freedom, we need rights that cannot be removed by the majority. The threat from
majorities exists whether or not there is strong nationalist sentiment, but it is
deepened by the existence of such sentiment. Second, even if we can guarantee the
rights of individuals within a democracy, a world divided into nation-states raises
issues of international justice: there are strong and wealthy nations, and there are
weak and poor nations. If individuals matter then they matter irrespective of their
nationality.
While the nation maybe a threat to liberty and to international justice, there are
grounds for holding that a world of nation-states is more likely to guarantee liberty
and justice than some other form of political organisation. Two quite different lines
of argument suggest themselves; both are liberal but, in fact, correspond respectively
to civic and ‘soft’ ethnic forms of nationalism (we explain the distinction between
‘soft’ and ‘hard’ ethnic nationalism later). The first – civic – argument is that the
world is more stable and efficient if organised around nation-states, where each
nation respects the territorial integrity of the others. As we suggested earlier, this
argument attaches instrumentalvalue to the nation: that is, the nation serves the
purposes of individuals. The second – ethnic – argument maintains that individuals
need culture as a means of self-expression, and the nation-state is the embodiment
of culture. Such an argument assumes that nations have intrinsicvalue – valuing
individual lives means respecting an individual’s culture, the political expression of
which is the nation-state. In terms of the history of political thought, John Stuart
Mill was an important exponent of the first position, while Johann Gottfried von
Herder defended the second.John Stuart Mill
In his book Considerations on Representative Government(published 1859) Mill
argues that ‘free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different
nationalities’ (Mill, 1991: 428). A ‘nation’ Mill defines as a portion of humankind
united ‘among themselves’ by common sympathies, which make them cooperate
with each other more willingly than with those of other nations. These common
sympathies may be based on ‘race and descent’, language, religion, shared memory
and political antecedents. Mill states that the last of these is the most important,
and yet his brief discussion of nationalism actually focuses much more on the need
for a shared language than the existence of historic political institutions. Without
a shared language a ‘united public opinion’ cannot exist; if, say, two major languages
coexist, then public life is vertically divided, with each group reading different
newspapers, books and pamphlets, and each looking to its own political class, which
speaks to them in their own language.
The danger with a ‘multinational’ – meaning, a multilingual – state is that the
army, as the security wing of the state, is held together by obedience to its officers,
and not by a shared sympathy. Although Mill does not argue for a popular militia,
he does imply that the army, and other security forces, must have popular legitimacy.
Faced with popular discontent, an army made up of one particular ethnic–linguistic
group will just as soon ‘mow down’ the members of another group as they will
‘foreigners’ (Mill, 1991: 429). In a multinational state the objective of the
government will be the maintenance of stability and that will entail balancing264 Part 2 Classical ideologies