Nationalism

Nationalism is the doctrine that the political community is properly bounded by the nation — a people sharing language, history, custom, and territory — and that this community has prior claims on the loyalty of its members and the policy choices of its government. Contemporary conservatives have defended a version of nationalism distinct from the chauvinistic and racial forms that discredited the word in the twentieth century. Yoram Hazony, Roger Scruton, and a wider current including Edmund Burke’s heirs argue that the nation is the natural unit of self-government and that the alternatives are either empire or atomised individualism. The classical-liberal and progressive replies treat national attachment as a moral hazard if not a positive evil.

Key Takeaways

• Conservative nationalism, in the form defended by Hazony and Scruton, distinguishes itself from racial nationalism and from imperial universalism alike, treating the nation as a unit of accountable self-government.
• Edmund Burke’s account of the nation as an inheritance — “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born” — supplies the intellectual root.
• Critics from Hayek to the contemporary cosmopolitan left argue that national attachment is at best instrumental and at worst dangerous; conservatives reply that the alternatives have their own failure modes.

History And Context

The modern idea of the nation as a political community emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, given shape by the Westphalian settlement (1648) and by Enlightenment debates about sovereignty and the source of legitimate authority. Conservative writers do not all accept the standard story that nationalism is a wholly modern invention; some, following Anthony Smith, argue that nations have pre-modern ethnic and cultural cores even where the political form is recent.

Nationalism as ideology was, in the nineteenth century, broadly a project of the centre-left: the Italian Risorgimento, German liberal nationalism before 1848, and the various movements for self-determination under Habsburg and Ottoman rule. Conservative associations with nationalism hardened in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, and the word acquired a darker resonance through fascist and Nazi appropriation. The post-1945 settlement, both in Europe and in transatlantic institutions, treated nationalism as the problem that universalist institutions (UN, EEC, later EU) were designed to contain.¹

The early twenty-first century saw a conservative recovery of the word. Brexit (2016), the election of Donald Trump (2016), and a cluster of central-European governments led by Viktor Orbán, the Polish Law and Justice party, and Giorgia Meloni made national sovereignty a live conservative project again. Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) became the central intellectual reference for this current.

The Conservative Position

The Burkean root is the account of the nation as an inheritance. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke wrote that the social compact is “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”² The nation, on this view, is the institutional form that the inter-generational partnership takes; it is the unit within which custom, language, common law, and the inherited apparatus of self-government can be transmitted.

Yoram Hazony’s argument in The Virtue of Nationalism runs as follows. The alternatives to a system of national states are empire and tribe. Empire claims universal jurisdiction and tends to coercive homogenisation; tribe is too small to organise the conditions of large-scale cooperation. The national state, bounded enough to be loyal to its own and large enough to defend itself, is the political form best suited to self-government under modern conditions. Hazony explicitly distinguishes this position from racial or ethnic exclusivism: a nation is a community of inheritance and loyalty, not of blood.³

Roger Scruton’s contribution in How to Be a Conservative (2014) and Where We Are: The State of Britain Now (2017) is to insist that national attachment is the precondition of liberal politics rather than its enemy. Citizens accept binding decisions from a majority who outvote them only because they recognise themselves as members of the same political community; remove that recognition and majoritarian decisions look like tyranny.⁴ Scruton’s term for the relevant attachment is “oikophilia” — love of home — distinguished from xenophobia (hatred of the foreign) and from racial nationalism.

Differing Positions

The classical-liberal objection is that national attachment is sentimental and prone to capture by demagogues. F.A. Hayek treated nationalism with suspicion in The Constitution of Liberty and elsewhere, arguing that the rule of law should be impersonal and that national loyalties were as likely to undermine it as to support it. Contemporary libertarians take a stronger line, treating borders themselves as restrictions on freedom of association.

Cosmopolitan progressives argue that moral obligations are owed to persons regardless of national membership and that the privileging of co-nationals is a form of arbitrary moral discrimination. Martha Nussbaum’s defence of cosmopolitanism is the canonical statement. The reply from the conservative side concedes that universal moral obligations exist but denies that they translate directly into political obligations — the latter being mediated by membership in particular communities.

Critics on the populist right object to Hazony’s and Scruton’s careful distinctions, arguing that a serious nationalism must be willing to defend ethnic and religious continuity more directly. This is a live disagreement within national conservatism rather than a critique from outside.

References

1. Anderson, B. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. London: Verso, 2006.
2. Burke, E. Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. C.C. O’Brien. London: Penguin Classics, 1968, pp. 194-95.
3. Hazony, Y. The Virtue of Nationalism. New York: Basic Books, 2018, pp. 1-22.
4. Scruton, R. Where We Are: The State of Britain Now. London: Bloomsbury, 2017, ch. 1.