not bring Kurdistan into existence. In response, it could be argued that Kurds have
to believe that Kurdistan exists independently of their beliefs even if, in fact, it only
exists because lots of people style themselves ‘Kurds’ and identify with a particular
land mass, language, customs and so on. On this argument all ‘social entities’ are
necessary fictions.
Whether social entities exist independently of individual beliefs and actions is a
problem for philosophers of social science (see, for example, Ruben, 1985), but our
concern is primarily with the ethical question: what is the moral status of this social
entity we call a nation? The question of the constructedness of the nation is relevant,
in that a person might reasonably argue that it is individuals who, through their
beliefs, construct the nation. This may lessen the claims that the nation has on the
individual: if a Kurd can say that Kurdistan only exists because a group of
individuals ‘construct’ that nation then it would appear to give moral primacy, or
authority, to the individual over the collective. However, this argument may be less
compelling than it appears at first sight, in that the nation may be constructed but
the process of socialisation might be so strong that an individual cannot imagine
him- or herself as anything other than Kurdish, or English, or French, or whatever.
There is another problem with the claim that because the nation is constructed
somehow the individual is free to belong or not to belong to it. The ‘necessary
fiction’ of the nation implies that nationalism depends upon the myth of a really
existing social entity. The word ‘myth’ is not an entirely pejorative term, for as
Anderson argues there is a need for ‘sacred stories’ which purport to explain the
‘origins’ of the nation (see Anderson, 1991). Nationalism depends on forgetfulness:
forgetting the factual, highly contingent formation of the nation. The problem for
liberal political theorists is less one of the authoritarian implications of elevating
the nation over the individual – although that is a concern – but much more the
deception necessarily entailed in effectively constructing the nation. Liberals believe
in transparency and nationalism is bound up with mythology.
At the heart of both these problems – the implicit authoritarianism and the
mythology of nationalism – is the question of the nature of the self. If individual
human beings are the source of authority then the claims of any collective are limited
or constrained by our individual rights, and the idea that political institutions must
be justified to each individual requires ‘transparency’. In the 1980s there was a
significant debate within Anglo-American political philosophy between
‘individualists’ and ‘communitarians’. John Rawls was taken to be representative
of liberal individualism: the derivation of political principles from the ‘original
position’ was individualist in that each individual ‘chose’ the principles through his
or her own powers of reason independently of any prior attachments, such as family,
culture or religion. In his influential critique Michael Sandel argued that Rawls’s
model of the individual was flawed, because a person denied knowledge of his or
her identity is in no position to value anything at all (Sandel, 1998: 179). How can
you know what you want if you do not know what social ties or religious beliefs
you have?
One of the problems with communitarianism is that taken to its logical conclusion
there is no individual standpoint from which we can criticise ‘our community’, and
values are entirely relative to ‘my’ community.^1 Given that we may belong to more
than one community we need to be able to negotiate our conflicting loyalties: this
is evident in the conflict that, historically, Catholics have felt between Church and
Chapter 12 Nationalism 269