Public Reason and Nationalism

Very short summary: This essay examines whether public reason liberalism can accommodate nationalist considerations. Against both cosmopolitan dismissals of nationalism and nationalist claims that the nation is the sole legitimate democratic body, it argues that nationalist reasons are intelligible and should not be excluded from public deliberation – but neither should they be privileged. Drawing on Pierre Manent’s distinction between nationalism as identity and as political community, it contends that the delimitation of “the public” is open to multiple considerations, with implications for European integration.

In the wake of the Enlightenment, many 19^th-century liberal thinkers viewed nationalism as a pathology to be cured by economic, cultural, and moral progress. Most of them rationalists, liberals treated nationalism as a residue of tribal instincts that would not survive the transition toward an open society. Nationalism, alongside myths and religion, would be relegated to the status of curiosities among humanity’s history of archaic beliefs. At the time, liberalism was often equated with one form or another of cosmopolitanism that disentangled morality from national ties.

The 20th century and the first quarter of the twenty-first century have proven these liberals wrong, not regarding their normative beliefs about the moral irrelevance of national identity per se (on this, the debate is still open), but rather regarding their belief that nationalism’s fate was to become a curiosity of the past. Nationalism fed two world wars in the 20th century and today drives the political success of populist movements in many Western countries – and of course justifies aggressive national and foreign policies in autocracies. Now, some may stick to the moralistic stance that cosmopolitanism is the only normatively right attitude and righteously condemn nationalism in whatever form it takes. However, I shall argue that if political morality (the morality that underlies political actions and institutions, that is in relation to the use of coercion in the organization of society) is social, then this stance is mistaken and wrong. Mistaken because it makes it impossible to understand what drives political behavior; wrong because it leads us to ignore a constitutive (social) aspect of contemporary political morality.

Though I frame this discussion within what is now largely known as “public reason liberalism,” I think the insights extend to any strand of liberal thought. This framing choice is mostly a matter of personal preference but is also motivated by the fact that the idea of public ...