Against nationalism

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 26, Issue , 1997, Pages 365-405

  Brighouse, Harry ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

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EID: 85003874365     PISSN: 00455091     EISSN: 19110820     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00455091.1997.10716822     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. It is hard to infer positions on this question by attention simply to practice, especially to socialist practice which has hitherto been (and will for the foreseeable future be) explicitly rectificatory. Nevertheless many (though probably not most) socialist currents have been hostile to national sentiment both because it is a barrier to immediate political projects and because it is desirable to do away with it in the long term.
2. Scruton, Roger. 1988. Philosopher ort Dover Beach 299London: St. Martin's Press.
3. I do not mean to imply that all internationalist socialists will feel this way. I am just describing what seems to me a possible (and, for some people, actual) psychological scenario.
4. Buchanan, Allen. 1991. Secession Edited by: French, Stanley G., Boulder, CO: Westview Press. See; David Copp, ‘Do Nations Have a Right to Self-Determination?’ in Philosophers Look at Canadian Confederation (Montreal: Canadian Philosophical Association 1979), 71–95; David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995) for more elaborate characterizations of nations.
5. 1987. Social Philosophy and Policy, 6:2 This corresponds to the idea in Joshua Cohen's description of the ideal procedure in a deliberative democracy that “On the deliberative conception it is important that collective choices be made in a deliberative way, and not simply that those choices conform to the preferences, convictions and ideals of citizens,” ‘The Economic Basis of Deliberative Democracy,’ 25–50 at 33. It is important for liberal legitimacy that assent be actually achieved, and not simply be consistent with people's preferences, convictions, and ideals.
6. Galston, William. 1991. Liberal Purposes 243–4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
7. Copp, David. 1992. ‘The Right to an Adequate Standard of Living: Justice, Autonomy, and Basic Needs,’. Social Philosophy and Policy, 9:1 See 231–62 for an account of how our interest in autonomy supports rights to access to a basic level of resources.
8. Some self-described liberals accord it no formal weight at all, for example, William Galston.
9. Secession This worry might be dealt with in practice by making the right to secede conditional on the new state recognizing that minorities within the new nation have more limited rights of self-determination. See Allen Buchanan, especially ch. 4.
10. This example has limited force because the case involves only harms and bads, and not the cessation of guarantees for autonomy-supporting conditions.
11. Philosopher on Dover Beach It is important to note that my use of the term ‘citizen’ does not reflect any commitment to any sort of national identity. Saying that citizens of a state owe these obligations to one another carries no implication that they owe any less or any different to citizens of other states. Nor does it imply that they have any right to determine the conditions of entry to or exit form citizenship. Anti-liberals are prone to accusing liberals of inconsistency when they use the language of commonality or citizenship. Roger Scruton says, “Nor are liberals consistent in their repudiation of the national idea, as is shown by a characteristic liberal attitude to immigration. The argument is advanced that we have no right to close our doors against immigrants from our former colonies, since it was we who exploited them, or reduced them to the state of economic and cultural dependence which ensures that their best—perhaps their only—prospects are now on British soil. If you examine the use of ‘we’ in that sentence you will find the perfect instance of the national idea, as I have described it: the idea of moral unity between people, based in territory, language, association, history and culture, and so bound up with the self-consciousness of those who are joined by it, as to make subsequent generations answerable for the sins of their forefathers.” Roger Scruton, 320. Scruton does not quote a liberal anti-nationalist, so his attribution of inconsistency is only to a statement which he has made up himself. But even on the way he has construed the position it does not take a great deal of charity in interpretation to render the position consistent. The first ‘we’ in his sentence refers only to the group of people who have the de facto control of the gates. The subsequent uses of ‘we’ and ‘our’ are indeed careless (though, as I say, the carelessness is that of a liberal in Scruton's imagination), but they are a shorthand for the individualist idea that we, the de facto controllers of the gates, are unjustly, the beneficiaries of a current distributive injustice which was caused by the behaviour of past de facto controllers of the gates who also, coincidentally, were our forebears (or some of our forebears). We do not owe anybody anything just because our forebears did wrong to their forebears. We owe things to them because we are currently on their wrong side, which situation was indeed brought about by the actions of our forebears. The appeal to groups here, furthermore, is not a fundamental appeal to group identity, but a convenient appeal for the sake of social policy, which must always be applied to well-defined groups, even though it must fundamentally be justified on individualist grounds.
12. In fact, violations of neutrality of intent sometimes make it easier for the victims to fulfill their conceptions of the good. Obvious cases are conceptions of the good which see persecution as a precondition of demonstrating full faith. Less obviously, cultures which suffer mild persecution are sometimes artificially sustained by the resistance that persecution provokes. That said, when a policy has publicly demonstrated negative effects on a particular conception of the good for some lengthy period of time it is sometimes reasonable for those who are disadvantaged by it to feel devalued even when in fact the justification of the policy was neutral.
13. 1995. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 24:1: 36–63. Of course, if the neutral justification were proposed by Baroness Thatcher no one would believe that she was being sincere. Discussions of justifications of policies are usually highly stylized because it is difficult in practice to establish the real justifications of any given measure. Not only are people often insincere about the public justifications they offer, but even when they are not, in democratic processes the supporters of any measure or package of measures typically diverge in their motivations. I address this issue in ‘Neutrality, Publicity, and State Funding of the Arts,’
14. Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice 100–8. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. esp. 75–90
15. Galston, William. 1995. ‘Two Concepts of Liberalism,’. Ethics, 105:3: 516–34. at 526
16. Galston. ‘Two Concepts of Liberalism,’ 526
17. 1991. Liberal Purposes Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Galston does appear to put forward a proposal favouring large-nation national sentiment in his account of civic education. See 243.
18. Galston. ‘Two Concepts of Liberalism,’ 527
19. Raz, Joseph. 1987. The Morality of Freedom Vol. 77:3, 457–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press. See. I discuss autonomy-facilitation as an element of liberalism in Is There a Neutral Justification for Liberalism?,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (1996), 193–215, and ‘Egalitarian Liberals and School Choice,’ Politics and Society24:4 (1996)
20. Miller, David. 1995. On Nationality 49Oxford: Oxford University Press.
21. Miller. On Nationality 50
22. Miller. On Nationality 70
23. Miller. On Nationality 70
24. Miller. On Nationality 69
25. Miller. On Nationality 24
26. Miller. On Nationality 25
27. I do not mean to preclude the possibility of successful assimilation, but, at least for adults, it takes a very long time and considerable good fortune.
28. On Nationality He explicitly distinguishes national self-determination from the view that every nation should have a state, though he is friendly to that idea. Miller, 80.
29. Miller. On Nationality 83–86.
30. Miller. On Nationality 88 Notice that this advantage, unlike the other two, requires that the state be democratic. Whereas mediating our distinctive obligations and protecting our national culture can be done by an authoritarian state, it is meaningless to say that we are exercising collective autonomy unless the mechanism by which we are doing this is responsive to our demands.
31. 1991. Ethics, 101:4: 134–71. The problems are not, in my view, insuperable. See for example Barbara Herman, ‘Agency, Attachment, and Difference,’ 775–97 and Peter Railton, ‘Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality,’ Philosophy and Public Affairs13:2 (1984)
32. Miller, David. 1993. ‘In Defence of Nationality/. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 10:1: 3–16. at 3
33. Miller. ‘In Defence of Nationality,’ 11
34. The Sun These were the thirteen Labour MPs identified by as opponents of the war against Argentina over the Falkland Islands.
35. Miller. On Nationality 87
36. Miller. On Nationality 88
37. 1992. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 24:1: 244–67. I have discussed the issue of state funding of the arts in ‘Neutrality, Publicity, and State Funding of the Arts,’ (1995) 36–63.1 think that the moderate argument I make there against state funding of the arts applies even more compellingly to state support for a particular national culture. For more discussions of state funding of culture, see Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1985), ch. 11; Noel Carroll, ‘Can Government Funding of the Arts be Justified Theoretically?,’ Journal of Aesthetic Education21:1 (1987) 21–34; and Samuel Black, ‘Revisionist Liberalism and the Decline of Culture,’ Ethics102:2
38. Miller. On Nationality 90–92.
39. Miller. On Nationality 9–10. 92. See also ‘In Defence of Nationality,’
40. Shapiro, Andrew. 1995. We're Number One New York: Vintage Books. See 1992), Edward N. Wolff, Top Heavy: A Study of the Increasing Inequality of Wealth in America (New York: Twentieth Century Fund 1995), Nancy Folbre, The New Field Guide to the U.S. Economy (New York: The New Press for some evidence of this failure.
41. Davis, Mike. 1984. Prisoners of the American Dream London: Verso. See, for example,.
42. Esping-Anderson, Gosta. 1985. Politics Against Markets Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. See, for example, 1985) and The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1990); Adam Przeworski, Capitalism and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
43. Rosselson, Leon. 1981. “ from ‘The Good of the Nation,’ lyrics printed in Leon Rosselson and Jeff Perks ”. In For the Good of the Nation London: Journeyman Press. ‘The state of the nation is all my concern When I'm gnawing a crust for my dinner I can't afford meat on the money I earn And I'm growing steadily thinner But its all for the good of the nation. The Nation the nation The nation is in such a terrible state Stagnation, inflation If we all pull together we'll once again make Britain Great.’ 0.
44. Goodin, Robert. 1988. ‘What's So Special About Our Fellow Countrymen?,’. Ethics, 98:4 See 663–86 for a careful defence of a universalist approach to nationality.
45. 1989. Liberalism, Community and Culture Oxford: Oxford University Press. Most of my discussion focuses on the arguments made in Will Kymlicka, and developed in Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1995). A distinct argument, concerning the importance of societal, or institutionally complete, cultures, is developed in Multicultural Citizenship. See Allen Buchanan's contribution to this volume, ‘What's So Special About Nations?’, for criticism of this argument.
46. Kymlicka. Liberalism, Community, and Culture 82–84. 166; Multicultural Citizenship
47. Kymlicka. Liberalism, Community, and Culture 182–3.
48. Kymlicka. Liberalism, Community, and Culture 183
49. Kymlicka. Liberalism, Community, and Culture 183 See also Multicultural Citizenship, where he says ‘The viability of their [national minorities'] societal cultures may be undermined by economic and political decisions made by the majority. They could be outbid or outvoted on resources and policies that are crucial to the survival of their societal cultures. The members of the majority do not face this problem. Given the importance of cultural membership this is a significant inequality which, if not addressed, becomes a serious injustice,’ 109.
50. Kymlicka. Liberalism, Community, and Culture 185–6.
51. Kymlicka. Liberalism, Community, and Culture 187
52. Kymlicka. Multicultural Citizenship 152
53. Kymlicka. Multicultural Citizenship, 152 (emphases in original)
54. Buchanan makes and elaborates this point in ‘What's So Special About Nations?’.
55. Aboriginal peoples in the U.S. have been subjected to massacres, thefts, juridical inequality of liberty, political inequality, and inequality of opportunity, and hardly any living North American descendants of American Indians who were resident at the time of the worst infractions have avoided the consequences. Even on Robert Nozick's view living North American Indians merit substantial compensation.
56. Dworkin. A Matter of Principle See chs. 14 and 15.
57. 1981. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 10:3: 283–345. For Dworkin's version of the initial auction see ‘What is Equality Part 2: Equality of Resources,’
58. Kymlicka. Liberalism, Community, and Culture 108–15. 188. For a less formal rendering of the main argument I am discussing here see Multicultural Citizenship
59. Kymlicka. Liberalism, Community, and Culture 188
60. Kymlicka. Liberalism, Community, and Culture 189!
61. I suppose that children growing up in the wild lack a cultural context of choice, but also that there is nothing that can be done about this except searching for them and placing them in societies.
62. Secession 101–2. Allen Buchanan makes a similar point in
63. Coupland, Nikolas, ed. 1977. Welsh and the Other Dying Languages in Europe: A Sociolinguistic Study Hamburg: Helmut Buske. For discussion of the state of English and Welsh in Wales, see Max Adler, Verlag, and English in Wales: Diversity, Conflict and Change (Bristol, PA: Multilinguistic Matters Ltd. 1990).
64. Kymlicka. Liberalism, Community, and Culture 194–5. Multicultural Citizenship, 152
65. Kymlicka. Multicultural Citizenship 81–82. 37. See also
66. Kymlicka. Liberalism, Community, and Culture 196; Multicultural Citizenship, 153
67. Allen Buchanan has pointed out to me that while some prescriptive minority language rights, like Bill 101 in Quebec, are external protections, they are also internal restrictions, since they are binding on the members of the culture as well as on non-members.
68. Raz, Joseph. 1994. “ ‘Multiculturalism: A Liberal Perspective,’ ”. In Dissent Winter 67–79 at 71.
69. Raz. ‘Multiculturalism,’ 71
70. Kymlicka. Multicultural Citizenship 113
71. I am grateful to Darrell Moellendorf for extremely valuable discussions and for suggesting that I write this paper, and to Allen Buchanan for extensive comments on it. I'm also grateful to Jonathan Barrett, Lynn Glueck, and Andrew Levine.