a ‘civic nation’ may succeed in providing non-racial or non-ethnic criteria for
citizenship all nations involve belonging, and belonging implies its opposite: not
belonging, or exclusion. From the perspective of political theory a nationalist must
defend these three features of nationalism: non-voluntariness, partiality and
exclusion. In the remainder of this chapter we explore a number of attempts to do
this. We start with two important nineteenth-century liberal thinkers – Mill and
Herder – move on to a nineteenth-century socialist perspective (Marx and Engels),
and then explore contemporary approaches to nationalism.Liberalism and nationalism: Mill and Herder
As we have suggested liberalism and nationalism may appear odd bedfellows: for
nationalists the most significant moral entity is the nation, whereas for liberals the
most significant is the individual human being. Where there is a conflict between
the claims of the individual and those of the nation, liberals and nationalists will
diverge over which should take precedence. Furthermore, the priority given to the
individual by liberals normally rests on features all human beings share, such that
the logic of liberal individualism is moral universalism(individualism might also
lead to egoism, but we will ignore that possibility here). In contrast, nationalists
are particularists: although some nationalists will argue that there is a universal
need to belong to a nation, nationalism entails regarding one’s own nation as
‘special’.
The difficulty with this apparent rejection of nationalism is that historically
liberalism and nationalism have often been combined into a single political
programme: the struggle for national self-determination has been expressed in the
language of freedom, self-government and accountability. The question is whether
the apparent affinity of liberalism and nationalism is simply a historical accident,
or whether there is a deeper philosophical compatibility that is not captured by an
oversimplistic derivation of universalism from individualism.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau may be interpreted as the first significant liberal thinker
to make an explicit case for nationalism. His defence of nationalism was based on
the importance of a ‘people’ possessing a general will, the recognition of which
supposedly guarantees individual freedom; the general will is not reducible to the
wills of individuals, or to a simple aggregation of wills (Rousseau, 1968: 247–9).
Rousseau’s theory is highly abstract, and seems unconnected to the political realities
of his time, but it has been influential in the development of a popular nationalism
based on democratic self-government. What provides the link between liberalism
and nationalism in Rousseau’s theory is the idea of democracy, such that a better
understanding of the relationship between the individual and the nation is:
Nation ←→Sovereign People (democracy) ←→Individual
However, there are still difficulties involved in reconciling nationalism and
liberalism. First, as we have argued, democracy and liberalism, while closely related,
can conflict: democracy does imply that each person’s interests should be given equal
consideration, but to make decisions we have to rely on a voting system, such that
some people’s preferences will almost inevitably be overridden. To protect individualChapter 12 Nationalism 263