“AMERICA FIRST”
The Case for Nations
The ‘we’ of the nation-state binds people together, builds an important legacy of social trust and blunts the sharp edges of globalization
There is a respectable opinion among educated people that nations are no longer relevant. Their reasoning runs roughly as follows:
We
live in an interconnected world. Globalization and the internet have
created new networks of belonging and new forms of social trust, by
which borders are erased and old attachments vaporized. Yes, we have
seen the growth of nationalism in Europe, the Brexit vote in the U.K.
and the election of the populist
Donald Trump,
but these are signs of reactionary sentiments that we should all
have outgrown. The nation-state was useful while it lasted and gave us a
handle on our social and political obligations. But it was dangerous
too, when inflamed against real or imaginary enemies.
In
any case, the nation-state belongs in the past, to a society in which
family, job, religion and way of life stay put in a single place and are
insulated against global developments. Our world is no longer like
that, and we must change in step with it if we wish to belong.
The
argument is a powerful one and was highly influential among those who
voted in the U.K. referendum to remain in the European Union. But it
overlooks the most important fact, which is that democratic politics
requires a demos. Democracy means rule by the people and
requires us to know who the people are, what unites them and how they
can form a government.
Government in turn requires a “we,” a
prepolitical loyalty that causes neighbors who voted in opposing ways to
treat each other as fellow citizens, for whom the government is not
“mine” or “yours” but “ours,” whether or not we approve of it. This
first person plural varies in strength, from fierce attachment in
wartime to casual acceptance on a Monday morning at work, but at some
level, it must be assumed if we are to adopt a shared rule of law.
A country’s stability is enhanced by economic growth, but it
depends far more upon this sense that we belong together and that we
will stand by each other in the real emergencies. In short, it depends
on a legacy of social trust. Trust of this kind depends on a common
territory, resolution in the face of external threat and institutions
that foster collective decisions in response to the problems of the day.
It is the sine qua non of enduring peace and the greatest
asset of any people that possesses it, as the Americans and the British
have possessed it throughout the enormous changes that gave rise to the
modern world.
Urban elites build trust through career moves,
joint projects and cooperation across borders. Like the aristocrats of
old, they often form networks without reference to national boundaries.
They do not, on the whole, depend upon a particular place, a particular
faith or a particular routine for their sense of membership, and in the
immediate circumstances of modern life, they can adapt to globalization
without too much difficulty. They will identify with transnational
networks since they see those things as assets, which amplify their
power.
‘We are in need of an inclusive identity that will hold us together as a people.’
However, even in modern conditions, this urban elite depends
upon others who do not belong to it: the farmers, manufacturers, factory
workers, builders, clothiers, mechanics, nurses, cleaners, cooks,
police officers and soldiers for whom attachment to a place and its
customs is implicit in all that they do. In a question that touches on
identity, these people will very likely vote in another way from the
urban elite, on whom they depend in turn for government.
We are
therefore in need of an inclusive identity that will hold us together as
a people. The identities of earlier times—dynasty, faith, family,
tribe—were already weakening when the Enlightenment consigned them to
oblivion. And the substitutes of modern times—the ideologies and “isms”
of the totalitarian states—have transparently failed to provide an
alternative. We need an identity that leads to citizenship, which is the
relation between the state and the individual in which each is
accountable to the other. That, for ordinary people, is what the nation
provides.
National loyalty marginalizes loyalties of family,
tribe and faith, and places before the citizens’ eyes, as the focus of
their patriotic feeling, not a person or a religion but a place. This
place is defined by the history, culture and law through which we, the
people, have claimed it as our own. The nationalist art and literature
of the 19th century is characterized by the emergence of territory from
behind religion, tribe and dynasty as the primary objects of love.
The
national anthems of the self-identifying nations were conceived as
invocations of home, in the manner of Sibelius’s “Finlandia” or the
unofficial national anthem of England, “Land of Hope and Glory.” Even a
militant anthem like “The Star-Spangled Banner” will take land and home
as its motto: “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” It is
our home that we fight for, and our freedom is the freedom of
self-government in the place that is ours.
However, we in the Anglosphere have a language with which
to discuss nationality that is not tainted by the bellicose rhetoric of
the 19th- and 20th-century nationalists. When we wish to summon the “we”
of political identity, we do not use grand and ideologically tainted
idioms, like la patrie or das Vaterland. We refer simply to the country,
this spot of earth, which belongs to us because we belong to it, have
loved it, lived in it, defended it and established peace and prosperity
within its borders.
Patriotism involves a love of home and a
preparedness to defend it; nationalism, by contrast, is an ideology,
which uses national symbols to conscript the people to war. When the
Abbé Sieyès declared the aims of the French Revolution, it was in the
language of nationalism: “The nation is prior to everything. It is the
source of everything. Its will is always legal…. The manner in which a
nation exercises its will does not matter; the point is that it does
exercise it; any procedure is adequate, and its will is always the
supreme law.” Those inflammatory words launched France on the path to
the Reign of Terror, as the “enemies of the nation” were discovered
hiding behind every chair.
But those who dismiss the national
idea simply because people have threatened their neighbors in its name
are victims of the very narrow-mindedness that they condemn. A small
dose of evolutionary psychology would remind them that human communities
are primed for warfare, and that when they fight, they fight as a
group. Of course they don’t put it like that; the group appears in their
exhortations as something transcendent and sublime—otherwise why should
they fight for it? It goes by many names: the people, the king, the
nation, God, even the Socialist International. But its meaning is always
the same: “us” as opposed to “them.”
Divide a classroom of
children into those wearing red pullovers and those wearing green and
then make a few significant discriminations between them. You will soon
have war between the reds and the greens. Within days, there will be
heroes on each side and acts of stirring self-sacrifice, maybe in the
long run a red anthem and a green. Red and Green will become symbols of
the virtues and sacrifices of their followers, and—like national
flags—they will acquire a spiritual quality, leading some to revere a
cloth of red, others to burn that cloth in an act of ritual vengeance.
That is not a reason for abolishing the color red or the color green.
Given
this genetic narrative, should we not concede that war in defense of
the homeland is more likely than most to end in a stable compromise?
When the boundaries are secure and the intruder expelled, fighting can
stop. Hence, when central Europe was divided into nation-states at the
Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the European people breathed a great sigh
of relief. Religion, they had discovered, far outperformed nationality
when it came to the body count.
In the world as it is today, the
principal threat to national identity remains religion, and in
particular Islam, which offers to its most ardent subscribers a complete
way of life, based on submission to the will of God. Americans find it
hard to understand that a religion could offer an alternative to secular
government and not just a way of living within its bounds. The First
Amendment to the Constitution, they think, removed religion from the
political equation.
But they forget that religions do not easily tolerate their
competitors and might have to be policed from outside. That is why the
First Amendment was necessary, and it is why we are fortunate that we
define our membership in national rather than religious terms.
In
states like Iran and Saudi Arabia, founded on religious rather than
territorial obedience, freedom of conscience is a scarce and threatened
asset. We, by contrast, enjoy not merely the freedom publicly to
disagree with others about matters of faith and private life but also
the freedom to satirize solemnity and to ridicule nonsense, including
solemnity and nonsense of the religious kind. All such freedoms are
precious to us, though we are losing the habit of defending them.
On
the foundation of national attachment it has been possible to build a
kind of civic patriotism, which acknowledges institutions and laws as
shared possessions and which can extend a welcome to those who have
entered the social contract from outside. You cannot immigrate into a
tribe, a family or a faith, but you can immigrate into a country,
provided you are prepared to obey the rules that make that country into a
home. That is why the many migrants in the world today are fleeing from
countries where faith, tribe or family are the principles of cohesion
to the countries where nationality is the sole and sufficient step to
social membership.
The “clash of civilizations,” which, according
to the late political scientist Samuel Huntington, is the successor to
the Cold War is, in my view, no such thing. It is a conflict between two
forms of membership—the national, which tolerates difference, and the
religious, which does not. It is this toleration of difference that
opens the way to democracy.
Ordinary patriotism comes about because people have ways of
resolving their disputes, ways of getting together, ways of cooperating,
ways of celebrating and worshiping that seal the bond between them
without ever making that bond explicit as a doctrine. This is surely how
ordinary people live, and it is at the root of all that is best in
human society—namely, that we are attached to what goes on around us,
grow together with it, and learn the ways of peaceful association as our
ways, which are right because they are ours and because they unite us
with those who came before us and those who will replace us in our turn.
Seen
in that way, patriotic feelings are not just natural, they are
essentially legitimizing. They call upon the sources of social affection
and bestow that affection on customs that have proved their worth over
time, by enabling a community to settle its disputes and achieve
equilibrium in the changing circumstances of life.
All of this
was expressed by the French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan in a
celebrated 1882 essay, “What Is a Nation?” For Renan, a nation is not
constituted by racial or religious conformity but by a “daily
plebiscite,” expressing the collective memory of its members and their
present consent to live together. It is precisely for these reasons that
national sentiments open the way to democratic politics.
It
would be the height of folly to reject the “we” of nationality in favor
of some global alternative or some fluctuating community in cyberspace.
The task is not to surrender to globalization but to manage it, to
soften its sharp edges, so that our attachments and loyalties can still
guide us in exercising the thing that defines us, which is the
sovereignty of the people, in a place of their own.
Mr.
Scruton is a British writer and philosopher. His many books include,
most recently, “Confessions of a Heretic” and “Fools, Frauds and
Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left.”