communitarian argument that we are, in part, constituted by our social attachments- in this case our nation – and that this gives us reason to act partially towards our
fellow nationals. The nation should not be confused with the state. The national
community has five characteristics: (a) there is a shared belief that the members
belong together by virtue of what they believe they hold in common; (b) the nation
has a history, and the members of the nation are conscious of that history; (c) it is
‘active in character’; (d) it is associated with a particular geographical space or
‘homeland’; (e) it has a public culture (Miller, 1995: 27). Miller argues that national
myths may be essential to reinforcing a sense of community and to the successful
transmission of moral values across generations.
German President Gustav Heinemann (1899–1976; president 1969–74) once
responded to the question whether he loved his country: ‘I don’t love my country;
I love my wife.’ He might have been joking but the implication was that you might
love somebody with whom you have freely entered a relationship, or feel pride in
one’s own achievements, but you cannot love what you have not chosen or be proud
of something you have not yourself done. Miller would accept that this is true but
nonetheless you can, as a result of self-reflection, identify with your nation, such
that membership of the nation becomes integral to your conception of a good life.
Identification through self-reflection is analogous to free choice and personal
achievement.
Miller makes a distinction between ethical universalism and ethical particularism.
The first leads to cosmopolitanism, and that entails rejecting the nation as ethically
significant, while the latter allows space for partiality towards one’s compatriots.
However, that partiality is not absolute: nation A may be morally required to
intervene in the affairs of nation B to prevent human rights violations, so long as
A’s interests are not significantly damaged. Put negatively, one nation should not
intervene in the affairs of another without compelling reasons for doing so. Miller’s
argument may be viewed less as an outline of what nations require and permit of
us, but more an attempt to establish a moral space in which we can pursue
particularist aims.
Hard ethnic nationalism
Liberal ethnic nationalists (soft ethnic nationalists) are keen to distance themselves
from any implication that nations are built on race. However, the discussion of
nationalism would be incomplete without discussing hard ethnic nationalism, where
an ethnic group (or ethny) is defined in biological, and not just cultural, terms. In
the last section we discuss whether hard ethnic nationalism makes any compelling
moral claims.
The revival of interest in Darwinism among social scientists in the 1970s provides
the intellectual backdrop to the contemporary restatement of ethnic nationalism,
although that certainly does not mean that all social scientists influenced by
Darwinian thought are hard ethnic nationalists. What is popularly termed evolution
is based on theories of Charles Darwin (1809–82) – particularly evolution by natural
selection and by sexual selection – combined with genetics, with the gene being the
basic unit of inheritance (a gene is a discrete unit of code which carries instructionsChapter 12 Nationalism 271