National Conservatism

National conservatism holds that the nation — a people bound by language, history, religion and territory — is the largest unit within which self-government works, and that conservative politics should defend it against dissolution from above by supranational bodies and from below by identity factions. It treats sovereignty, borders, family and religious inheritance as prior commitments, and subordinates economic policy to the cohesion of the political community rather than the reverse.

The position emerged as a distinct movement after 2016, when the Brexit referendum and the American presidential election exposed a gap between conservative parties and conservative voters. Its argument against the fusionist settlement of the postwar right is that the settlement made free markets and global institutions the substance of conservatism and left the nation as sentiment, with the result that conservative governments presided over the erosion of the things their voters had elected them to conserve.

Key Takeaways

• The nation, not the individual and not humanity, is treated as the working unit of political loyalty and self-government.
• Sovereignty is understood as the capacity to decide, which supranational adjudication transfers rather than shares.
• Markets are endorsed as instruments and rejected as ends; trade and immigration policy are judged by their effect on national cohesion.
• The movement is a critique of the postwar fusionist right as much as of the left.
• Its principal internal problem is the boundary between civic and ethnic definitions of the nation, which its own thinkers police unevenly.

History And Context

The idea that political legitimacy runs through nations is older than the movement’s name. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 established territorial sovereignty as the organising principle of European order. Burke’s Reflections of 1790 defended the specific inheritance of a particular people against the French assertion of universal rights, arguing that the rights Englishmen possessed were an entailed inheritance from their forefathers rather than deductions from abstract principle.³

The postwar right in Britain and America built a different synthesis. Fusionism joined free-market economics, anti-communism and traditional morality, and the economic component gradually became the operative one. Hayek marked the fault line himself in the 1960 postscript to The Constitution of Liberty, distinguishing his liberalism from conservatism precisely on the conservative’s attachment to established national authority and his own commitment to open, denationalised order.⁴

Roger Scruton supplied the philosophical case for nations from within conservatism. In The Need for Nations (2004) he argued that the loyalties that make democratic accountability possible are territorial rather than creedal, and that a demos capable of accepting defeat at the ballot box has to already exist as a people.² Scruton’s defence of settled attachment to home and country remains the movement’s most careful statement.

The political sequence ran quickly. Britain voted to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016. Yoram Hazony published The Virtue of Nationalism in 2018, arguing that the choice in political order is between an order of independent national states and an imperial order pursuing universal rule, and that the former has the better record on liberty.¹ The first National Conservatism conference met in Washington in July 2019; the Edmund Burke Foundation issued a Statement of Principles in June 2022, and conferences followed in Rome, Brussels, London and Miami. Parallel currents appeared in European parties that had reached similar conclusions by other routes.

The Conservative Position

The core claim concerns sovereignty. A parliament that cannot alter a rule because a treaty body will strike it down is a debating chamber, and voters learn this before political scientists do. National conservatives argue that democratic accountability requires a body that can be held responsible by an electorate that can remove it, which supranational courts and standing regulatory bodies cannot.

The second claim concerns cohesion. Self-government rests on a population willing to accept losses at the hands of its fellow citizens, which requires mutual recognition built out of shared language, memory and law. On this account rapid demographic change and multicultural policy erode the substrate that redistribution and democratic consent both depend on, and the argument is prudential rather than racial.

The third concerns economics. National conservatives accept market allocation and reject the treatment of efficiency as the final criterion. Where offshoring hollowed out manufacturing regions, the measured gains in consumer prices were real and the social costs — collapsed local employment, family breakdown, drug mortality — were entered nowhere on the ledger. Policy should weigh both, which yields support for industrial policy, supply-chain security and restrictive immigration where wages are being undercut.

The fourth concerns religion and family. The movement treats the transmission of an inherited religious culture as a public interest rather than a private preference, on the ground that a nation which stops reproducing its own beliefs will be governed by beliefs imported from somewhere else.

Differing Positions

The classical liberal critique is the sharpest. Hayek’s objection stands: the conservative’s willingness to use state power for national ends supplies no principle limiting that power, and industrial policy hands the direction of investment to officials with worse information and worse incentives than markets. Tariffs raise costs for domestic producers who buy inputs, and the historical record of protection is a record of capture by incumbents.

A second objection concerns the definition of the nation. Civic nationalism admits anyone who accepts the constitutional order; ethnic nationalism does not. Critics argue the movement equivocates, using civic language in public while its electoral coalition responds to the ethnic version, and that the boundary policing has been inconsistent enough to matter.

A third holds that the international institutions under attack were built by conservatives after 1945 for conservative reasons — to prevent the return of the continental wars that nationalism had produced twice in thirty years — and that dismantling them trades a known benefit for a speculative gain in autonomy.

National conservatives answer that the postwar settlement rested on strong nation states cooperating, not on their supersession, and that the alternative to accountable national government is not universal peace but rule by bodies no electorate can reach.

References

1. Yoram Hazony, The Virtue of Nationalism (Basic Books, 2018), pt. 1, chs. 1–3.
2. Roger Scruton, The Need for Nations (Civitas, 2004).
3. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London: J. Dodsley, 1790).
4. Friedrich A. Hayek, “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” postscript to The Constitution of Liberty (University of Chicago Press, 1960).