideas pull apart.

One important difference is that whereas, as indicated above, nationalism could only arise under conditions of modernity, patriotism has a far longer historical reach, and was widely recognised as a virtue in the ancient world (Dietz 2020; Crowley 2020; Kapust 2020). This historical continuity was aided by the fact that the object of patriotic loyalty—the “country”—is often left unspecified. In classical sources the patria or fatherland was usually understood in political terms to mean the polis, in the Greek case, or the republic, in the Roman case. Contemporary discussions of patriotism, in contrast, are keen to emphasise that being patriotic does not mean supporting the state, and may involve actively opposing it (MacIntyre 1984). So “country” may be given a wider meaning that incorporates many of the features of nationality. Kleinig recommends thinking of it

in more holistic terms, generally as comprising a land, a terrain, a people, a culture, a history, a collective self-understanding, and a network of social institutions framed and bound together by the distinctive juridical structure of a governing order. (2015: 21)

Here a “country” effectively means a nation-state. So the contrast between patriotism and nationalism that defenders of the former are keen to preserve can only be sustained by adopting a narrow and unsympathetic version of the latter—defining the nation, for example, in ethnic terms as a community of descent (Primoratz 2015: 76). This stands in clear contrast to the understanding of nationhood offered by Renan and Mill.

A sharper difference between patriotism and nationalism emerges when we observe that patriotism involves no deep commitment to the idea of collective self-determination. It is possible, in other words, to be patriot while still believing that the fatherland is best governed by outsiders, so long as they govern it well. Of course, if a link is forged between the fatherland and a particular set of political institutions, then a patriot will be committed to defending those institutions (thus one can be a “constitutional patriot” along the lines of Habermas 1996 [1998]). But equally one can be both a patriot and a monarchist who believes that the king rules by Divine Right, whereas for a nationalist the nation conceived as a community of equals is the ultimate source of political authority, and therefore has the right to be self-determining.

It is also unclear whether switching from nationalism to patriotism is an effective way of inoculating oneself against the dangers that nationalism is said to pose, such as licensing territorial aggression against other countries. In both cases we can distinguish between egalitarian versus inegalitarian, and morally bounded versus morally unbounded, versions of the doctrine (see Benner & Miller 2021). In egalitarian versions, each people is regarded as having equal value, and as being suitable objects of patriotic (or nationalistic) concern, so in affirming my loyalty to my own country, I simultaneously recognise that others should likewise affirm loyalty to theirs. In morally bounded versions, the partiality that I am entitled to show to compatriots may only be exercised in a way that does not involve significant harm to outsiders (for example, breaches of their human rights). Being a patriot does not entail adopting these more benign versions of the doctrine, and whether patriotism in practice tends to manifest itself in egalitarian and morally bounded forms remains an open question. Cosmopolitans who object to the narrowing of human concern that loyalty to specific communities can bring with it are likely to attack patriotism in much the same way as they attack nationalism (see Gomberg 1990; Nussbaum 1996).

It is of course possible by definitional fiat to use “patriotism” to refer to the egalitarian and morally bounded forms of group loyalty, and “nationalism” to refer to the inegalitarian and morally unbounded forms, but this merely obscures both the conceptual similarities and the conceptual differences between the two ideas, as outlined above.

3. The Ethics of Nationalism

According to the principle of nationality, nations are ethical communities whose members have obligations to one another that they do not have to outsiders. But many critics have found it mysterious how simply belonging to such a large and anonymous group could be ethically significant, and have therefore accused nationalists of defending irrational favouritism towards compatriots.

To assess this charge, it is important first to distinguish special obligations that might arise from nationhood itself from those that arise from citizenship. As citizens, and therefore as participants in an ongoing co-operative practice, people will have obligations to one another on grounds of reciprocity: I benefit when you keep the law and pay your taxes, so I owe it to you to do likewise (Dagger 1997: ch. 5). Obligations to fellow-nationals, in contrast are a species of associative obligation: they arise directly from the relationship that exists between compatriots by virtue of their shared identity (see Scheffler 2001). Are they therefore redundant in the context of a nation-state where compatriots are also united by common citizenship? No, because they help to explain why it is permissible in the first place to practise a form of citizenship that generates reciprocal obligations among fellow-citizens from which outsiders are excluded, and also because they can influence the shape of these latter obligations. In particular, when citizens are also bound together by ties of nationality, they can depart from strict reciprocity, where everyone expects to receive from the state an equivalent of what she has contributed, in favour of a looser form that encompasses anticipated redistribution from the better-off to those in need (Miller 1995: 71–3).

If national obligations are best construed as a species of associative obligation, they face two challenges. The first is a general challenge to the very idea of associative obligations—obligations that stem directly from the relationships in which people stand to one another, rather than from personal features such as having special needs or being the beneficiary of a promise. The second is a more specific challenge to the claim that the tie that exists between fellow-nationals is the right kind of tie to bring associative obligations into play. Here a sharp contrast may be drawn between the nation and smaller groups such as the family whose members are interacting directly with one another. Since the first challenge raises general questions about how, if at all, special obligations of any sort can be justified, it is beyond the scope of this article—but see Scheffler 2001, Baron 2002 and the entry on special obligations. The focus here will therefore be on the second challenge.

For associative obligations to arise from within a relationship, two conditions are required. First, the relationship in question must be intrinsically valuable, which for present purposes we can take to mean that people’s lives go better merely as a result of their involvement in it, over and above any instrumental benefits that may also ensue. Second, it must be in part constitutive of the relationship that it should include having special obligations to the other participants. These conditions are clearly met in the case of friendship, for example: having friends enriches a person’s life whether or not they derive any material benefit from the friendship, and it is part and parcel of being someone’s friend that as well as enjoying their company you should offer them support when they are in need, even at some cost to yourself (see Raz 1994: 41–2; though this is challenged in Lazar 2016).

The question, then, is whether these conditions can be extended upwards from small groups such as family and friends to much larger groups such as nations each of whose members only interacts directly with a tiny fraction of the rest. Critics such McMahan point out that whereas small groups are held together by direct knowledge of one another’s characteristics, so that there can be genuine commonalities within the group, within nations such commonality as exists depends upon assumptions about a “national character” that all members are supposed to share. But this is in part illusory because

the correlation between membership in the nation and possession of the national character is inevitably imperfect when membership is normally a matter of birth, with no screening or selection. (McMahan 1997: 127)

Another question raised by critics is whether belonging to a nation is intrinsically valuable in the way that family and friendship are, such that it would be real loss to someone if they were obliged to live apart from their compatriots. Hurka suggests, however, that we should think of the significance of a given membership as having two relevant dimensions: how close the relationship between members is, and how much good the relationship has produced over the course of its existence. Comparing the family with the nation, he argues that although the family scores higher on the first dimension, on the second they score roughly the same, at least in the case of a country like Canada, where

if we consider the benefits each Canadian receives from living under the rule of law and with social programs such as medicare, they are surely of similar size to those that person receives from his or her family. (Hurka 1997: 154–5)

However Hurka’s argument might be faulted on the grounds that the benefits he cites in the case of the nation are instrumental rather than intrinsic whereas the goods created within the family are to a large extent intrinsic. To justify national partiality, we must assume that nationality is intrinsically valuable—that it is part of a person’s good to belong to an intergenerational community that over time has created a range of benefits, including perhaps those that Hurka mentions alongside others. In other words, what matters intrinsically is not receiving the benefits as such but being an active participant in the community that acts to produce them. Why such involvement is significant discussed in section 5 below.

In order to justify special obligations within a group, it is important that the group should not be disfigured by injustice, either internally or in relation to outsiders. Such obligations cannot arise in the case of criminal gangs or the Ku Klux Klan, for example (see Miller 2005). This condition, however, applies to families and nations alike, since both are capable of being sites of injustice. A line needs to be drawn between relationships that inherently involve injustice—by their very nature they are discriminatory or exploitative—and those that are valuable in themselves but may nevertheless have the potential to create injustice if their members choose to act in certain ways, though exactly where it should be drawn may be disputed. Some critics of nationalism would place the nation in the first category on the grounds that nations always claim the right to exclude outsiders from the resources contained in their territory, even when they suffer severe harm as a result. But here it is important not to beg the question by taking for granted a particular account of international or global justice, since what is at stake at this point is whether nations are entitled to give a certain degree of priority to their own members.

To sum up, it is contestable but not entirely implausible to regard nations as one of the social forms within which members owe one another special obligations. These obligations are different from, though not always weaker than, the obligations that hold between the members of family or friendship groups. E.M. Forster famously said that “if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country”, but this was written in 1938, and it may be doubted whether he would have said the same two years later if his friend were detected passing vital information to the Luftwaffe. In times of crisis, national loyalties may prove to be indispensable.

If duties of nationality arise directly from the relationship between compatriots, and are therefore not just convenient ways of discharging universal duties owed to all human beings, we must ask whether either set of duties has priority over the other. One very tempting answer is to say that universal duties must take priority; once these have been discharged, compatriots are then left free to act on their special obligations to one another, but these must be sculpted in such a way that they do not interfere with the performance of universal duties, understood as duties of justice owed to human beings as such (see Barry 1999; Tan 2004). As Tan puts it

impartial cosmopolitan justice serves to define and secure the global background conditions under which individuals may legitimately favour the demands of their compatriots as well as pursue other national and partial projects. (2004: 158)

Whether this leaves adequate scope for special obligations to compatriots to exist will depend on the form and demandingness of these cosmopolitan duties of justice. Tan speaks of the need to secure people’s “baseline entitlements” without specifying how these are to be conceptualised. In particular, if such entitlements are to be understood in egalitarian terms—as equality of resources, capabilities or welfare, for example—this will place severe constraints on the exercise of special obligations among people living in richer societies, since the effect of doing so will be to confer unjust advantages on their inhabitants, using resources that could be used for the benefit of poorer outsiders (Scheffler 2001 refers to this as the “distributive objection” to associative duties). If, conversely, baseline entitlements are understood in sufficientarian terms, as requiring that all human beings should enjoy an adequate (rather than equal) set of resources and opportunities, then this leaves more space for special obligations to be fulfilled. Even so, the result of constraining duties of nationality within the bounds set by cosmopolitan duties of justice will be revisionary. Beitz, for example, having conceded that there are indeed special responsibilities arising directly from the relationship that exists between compatriots, nevertheless concludes that

the special responsibilities to compatriots that can plausibly be defended are not nearly as extensive as the priority for compatriots found in conventional morality. (Beitz 1999: 213)

It is in any case not self-evident that cosmopolitan justice must always override duties of justice owed to compatriots (see further Miller 2013). If we take a case in which essential resources are in short supply, it seems permissible to give priority to meeting the needs of compatriots even where the needs of foreigners are more urgent. For example in a global pandemic where supplies of vaccine are for the moment limited, cosmopolitan justice appears to require that the most vulnerable individuals should receive the vaccine first, regardless of which nation they belong to. The alternative view—priority for compatriots—holds that all nationals at serious risk should be vaccinated first, and only then should vaccine be sent to countries that would not otherwise have access to it. This alternative view can acknowledge that there is a global duty of justice to supply the vaccine once it is available, but holds that under these circumstances it is constrained by the stronger duty owed to fellow-nationals (for a discussion of this case, see Beaton et al. 2021)

4. Liberal Nationalism and its Critics

Most recent philosophical work written in support of the nation has offered a defence of liberal nationalism (see Tamir 1993, Kymlicka 1995, Miller 1995, Moore 2001a) although there have also been advocates of conservative nationalism (Scruton 1990, Hazony 2018). The contrast between the two is not always clear, and may be disputed (Daniel 2022), but turns centrally on the form that national identity should take. For liberal nationalists it must be multi-stranded and open to revision, making it potentially inclusive of groups such as ethnic minorities and immigrants whose cultural values may not align with those of the majority (for a fuller analysis, see Gustavsson 2019), whereas for conservative nationalists the collective identity handed down from previous generations, while not immutable, must be treated as authoritative, and national loyalty is seen as a cardinal virtue.

As their name suggests, liberal nationalists aim to reconcile nationalism and liberalism, but the linkage between the two comes in weaker and stronger versions. The weaker version holds simply that they are compatible. There is no theoretical or practical contradiction involved in valuing both the rights and freedoms that liberals defend and valuing goods such as national identity and national self-determination that nationalists champion. One set of goods does not come at the expense of the other: it is possible for a society both to offer its members a wide variety of lifestyle choices and to protect them from discrimination on grounds of race, gender and so forth, and for those members to participate in a shared national identity and to enjoy collective self-determination as bearers of that identity.

The stronger version, by contrast, holds that liberalism needs nationality to survive: there cannot be a stable liberal society that does not have a national basis. This has centrally to do with the conditions under which citizens who in their personal lives may hold very different values and pursue conflicting conceptions of the good can nevertheless be tolerant of one another, and trust one another sufficiently to allow democratic institutions to function. The liberal nationalist claim is that a widely shared national identity is necessary for—or at the very least highly conducive to—generating the required level of solidarity. This is especially so when liberalism takes the form of liberal egalitarianism, requiring the better off to acquiesce in, if not positively support, redistributive policies such as those that together make up the welfare state.

Critics of liberal nationalism may therefore choose to direct their fire at either version. In the case of the stronger version, the issue is to a large extent empirical: is it possible to show that the effect of having a national identity is to make citizens more likely to trust one another and/or to support redistributive policies? The evidence so far is mixed (see Moore 2001b; Miller & Ali 2014; Holtug 2020). The weaker version, in contrast, raises normative questions about liberalism itself.

Some liberals will argue that liberalism leaves no space for nationalism, since it is founded on a principle of equal concern and respect for all human beings that prohibits states from privileging the interests of their own citizens. However most liberals, today and in the past, have not held such a radical view. John Rawls’s (1971) theory of justice, for example, is designed to apply within a society that takes the form of an independent state, and he denies that the principles that make up the theory should be applied at global level. Although this refusal has drawn criticism, it is implausible to claim that Rawls—and other liberal egalitarians such as Nagel (2005)—are disqualified as liberals simply because they do not endorse strong global egalitarianism. The more challenging question, therefore, is whether liberalism of this latter type must also conflict with nationalism. Such a conflict might appear to arise from the liberal commitment to personal freedom or from the liberal commitment to equality between citizens.

To see how a conflict might arise over personal freedom, consider measures that a government might introduce in order to protect or strengthen its citizens’ national identity. It might pass a law criminalising burning or defiling the national flag; it might require all schools to teach a national curriculum that presents the nation’s history and culture in a good light; it might introduce a national service requirement; and so forth. In each case it is removing a freedom that citizens would otherwise enjoy. But does this show that nationalism and liberalism are incompatible? Only if liberalism is understood to include a principle of maximising individual freedom, which would assimilate it to libertarianism. Most liberals do not hold such a view: Rawls, for example, having initially proposed such a maximising principle of liberty, gave as his final considered version that “each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties which is compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all” (Rawls 1993: 291). By introducing the idea of a basic liberty that must not be infringed, Rawls is in effect conceding that there are other freedoms that may be restricted when there are good (public) reasons for doing so. Liberal nationalists are also committed to the view that basic liberties must not be infringed, but they might disagree with other liberals over where exactly the line between basic and non-basic liberties should be drawn (does the freedom to burn the national flag count as a basic liberty?) as well as over the grounds on which non-basic liberties can be restricted (may compulsory national service be introduced only in time of war, or also in peacetime as a means of fostering national solidarity?)

Next consider why liberal nationalism might pose a threat to liberal equality. Critics will charge that national identities are always constructed in such a way that some citizens will be able to identify more fully with the nation than others. Even though liberal nationalists insist that these identities must be multi-stranded and revisable, it will remain the case that some people, especially immigrants whose cultural backgrounds are different from those of the national majority, will find it harder to embrace them. For example, if a country has historically had a national religion, this will have left a lasting imprint not only on its architecture and landscape but also on aspects of its culture that are not themselves explicitly religious (such as the national language). So even though religious observance is no longer treated as a qualifying condition for belonging to the nation, those from a different background will feel alienated to the extent that these cultural features continue to inform the public culture and social mores of the country they inhabit.

The charge, then, is that when states take the form of nation-states, as liberal nationalists argue that they should, some part of the citizen body will think of themselves, and be thought of by the majority, as “second-class citizens”. This will be so even if, in law and public policy, they are treated in exactly the same way as those from the cultural majority. For egalitarian reasons, therefore, the only form of nationalism that is acceptable is a purely “civic” (as opposed to “ethnic”) nationalism according to which the common identity that holds citizens together is to be understood in narrowly political terms as allegiance to certain political principles, and institutions such as a constitution or parliamentary democracy (Ignatieff 1993, Barry 1999).

To this, liberal nationalists will respond that the idea of a purely civic nation is in fact a myth, As Yack puts it

it suggests that your national identity is nothing but your choice: you are the political principles you share with other like-minded individuals. Real nations, in contrast, combine choice and cultural heritage. (2012: 30)

Not only are there no wholly civic nations to be found in the world, but such an identity could not have the motivating power of identities with cultural and historical as well as political elements (for a critique of the contrast between civic and ethnic conceptions of national identity, see Laborde 2002: 597–8). There would, for example, be no reason to resist the state you belong to being absorbed by another state so long as the political principles on which it was based continued to be observed.

The liberal nationalist response to the equality challenge, therefore, is to concede that at any moment there are likely to be groups who find it difficult to embrace their state’s national identity as it stands, but to insist on the dynamic character of these identities and their ability to absorb new cultural elements from hitherto-excluded minority groups. The remaking of national identity can be a democratic process in which cultural icons and practices are debated, and in some cases modified or abandoned. Where a yes/no decision on some cultural issue has to be made, the majority view (if there is one) must prevail, but even here it may be possible to provide recognition for minority perspectives. Thus if a national event such as a coronation or presidential inauguration has traditionally involved a religious ritual, this can be modified so as to allow representatives of minority faiths to play a part in the ceremony alongside those of the historically recognised religion (for a fuller discussion see Miller 2020).

5. National Self-determination and Secession

As indicated earlier, the desire to be self-determining is integral to nationality. Nations are groups of people who want to decide the terms on which they are to live together, and also the impact they will make on the outside world. Such claims are often met with scepticism, however. Critics will point to the size of nations and also to their internal diversity. For self-determination to be valuable, it seems it must be valuable not just for the nation as a collective but also for its individual members. But how is it possible for a person to feel in control of their destiny when they are one among many millions, and when on many issues they find themselves in deep disagreement with their compatriots?

Under what conditions, then, can a nation be self-determining? The first is that it should exist in an environment that allows it make collective choices over matters that are important to its members. This is not to be confused with the issue of state sovereignty. A nation might control a state that is formally sovereign (it is subject to no higher legal authority) and yet fail to be self-determining, for example because it is wholly reliant for its subsistence on a neighbouring state that uses its dominant position to determine what the first state does. Of course, no nation is able to act entirely without external constraint, so we see immediately that national self-determination in practice is a matter of degree, and the corresponding normative demand can only be that each nation should enjoy an adequate measure of self-determination.

In particular, a self-determining nation must be able to exercise jurisdiction over the area of land that it claims as its national homeland. The relationship between nation and territory is constitutive (see the section on nationalist theories in the entry on territorial rights and territorial justice) and so self-determination must involve, among other things, deciding on the future use and appearance of the physical space that it regards as its own. To support such territorial claims, nations can appeal to the transformative labour of past and present generations that have enhanced the value of the territory, to its symbolic importance as a repository of national culture and national memory, or to both at once (Miller 2012). Of course, these claims are often disputed when rival nations claim the same area of land as rightfully theirs on such grounds.

The second condition is that the nation should have a mechanism for making collective decisions that allows all members to see the outcome as an expression of their collective will (for general discussion of the institutional conditions that are necessary for a people to be self-determining, see Stilz 2016). This means both something more and something less than that it should be governed democratically. Something less, because it is at least possible that there can be what Rawls (1999) has called “decent hierarchical peoples” whose rulers take decisions guided by comprehensive doctrines, typically religious in character, that are very widely shared in the society. So long as there are mechanisms that ensure that the ruling hierarchy remains aligned with the beliefs and values of the people as a whole when making these decisions—such as allowing dissenting voices to be heard without fear of suppression—a form of self-determination can be achieved. Something more, because democracy in its procedural form, such as the holding of regular, free elections, may not be sufficient for self-determination if there is no attempt to reach policy outcomes that everyone is able to endorse. For example, in the case of a nation divided along religious lines, self-determination requires that those in the majority camp should not use their position of advantage to vote through policies that discriminate severely against the minority. What matters is that everyone should be able to regard the policies that are chosen as a reasonable expression of their underlying values, even if they are not the policies they would have chosen themselves.

Although the desire to be self-determining is integral to nationality, more needs to be said to explain why self-determination, at national level, should be valuable. Here we should distinguish between instrumental and intrinsic arguments for the value of self-determination (Margalit & Raz 1990; for a full discussion of this value, see Stilz 2016). The instrumental argument is fairly straightforward: when a group has collective preferences about its future way of life, the most secure way for it to ensure that those preferences are met is to make decisions for itself. Outsiders, no matter how well-intentioned, are always liable to misunderstand what the group wants, or to strike the wrong balance between different priorities. The intrinsic argument—the claim that self-determination is valuable quite apart from the concrete outcomes that it produces—is, however, more open to challenge.

One version of that argument appeals to personal autonomy. It says that where individuals are involved in making decisions on behalf of the groups they belong to, outside interference with these collective decisions diminishes their autonomy. Just as it matters to someone that they should be in control of their own personal life, it matters that the groups they are involved in controlling should be self-determining, and therefore not subject to external interference (Wellman 2005). Margalit and Raz (1990) argue that nations are “encompassing groups”, having a number of special features that make membership in such groups particularly important to those who belong to and identify with them. It is also important to be able to express one’s membership by participating in political activities within the group. Therefore, they conclude, “self-government is inherently valuable, it is required to provide the group with a political dimension” (1990: 451). But not everyone accepts bridging arguments of this kind. Buchanan (1998a: 17–18) points to the gulf that exists between individual and collective self-government (which he identifies with democratic decision-making):

it is simply false to say that an individual who participates in a democratic decision-making process is self-governing; he or she is governed by the majority.

Personal autonomy, he argues, can be expressed in many different areas of social life, and need not require political involvement at national level.

A second version of the intrinsic argument in favour of self-determination appeals to respect for persons. The claim is that “individuals are disrespected in a morally objectionable manner when their group is denied self-determination” (Altman & Wellman 2009: 38). Where a group has developed the ability and willingness to govern itself, to deny it that right is to show them disrespect. This is particular clearly illustrated, Altman and Wellman claim, in the case of colonial government, which denies the colonised the “recognition respect” they deserve by virtue of their willingness to perform the functions that are needed to support a legitimate state.

This way of explaining the value of self-determination does however raise the question whether groups of all kinds, not only nations, can claim to be disrespected if they are not granted the right to be self-governing. Can the colonial case be generalised to apply, for example, to minority nations living within established states who make claims to secede? It appears not. Could the Scots, for example, claim that they were being disrespected if the government of the United Kingdom turned down their demand for Scotland to become an independent state? The obvious counterargument is that since Scots are being treated as equal citizens within the UK, with the same rights and responsibilities as other citizens, their political capacities are already being shown appropriate respect. Nor does the refusal to grant independence communicate the message that the Scots would be incapable of forming a state of their own. It merely signals they have yet to provide a good enough reason for creating such a state.

Nationalists often face the charge that their commitment to political self-determination opens the door to political turmoil. According to Canovan,

it is of the essence of nationalism…. to be a revolutionary doctrine, calling for the destruction of existing states and the construction of new ones with different boundaries, and thereby upsetting existing legal frameworks. (1996: 11)

There is no doubt that, in the case of Europe at least, nationalism has had this corrosive effect at certain historical moments, such as in the revolutionary period in the mid-nineteenth century, and in the aftermath of World War One. But these were also moments when long-established empires were in the process of collapsing. Where nationalist demands emerge within states that are already constituted as nation-states, there are options besides secession and boundary-redrawing that can respond to these demands (for a full discussion, see Norman 2006).

One such response is nation-building. Nation-states cannot in any case help being involved in reproducing the national identity and culture of their people over time, often in ways that are so banal as to pass very largely unnoticed (Billig 1995), and so faced with separatist demands they can make a more conscious attempt to strengthen the inclusive aspects of national identity, while at the same time adjusting its content to make it more accessible to members of minority nations. For example, national histories, which anyway are continually in process of being rewritten in the light of contemporary political concerns, can give greater prominence to the role played by people from these groups in promoting the nation’s interests and contributing to its culture. This need not—and should not—involve outright falsification of the national past (see the following section (§6)).

A second response is to create institutions that allow national minorities to be self-determining in areas that are important to them within the boundaries of the larger nation-state (Kymlicka 1995, esp. ch. 6). This could be done on either a territorial or a non-territorial basis. If the nationalism of these groups is predominantly cultural in character, it may be sufficient to give them control over the relevant cultural institutions. (Gans 2003: ch. 3; Tamir 1993: ch. 3). More commonly, devolved forms of government can be created in those parts of the territory where minority nations mainly live (and which they regard as their homeland), as has occurred in countries such as Belgium, Canada, Spain and the United Kingdom. These arrangements are not entirely stable, since the experience of self-government may give national minorities the confidence to ask for yet more rights, while experiencing the frustration of having to operate within broad policy guidelines and budgetary constraints imposed by central government. Thus there is the risk of a slippery slope that leads to secession, and for that reason states that attach great importance to preserving national unity may be very reluctant to grant minorities political rights in the first place (Kymlicka 2004). Yet where such anxieties can be allayed, perhaps through inclusive nation-building policies as outlined above, partial autonomy for national minorities may produce a better outcome all round than outright secession.

One reason to think so is that secession, when it occurs, is rarely “clean”, in the sense of establishing a nation-state virtually all of whose inhabitants endorse the new arrangement. (Miller 1998). In many cases there will be a minority within the minority nation who strongly prefer to remain within the larger state, and whose interests may be put at risk if the secession occurs. There may be disagreement over where the territorial boundary between the newly-created state and the rump state should be drawn, about the division of the spoils in relation to natural resources and other assets, and about who should be entitled to take part in any proposed referendum on secession. Although there have been historic examples of consensual secessions, these are the exceptions to the rule that secessions are at best politically contested and at worst occasions for civil war. It is therefore important to underline that believing in the value of national self-determination does not entail believing that any group that qualifies as a nation must be granted the right to form its own independent state.

6. Is Nationalism Irrational?

Albert Einstein is said to have described nationalism as an infantile disease—“the measles of mankind” (1929: 117)—which would therefore pass away once human beings, together, had reached maturity. As noted earlier, many philosophers have shared his conviction that it represents a collective mental aberration of some kind. But if so, in what more specific way is nationalism claimed to be irrational? This section explores three main possibilities.

First, nationalism might be irrational because it requires the arbitrary privileging of one particular identity out of the many identities that might matter to a particular person. Buchanan (1998b) has developed this point:

in pluralistic societies nationality will be only one source of identification and allegiance among others, and for some people it will be of little or no importance relative to other sources of identification and allegiance, whether these are cultural or occupational or religious or political or familial. (1998b: 294)

Nationalism proclaims that national identity reigns supreme, and this, he argues,

is an insult to the equal status of every citizen whose primary identity and allegiance is other than national and to all who have no single primary identity or allegiance. (1998b: 295)

Defenders of nationality will reply that this seriously misrepresents their view. They make no claim about the relative importance of different forms of identity to the person whose identity is in question. It is not misguided or ethically problematic for someone to say that their religious identity matters more to them than their national identity, so that if forced to relinquish one of these, they would opt to forfeit their national identity (for example by choosing to go into exile). National identity is privileged only in the sense that it can form the basis for a stable form of political order. In certain circumstances, this would provide the justification for nation-building policies as described above. But the rationale for such policies is not that national identities are of greater worth than identities of other kinds, and therefore should be promoted at their expense, but that in the absence of a sufficient degree of identification at national level, the society is liable to break down, or at least be unable to sustain democracy and social justice. Even those who do not find national identities intrinsically valuable can therefore have reason to support their promotion.

Second, some critics will claim that the very act of identifying with a nation is irrational. This might be because there are in fact no such things as nations, understood as bodies of people who share the characteristics, such as a common culture, that are said to mark out one nation from another. The idea of “national character” is illusory, these critics say. A Frenchman will, in general, have no more in common with another Frenchman than he will with a German or a Spaniard. So if nationalists claim that nations are like-minded groups of people among whom special responsibilities and obligations arise, they are simply deluded.

One response to this was suggested by David Hume, who conceded however that national similarities were often exaggerated:

the vulgar are apt to carry all national characters to extremes; and having once established it as a principle, that any people are knavish, or cowardly, or ignorant, they will admit of no exception, but comprehend every individual under the same censure. Men of sense condemn these undistinguishing judgements: Though at the same time, they allow, that each nation has a peculiar set of manners, and that some particular qualities are more frequently to be met with among one people than among their neighbours. (Hume 1748 [1985: 295])

Hume’s suggestion might be developed by proposing a family resemblance view of nationhood, according to which there is no feature that serves as a necessary condition for belonging to a particular nation, but instead there is a range of features that are found more often among the members of one nation than among others (see Moore 2020 for discussion). This view can then allow that one particular Swede might have a greater number of features in common with a particular Italian than she does with another individual Swede, while still maintaining that Swedes overall have many more overlapping features with one another than they do with Italians. In that sense nations as bodies of people with cultural and other qualities in common are not mere illusions.

Personal identification with a nation may be regarded as irrational for a different reason. Critics claim is that it allows those who are personally undistinguished to bask in the reflected glories of their nation, whose achievements are accordingly greatly exaggerated. Schopenhauer, for example, thought that

national pride is transparently a surrogate kind of pride for individuals who possess no qualities of their own….unremarkable people—and to him, most people were unremarkable— tend to boast of the accomplishments of some greater collective to which they belong; they grasp after something that will make them seem great and impressive but find nothing in themselves. (Norberg 2022)

A similar charge was laid by Erich Fromm who, borrowing Freud’s concept of narcissism, claimed that nationalism often functions as a form of “group narcissism”:

What should feed the narcissism of a poor man, who has little social prestige, whose children even tend to look down on him? He is nothing—but if he can identify with his nation, and can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything…“My nation is the strongest, the most cultured, the most peace-loving, the most talented of all nations”. (Fromm 1980: 51–2)

The charge being laid here—that identifying with a nation is irrational because it is driven by an unacknowledged need to compensate for a sense of personal worthlessness—is speculative and hard to assess (similar claims have been made about religious belief). More tractable is that part of the critique which says that nationalists everywhere make claims about the superiority of their country to others, along relevant dimensions, which for obvious reasons cannot all be true. Keller goes further, arguing that loyalty to a country involves a form of “bad faith”, whereby belief in the nation’s superior qualities is protected by blocking out evidence that might undermine it. A patriotic person

is motivated to believe that her country has certain features, and she marshals the evidence in ways that support this belief; but she cannot maintain the belief in its full-blooded form if she admits to herself that it is not grounded in an unbiased assessment of the evidence; so she does not make this admission. (Keller 2005: 580)

It is worth pointing out here that even if these psychological mechanisms are ubiquitous among those who hold nationalist beliefs, this would at most show that nationalism as a social phenomenon is irrational, not that the beliefs themselves are unfounded (showing that a certain belief is widely held for reasons unrelated to its truth may suggest, but certainly does not prove, that the belief itself is false). Moreover the evidence collected by psychologists suggests that among those who identify with their nation, there is considerable variation both in the content and level of “national pride”—the features of the country that are valued by the identifier—and in the extent to which their nationalism is critical or uncritical—whether they endorse the direction that their country is taking, or on the contrary censure it and wish it to change course (see Huddy & Khatib 2007; Miller & Ali 2014). The causal factors that may lead a particular person to identify with and support their nation are sufficiently varied to undermine the charge that such commitments must always be irrational.

There is, however, one further way in which nationalism might be judged to be irrational. This has to do with the prevalence of national myths in the historical narratives that form an essential part of every national identity—the “rich legacy of memories” that Renan believed every nation must possess (for discussion see Miller 1995: ch. 2: Archard 1995; Abizadeh 2004) These memories are of significant events in the nation’s history—often involving either national triumphs or national disasters—and it is undoubtedly the case that the way that these events are remembered by the general public in the country in question is likely to diverge significantly from the best scholarly accounts as provided by historians. Here, however, it is important to distinguish between two kinds of myth: what we might call pure myths, such as legends of how the nation was first established by some heroic figure in the distant past (Aeneas founding Rome, his grandson Brutus founding Britain) which are a feature of pre-modernity, and cannot survive the conditions of free enquiry that prevail in liberal societies; and what we might call partial myths, where persons who undeniably lived or events that undeniably occurred are glossed in such a way as to fit into a “story of peoplehood” that serves a normative purpose for people now, for example by reassuring them that they are the legitimate holders of the territory they occupy, or providing them with ethically inspiring models of conduct to emulate. But is the omnipresence of such partial myths sufficient to show that nationalism is irrational?

There are two points worth making here. First, it is important to note that someone may endorse a partial myth while recognising that the story that they are telling, while faithful to the spirit of the original event it describes, is not accurate in all its details. To use an American example, we now know that the Liberty Bell was not in fact rung in Philadelphia on July 4^th 1776, and that Paul Revere did not actually ride all the way from Lexington to Concord, but these stories will continue to be told and retold because they form part of a wider narrative about an event—the American Revolution—that undoubtedly did occur, and whose significance is unquestionable. Some may believe these accounts to be literally true, while others may recognise their partly mythical character, but the importance of a shared narrative as a source of national unity is such as to make it reasonable in certain contexts to suspend disbelief.

Second, the moral value of a national myth will depend upon the ends that it serves to promote, and in particular whether the story it tells about the nation’s past is one that all of its present members can identify with. To continue with the same example, the myth that the American Revolution was an all-American rising against the oppressive British, and not at the same time an internal conflict between patriot and loyalist factions within America, also obscures the role played by Black Americans (many of whom fought on the loyalist side) in this event. In doing so, it conceals the racial dimension of the Revolution. The myth does not serve Black Americans today well, and needs to be recast to carry out the unifying and motivating functions that national myths, in the best cases, can perform.

This section has reviewed reasons of different kinds for holding that nationalism is irrational, some having to do with what nationalists believe, and others having to do with the motivation that induces people to hold these beliefs. The general charge of irrationality cannot be substantiated, but it remain an open question how far the version of nationalism that (some) philosophers are willing to defend is also the version that moves people in different places to act politically, sometimes with earth-shaking consequences.