essay on humanity vs patriotism

Essay on Patriotism for Students and Children

500+ words essay on patriotism.

Essay on Patriotism: Patriotism refers to the passionate love one has for their country. This virtue pushes to citizens of a country to work for their country selflessly and make it better. A truly developed country is made up of true patriots. In other words, patriotism means keeping the country’s interest first and then thinking about oneself. Patriotism can be specifically seen during times of war. Moreover, it helps in building the nation stronger. There are other significances of patriotism as well.

Significance of Patriotism

Usually, we refer to our country as our motherland. This further proves that we must have the same love for our country as we have for our mother. After all, our country is no less than a mother; it nurtures us and helps us grow. Everyone must possess the virtue of patriotism as it makes it better.

In addition, it also enhances the life quality of the citizens . It does that by making people work for the collective interest of the country. When everyone works for the betterment of the country, there would be no conflict of interest. Thus, a happier environment will prevail.

After that, peace and harmony will be maintained through patriotism. When the citizens have the spirit of brotherhood, they will support one another. Hence, it will make the country more harmonious.

In short, patriotism does have great importance in developing the country. It eliminates any selfish and harmful motives which in turn lessens corruption. Similarly, when the government becomes free of corruption , the country will develop faster.

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Great Patriots of India

India has had a fair share of patriots from the very beginning. The struggle for independence gave birth to various patriots. These patriots have made a lot of sacrifices for the county to flourish and prosper. Their names have gone down in history and are still taken with respect and admiration. Some of the greatest patriots of India were Rani Lakshmi Bai, Shaheed Bhagat Singh, and Maulana Azad.

Rani Lakshmi Bai was one of the most famous patriots of the country. Her courage and bravery are still talked about. Her name always comes up in the revolt of 1857. She revolted against the British rule and to fight for independence. She gave her life fighting on the battlefield for our country.

Shaheed Bhagat Singh is another name that is synonymous with patriotism. He was determined to free India from the clutches of the British rule. He was a part of several freedom struggles. Similarly, he also started a revolution for the same. He dedicated his life to this mission and died as a martyr for the love of his country.

Maulana Azad was a true patriot. The first education minister of India played a great role in the freedom struggle. He traveled through cities and created awareness of the injustices by the British. He united people through his activism and led India to freedom.

In conclusion, these are just a few who were patriots of the country. They lived for their country and did not hesitate before devoting their lives to it. These names are shining examples for the generations to come. We must possess patriotism and work for our motherland to see it succeed.

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Patriotism raises questions of the sort philosophers characteristically discuss: How is patriotism to be defined? How is it related to similar attitudes, such as nationalism? What is its moral standing: is it morally valuable or perhaps even mandatory, or is it rather a stance we should avoid? Yet until a few decades ago, philosophers used to show next to no interest in the subject. The article on patriotism in the Historical Dictionary of Philosophy , reviewing the use of the term from the 16 th century to our own times, gives numerous references, but they are mostly to authors who were not philosophers. Moreover, of the few well known philosophers cited, only one, J. G. Fichte, gave the subject more than a passing reference – and most of what Fichte had to say actually pertains to nationalism, rather than patriotism (see Busch and Dierse 1989).

This changed in the 1980s. The change was due, in part, to the revival of communitarianism, which came in response to the individualistic, liberal political and moral philosophy epitomized by John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1971); but it was also due to the resurgence of nationalism in several parts of the world. The beginning of this change was marked by Andrew Oldenquist’s account of morality as a matter of various loyalties, rather than abstract principles and ideals (Oldenquist 1982), and Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument that patriotism is a central moral virtue (MacIntyre 1984). Largely in response to MacIntyre, some philosophers have defended constrained or deflated versions of patriotism (Baron 1989, Nathanson 1989, Primoratz 2002). Others have argued against patriotism of any sort (Gomberg 1990, McCabe 1997, Keller 2005). There is now a lively philosophical debate about the moral credentials of patriotism that shows no signs of abating. A parallel discussion in political philosophy concerns the kind of patriotism that might provide an alternative to nationalism as the ethos of a stable, well-functioning polity.

1.1 What is patriotism?

1.2 patriotism and nationalism, 2.1 patriotism and the ethics of belief, 2.2 the moral standing of patriotism, 3. the political import of patriotism, other internet resources, related entries, 1. conceptual issues.

The standard dictionary definition reads “love of one’s country.” This captures the core meaning of the term in ordinary use; but it might well be thought too thin and in need of fleshing out. In the first philosophical book-length study of the subject, Stephen Nathanson (1993, 34–35) defines patriotism as involving:

Special affection for one’s own country
A sense of personal identification with the country
Special concern for the well-being of the country
Willingness to sacrifice to promote the country’s good

There is little to cavil about here. There is no great difference between special affection and love, and Nathanson himself uses the terms interchangeably. Although love (or special affection) is usually given expression in special concern for its object, that is not necessary. But a person whose love for her country was not expressed in any special concern for it would scarcely be considered a patriot. Therefore the definition needs to include such concern. Once that is included, however, a willingness to make sacrifices for one’s country is implied, and need not be added as a separate component. Identification with the country, too, might be thought implied in the phrase “one’s country.” But the phrase is extremely vague, and allows for a country to be called “one’s own” in an extremely thin, formal sense too. It seems that if one is to be a patriot of a country, the country must be his in some significant sense; and that may be best captured by speaking of one’s identification with it. Such identification is expressed in vicarious feelings: in pride of one’s country’s merits and achievements, and in shame for its lapses or crimes (when these are acknowledged, rather than denied).

Accordingly, patriotism can be defined as love of one’s country, identification with it, and special concern for its well-being and that of compatriots.

This is only a definition. A fuller account of patriotism is beyond the scope of this article. Such an account would say something about the patriot’s beliefs about the merits of his country, his need to belong to a group and be a part of a more encompassing narrative, to be related to a past and a future that transcend the narrow confines of an individual’s life and its mundane concerns, as well as social and political conditions that affect the ebb and flow of patriotism, its political and cultural influence, and more.

Discussions of both patriotism and nationalism are often marred by lack of clarity due to the failure to distinguish the two. Many authors use the two terms interchangeably. Among those who do not, quite a few have made the distinction in ways that are not very helpful. In the 19 th century, Lord Acton contrasted “nationality” and patriotism as affection and instinct vs. a moral relation. Nationality is “our connection with the race” that is “merely natural or physical,” while patriotism is the awareness of our moral duties to the political community (Acton 1972, 163). In the 20 th century, Elie Kedourie did the opposite, presenting nationalism as a full-fledged philosophical and political doctrine about nations as basic units of humanity within which the individual can find freedom and fulfilment, and patriotism as mere sentiment of affection for one’s country (Kedourie 1985, 73–74).

George Orwell contrasted the two in terms of aggressive vs. defensive attitudes. Nationalism is about power: its adherent wants to acquire as much power and prestige as possible for his nation, in which he submerges his individuality. While nationalism is accordingly aggressive, patriotism is defensive: it is a devotion to a particular place and a way of life one thinks best, but has no wish to impose on others (Orwell 1968, 362). This way of distinguishing the two attitudes comes close to an approach popular among politicians and widespread in everyday discourse that indicates a double standard of the form “us vs. them.” Country and nation are first run together, and then patriotism and nationalism are distinguished in terms of the strength of the love and special concern one feels for it, the degree of one’s identification with it. When these are exhibited in a reasonable degree and without ill thoughts about others and hostile actions towards them, that is patriotism; when they become unbridled and cause one to think ill of others and act badly towards them, that is nationalism. Conveniently enough, it usually turns out that we are patriots, while they are nationalists (see Billig 1995, 55–59).

There is yet another way of distinguishing patriotism and nationalism – one that is quite simple and begs no moral questions. We can put aside the political sense of “nation” that makes it identical with “country,” “state,” or “polity,” and the political or civic type of nationalism related to it. We need concern ourselves only with the other, ethnic or cultural sense of “nation,” and focus on ethnic or cultural nationalism. In order to do so, we do not have to spell out the relevant understanding of “nation”; it is enough to characterize it in terms of common ancestry, history, and a set of cultural traits. Both patriotism and nationalism involve love of, identification with, and special concern for a certain entity. In the case of patriotism, that entity is one’s patria , one’s country; in the case of nationalism, that entity is one’s natio , one’s nation (in the ethnic/cultural sense of the term). Thus patriotism and nationalism are understood as the same type of set of beliefs and attitudes, and distinguished in terms of their objects, rather than the strength of those beliefs and attitudes, or as sentiment vs. theory.

To be sure, there is much overlap between country and nation, and therefore between patriotism and nationalism; thus much that applies to one will also apply to the other. But when a country is not ethnically homogeneous, or when a nation lacks a country of its own, the two may part ways.

2. Normative issues

Patriotism has had a fair number of critics. The harshest among them have judged it deeply flawed in every important respect. In the 19 th century, Russian novelist and thinker Leo Tolstoy found patriotism both stupid and immoral. It is stupid because every patriot holds his own country to be the best of all whereas, obviously, only one country can qualify. It is immoral because it enjoins us to promote our country’s interests at the expense of all other countries and by any means, including war, and is thus at odds with the most basic rule of morality, which tells us not to do to others what we would not want them to do to us (Tolstoy 1987, 97). Recently, Tolstoy’s critique has been seconded by American political theorist George Kateb, who argues that patriotism is “a mistake twice over: it is typically a grave moral error and its source is typically a state of mental confusion” (Kateb 2000, 901). Patriotism is most importantly expressed in a readiness to die and to kill for one’s country. But a country “is not a discernible collection of discernible individuals”; it is rather “an abstraction … a compound of a few actual and many imaginary ingredients.” Specifically, in addition to being a delimited territory, “it is also constructed out of transmitted memories true and false; a history usually mostly falsely sanitized or falsely heroized; a sense of kinship of a largely invented purity; and social ties that are largely invisible or impersonal, indeed abstract …” Therefore patriotism is “a readiness to die and to kill for an abstraction … for what is largely a figment of the imagination” (907).

Some of these objections can easily be countered. Even if full-fledged patriotism does involve a belief in one’s country’s merits, it need not involve the belief that one’s country is better than all others. And the fact that a country is not a collection of “discernible individuals” and that the social ties among compatriots are “largely invisible or impersonal,” rather than palpable and face-to-face, does not show that it is unreal or imaginary. As Benedict Anderson, who coined the term “imagined community,” points out, “all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact … are imagined.” “Imagined community” is not the opposite of “real community,” but rather of community whose members have face-to-face relations (Anderson 1991, 6).

However, there is another, more plausible line of criticism of patriotism focusing on its intellectual, rather than moral credentials. Moreover, Tolstoy’s and Kateb’s arguments questioning the moral legitimacy of patriotic partiality and those highlighting the connection of patriotism with international tensions and war cannot be so easily refuted.

When asked “why do you love your country?” or “why are you loyal to it?”, a patriot is likely to take the question to mean “what is so good about your country that you should love it, or be loyal to it?” and then adduce what she believes to be its virtues and achievements. This suggests that patriotism can be judged from the standpoint of ethics of belief – a set of norms for evaluating our beliefs and other doxastic states. Simon Keller has examined patriotism from this point of view, and found it wanting.

Keller argues that whereas one’s love of and loyalty to a family member or a friend may coexist with a low estimate of the person’s qualities, patriotism involves endorsement of one’s country. If the patriot is to endorse her country, she must consider her beliefs about the country’s virtues and achievements to be based on some objectively valid standards of value and an unbiased examination of the country’s past and present record that leads to the conclusion that it lives up to those standards. However, the patriot’s loyalty is not focused on her country simply because it instantiates a set of virtues a country can have. If that were the case, and if a neighboring country turned out to have such virtues to an even higher degree, the patriot’s loyalty would be redirected accordingly. She is loyal to her country because that country, and only that country, is her country; hers is a loyalty “in the first instance.” Thus the patriot is motivated to think of the patria as blessed by all manner of virtues and achievements whether the evidence, interpreted objectively, warrants that or not. Accordingly, she forms beliefs about her country in ways different from the ways in which she forms beliefs about other countries. Moreover, she cannot admit this motivation while at the same time remaining a patriot. This leads her to hide from herself the true source of some of the beliefs involved. This is bad faith. Bad faith is bad; so is patriotism, as well as every identity, individual or collective, constituted, in part, by patriotic loyalty. This, in Keller’s view, amounts to “a clear presumptive case against patriotism’s being a virtue and for its being a vice” (Keller 2005, 587–88).

This portrayal does seem accurate as far as much patriotism as we know it is concerned. Yet Keller may be overstating his case as one against patriotism as such. When queried about one’s loyalty to one’s country, couldn’t one say: “This is my country, my home; I need no further reason to be loyal to it and show special concern for its well-being”? This might not be a very satisfactory answer; we might agree with J.B. Zimmermann that “the love for one’s country … is in many cases no more than the love of an ass for its stall” (quoted in Nathanson 1993, 3). But however egocentric, irrational, asinine, surely it qualifies as patriotism. (In a later statement of his argument (2007a, 80–81), Keller seems to be of two minds on this point.)

Many think of patriotism as a natural and appropriate expression of attachment to the country in which we were born and raised and of gratitude for the benefits of life on its soil, among its people, and under its laws. They also consider patriotism an important component of our identity. Some go further, and argue that patriotism is morally mandatory, or even that it is the core of morality. There is, however, a major tradition in moral philosophy which understands morality as essentially universal and impartial, and seems to rule out local, partial attachment and loyalty. Adherents of this tradition tend to think of patriotism as a type of group egoism , a morally arbitrary partiality to “one’s own” at odds with demands of universal justice and common human solidarity. A related objection is that patriotism is exclusive in invidious and dangerous ways. Love of one’s own country characteristically goes together with dislike of and hostility towards other countries. It tends to encourage militarism, and makes for international tension and conflict. Tolstoy’s and Kateb’s moral objections to patriotism, mentioned above, are in line with this position.

What, then, is the moral status of patriotism? The question does not admit of a single answer. We can distinguish five types of patriotism, and each needs to be judged on its merits.

2.2.1 Extreme patriotism

Machiavelli is famous (or infamous) for teaching princes that, human nature being what it is, if they propose to do their job well, they must be willing to break their promises, to deceive, dissemble, and use violence, sometimes in cruel ways and on a large scale, when political circumstances require such actions. This may or may not be relevant to the question of patriotism, depending on just what we take the point of princely rule to be. A less well known part of Machiavelli’s teaching, however, is relevant; for he sought to impart the same lesson to politicians and common citizens of a republic. “When the safety of one’s country wholly depends on the decision to be taken, no attention should be paid either to justice or injustice, to kindness or cruelty, or to its being praiseworthy or ignominious” (Machiavelli 1998 [1518], 515). The paramount interests of one’s country override any moral consideration with which they might come into conflict.

This type of patriotism is extreme, but by no means extremely rare. It is adopted much too often by politicians and common citizens alike when their country’s major interests are thought to be at stake. It is encapsulated in the saying “our country, right or wrong,” at least on the simplest and most obvious construal of this saying. Not much needs to be said about the moral standing of this type of patriotism, as it amounts to rejection of morality. “Our country, right or wrong ” cannot be right.

2.2.2 Robust patriotism

In his seminal lecture “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” Alasdair MacIntyre contrasts patriotism with the liberal commitment to certain universal values and principles. On the liberal view, where and from whom I learn the principles of morality is just as irrelevant to their contents and to my commitment to them, as where and from whom I learn the principles of mathematics is irrelevant to their contents and my adherence to them. For MacIntyre, where and from whom I learn my morality is of decisive importance both for my commitment to it and for its very contents.

There is no morality as such; morality is always the morality of a particular community. One can understand and internalize moral rules only “in and through the way of life of [one’s] community” (MacIntyre 1984, 8). Moral rules are justified in terms of certain goods they express and promote; but these goods, too, are always given as part and parcel of the way of life of a community. The individual becomes a moral agent only when informed as such by his community. He also lives and flourishes as one because he is sustained in his moral life by his community. “… I can only be a moral agent because we are moral agents … Detached from my community, I will be apt to lose my hold upon all genuine standards of judgment” (10–11).

If I can live and flourish as a moral agent only as a member of my community, while playing the role this membership involves, then my very identity is bound up with that of my community, its history, traditions, institutions, and aspirations. Therefore,

if I do not understand the enacted narrative of my own individual life as embedded in the history of my country … I will not understand what I owe to others or what others owe to me, for what crimes of my nation I am bound to make reparation, for what benefits to my nation I am bound to feel gratitude. Understanding what is owed to and by me and understanding the history of the communities of which I am a part is … one and the same thing. (16)

This leads MacIntyre to conclude that patriotism is not to be contrasted with morality; it is rather a central moral virtue, indeed the bedrock of morality.

The object of patriotic loyalty is one’s country and polity; but this does not mean that a patriot will support any government in power in her country. Here MacIntyre’s position is different from a popular version of patriotism that tends to conflate the two. The patriot’s allegiance, he says, is not to the status quo of power, but rather to “the nation conceived as a project ” (13). One can oppose one’s country’s government in the name of the country’s true character, history, and aspirations. To that extent, this type of patriotism is critical and rational. But at least some practices and projects of the patria , some of its “large interests,” must be beyond questioning and critical scrutiny. To that extent, MacIntyre grants that what he considers true patriotism is “a fundamentally irrational attitude” (13). But a more rational and therefore more constrained loyalty would be “emasculated,” rather than real patriotism.

This account of patriotism is exposed to several objections. One might question the communitarian foundations of MacIntyre’s case for patriotism: his view of the moral primacy of the community over the individual. One might find fault with the step from communitarianism to patriotism:

Even if his communitarian conception of morality were correct and even if the process of moral development ensured that group loyalty would emerge as a central virtue, no conclusion would follow about the importance of patriotism. The group to which our primary loyalty would be owed would be the group from which we had obtained our moral understanding. This need not be the community as a whole or any political unit, however. It could be one’s family, one’s town, one’s religion. The nation need not be the source of morality or the primary beneficiary of our loyalty. (Nathanson 1989, 549)

Yet another objection would focus on the fundamentally irrational character of robust patriotism: its insistence that “large interests” of the patria must be beyond questioning.

MacIntyre concedes that “on occasion patriotism might require me to support and work for the success of some enterprise of my nation as crucial to its overall project … when the success of that enterprise would not be in the best interests of mankind” (14). If so, this type of patriotism would seem to involve the rejection of such basic moral notions as universal justice and common human solidarity.

Tolstoy and other critics have argued that patriotism is incompatible with these notions – that it is egoism writ large, an exclusive and ultimately aggressive concern for one’s country, and a major cause of international tensions and war. This is not a fair objection to patriotism as such. Patriotism is defined as a special concern for one’s country’s well-being, and that is not the same as an exclusive and aggressive concern for it. But the objection is pertinent, and has considerable force, when brought up against the type of patriotism advocated by MacIntyre. MacIntyre’s patriot may promote his country’s interests in a critical, and therefore non-exclusive way, over a range of issues. But when it comes to those “large interests” of his country that are beyond criticism and must be supported in an irrational way, his concern will inevitably become exclusive, and most likely aggressive too. If justice is understood in universal, rather than parochial terms, if common human solidarity counts as a weighty moral consideration, and if peace is of paramount importance and war is morally permissible only when it is just, then this kind of patriotism must be rejected.

2.2.3 Moderate patriotism

Rejecting robust patriotism does not entail adopting sweeping impartialism that acknowledges no special obligations, and allows no partiality, to “our own.” Nor does it entail adopting the more restricted, cosmopolitan position, that allows no partiality to our own country and compatriots. There is considerable middle ground between these extremes. Exploring this middle ground has led some philosophers to construct positions accommodating both the universal and the particular point of view – both the mandates of universal justice and claims of common humanity, and the concern for the patria and compatriots.

One such position is “patriotism compatible with liberal morality,” or “liberal patriotism” for short, advocated by Marcia Baron (1989). Baron argues that the conflict between impartiality and partiality is not quite as deep as it may seem. Morality allows for both types of considerations, as they pertain to different levels of moral deliberation. At one level, we are often justified in taking into account our particular commitments and attachments, including those to our country. At another level, we can and ought to reflect on such commitments and attachments from a universal, impartial point of view, to delineate their proper scope and determine their weight. We can conclude, for example, “that with respect to certain matters and within limits, it is good for an American to judge as an American, and to put American interests first” (Baron 1989, 272). In such a case, partiality and particular concerns are judged to be legitimate and indeed valuable from an impartial, universal point of view. This means that with respect to those matters and within the same limits, it is also good for a Cuban to judge as a Cuban and to put Cuban interests first, etc. Actually, this is how we think of our special obligations to, and preferences for, our family, friends, or local community; this kind of partiality is legitimate, and indeed valuable, not only for us but for anyone.

In MacIntyre’s view, the type of partiality in general, and patriotism in particular, that is at work only at one level of moral deliberation and against the background of impartiality at another, higher level, lacks content and weight. For Baron, on the other hand, MacIntyre’s strongly particularistic type of patriotism is irrational and morally hazardous. Baron also finds problematic the popular understanding of patriotism which focuses on the country’s might and its interests as determined by whatever government is in power. She emphasizes concern for the country’s cultural and moral excellence. By doing so, she argues, our patriotism will leave room for serious, even radical criticism of our country, and will not be a force for dissension and conflict in the international arena.

Another middle-of-the-road view is “moderate patriotism” propounded by Stephen Nathanson (1989, 1993). He, too, rejects the choice between MacIntyre’s robust patriotism and cosmopolitanism, and argues that impartiality required by morality allows for particular attachments and special obligations by distinguishing different levels of moral thinking. A good example is provided by the Ten Commandments, a major document of Western morality. The wording of the commandments is for the most part universal, impartial; but they also tell us “honor your father and your mother.”

The kind of patriotism defended by Nathanson and Baron is moderate in several distinct, but related respects. It is not unbridled: it does not enjoin the patriot to promote his country’s interests under any circumstances and by any means. It acknowledges the constraints morality imposes on the pursuit of our individual and collective goals. For instance, it may require the patriot to fight for his country, but only in so far as the war is, and remains, just. Adherents of both extreme and robust patriotism will consider themselves bound to fight for their country whether its cause be just or not. Extreme patriots will also fight for it in whatever way it takes to win. Whether adherents of MacIntyre’s robust patriotism, too, will do so is a moot point. If they do not, that will be because the morality of their own community places certain constraints on warfare, whether of a particularistic type (“a German officer does not execute POWs”), or by incorporating some universalistic moral precepts (“an officer does not execute POWs”).

Moderate patriotism is not exclusive. Its adherent will show special concern for his country and compatriots, but that will not prevent him from showing concern for other countries and their inhabitants. Moreover, this kind of patriotism allows for the possibility that under certain circumstances the concern for human beings in general will override the concern for one’s country and compatriots. Such patriotism is compatible with a decent degree of humanitarianism. By contrast, both extreme and robust patriotism give greater weight to the (substantial) interests of one’s country and compatriots than to those of other countries and their inhabitants whenever these interests come into conflict.

Finally, moderate patriotism is not uncritical, unconditional, or egocentric. For an adherent of this type of patriotism, it is not enough that the country is her country. She will also expect it to live up to certain standards and thereby deserve her support, devotion, and special concern for its well-being. When it fails to do so, she will withhold support. Adherents of both extreme and robust patriotism, on the other hand, love their country unconditionally, and stand by it whatever it does as long as its “safety” or its “large interests” more generally are concerned.

Baron and Nathanson have found a middle ground between sweeping cosmopolitanism that allows for no attachment and loyalty to one’s country and compatriots, and extreme or robust patriotism that rejects universal moral considerations (except those that have become part and parcel of one’s country’s morality). They have shown that the main objections usually advanced against patriotism as such apply only to its extreme or robust varieties, but not to its “liberal” or “moderate” versions. The latter type of patriotism need not conflict with impartial justice or common human solidarity. It will therefore be judged morally unobjectionable by all except some adherents of a strict type of cosmopolitanism .

However, both Baron and Nathanson fail to distinguish clearly between showing that their preferred type of patriotism is morally unobjectionable and showing that it is morally required or virtuous, and sometimes seem to be assuming that by showing the former, they are also showing the latter. Yet there is a gap between the two claims, and the latter, stronger case for moderate patriotism still needs to be made.

2.2.4 Deflated patriotism

What is the case for the claim that moderate patriotism is morally mandatory – that we have a duty of special concern for the well-being of our country and compatriots, similar to special duties to family or friends?

Gratitude is probably the most popular among the grounds adduced for patriotic duty. Echoing Socrates in Plato’s Crito (51c-51d), Maurizio Viroli writes: “… We have a moral obligation towards our country because we are indebted to it. We owe our country our life, our education, our language, and, in the most fortunate cases, our liberty. If we want to be moral persons, we must return what we have received, at least in part, by serving the common good” (Viroli 1995, 9).

Both Socrates and Viroli are exaggerating the benefits bestowed on us by our country; surely any gratitude owed for being born or brought up is owed to parents, rather than patria . But there are important benefits we have received from our country; the argument is that we are bound to show gratitude for them, and that the appropriate way to do so is to show special concern for the well-being of the country and compatriots.

One worry here is that considerations of gratitude normally arise in interpersonal relations. We also speak of gratitude to large and impersonal entities – our school, profession, or even our country – but that seems to be an abbreviated way of referring to gratitude to particular persons who have acted on behalf of these entities. A debt of gratitude is not incurred by any benefit received. If a benefit is conferred inadvertently, or advisedly but for the wrong reason (e.g. for the sake of the benefactor’s public image), gratitude will be misplaced. We owe a moral debt of gratitude (rather than the mere “thank you” of good manners) only to those who confer benefits on us deliberately and for the right reason, namely out of concern for our own good. And we cannot talk with confidence about the reasons a large and complex group or institution has for its actions.

Perhaps we can think of compatriots as an aggregate of individuals. Do we owe them a debt of gratitude for the benefits of life among them? Again, it depends on the reason for their law-abiding behavior and social cooperation generally. But there is no single reason common to all or even most of them. Some do their part without giving much thought to the reasons for doing so; others believe that doing so is, in the long run, the most prudent policy; still others act out of altruistic motives. Only the last group – surely a tiny minority – would be a proper object of our gratitude.

Moreover, gratitude is appropriate only for a benefit conferred freely, as a gift, and not as a quid pro quo . But most of the benefits we receive from our country are of the latter sort: benefits we have paid for by our own law-abiding behavior in general, and through taxation in particular.

The benefits one has received from her country might be considered relevant to the duty of patriotism in a different way: as raising the issue of fairness . One’s country is not a land inhabited by strangers to whom we owe nothing beyond what we owe to any other human being. It is rather a common enterprise that produces and distributes a wide range of benefits. These benefits are made possible by cooperation of those who live in the country, participate in the enterprise, owe and render allegiance to the polity. The rules that regulate the cooperation and determine the distribution of burdens and benefits enjoin, among other things, special concern for the well-being of compatriots which is not due to outsiders. As Richard Dagger puts it:

Compatriots take priority because we owe it to them as a matter of reciprocity. Everyone, compatriot or not, has a claim to our respect and concern … but those who join with us in cooperative enterprises have a claim to special recognition. Their cooperation enables us to enjoy the benefits of the enterprise, and fairness demands that we reciprocate. … We must accord our fellow citizens a special status, a priority over those who stand outside the special relationship constituted by the political enterprise. […] [Our fellow citizens] have a claim on us … that extends to include the notion that compatriots take priority. (Dagger 1985, 446, 443)

This argument conflates the issue of patriotism with that of political obligation , and the notion of a patriot with that of a citizen. Unlike informal cooperation among tenants in a building, for instance, cooperation on the scale of a country is regulated by a set of laws. To do one’s part within such a cooperative enterprise is just to obey the laws, to act as a citizen. Whether we have a moral duty to obey the laws of our country is one of the central issues in modern political philosophy, discussed under the heading of political obligation. One major account of political obligation is that of fairness. If successful, that account shows that we do have a moral duty to abide by the laws of our country, to act as citizens, and that this duty is one of fairness. To fail to abide by one’s country’s laws is to fail to reciprocate, to take advantage of compatriots, to act unfairly towards them. But whereas a patriot is also a citizen, a citizen is not necessarily a patriot. Patriotism involves special concern for the patria and compatriots, a concern that goes beyond what the laws obligate one to do, beyond what one does as a citizen; that is, beyond what one ought, in fairness , to do. Failing to show that concern, however, cannot be unfair – except on the question-begging assumption that, in addition to state law, cooperation on this scale is also based on, and regulated by, a moral rule enjoining special concern for the well-being of the country and compatriots. Dagger asserts that the claim our compatriots have on us “extends to include” such concern, but provides no argument in support of this extension.

Some philosophers seek to ground patriotic duty in its good consequences (see the entry on consequentialism ). The duty of special concern for the well-being of our country and compatriots, just like other duties, universal and special, is justified by the good consequences of its adoption. Special duties mediate our fundamental, universal duties and make possible their most effective discharge. They establish a division of moral labor, necessary because our capacity of doing good is limited by our resources and circumstances. Each of us can normally be of greater assistance to those who are in some way close to us than to those who are not. By attending first to “our own,” we at the same time promote the good of humanity in the best way possible.

Patriots will find this account of their love of and loyalty to their country alien to what they feel patriotism is all about. It presents the duty of special concern for the well-being of one’s country and compatriots as a device for assigning to individuals some universal duties. Patriotic duty owes its moral force to the moral force of those universal duties. But if so, then, as a proponent of this understanding of patriotism concedes, “it turns out that ‘our fellow countrymen’ are not so very special after all” (Goodin 1988, 679). They merely happen to be the beneficiaries of the most effective way of putting into practice our concern for human beings in general. The special relationship between the patriot and the patria and compatriots – the relationship of love and identification – has been dissolved.

There is also a view of patriotic duty that, in contrast to the consequentialist account, does not dissolve, but rather highlight this relationship. That is the view of patriotism as an associative duty (see the entry on special obligations , section 4). It is based on an understanding of special relationships as intrinsically valuable and involving duties of special concern for the well-being of those we are related to. Such duties are not means of creating or maintaining those relationships, but rather their part and parcel, and can only be understood, and justified, as such, just as those relationships can only be understood as involving the special duties pertaining to them (while involving much else besides). For instance, one who denies that she has an obligation of special concern for the well-being of her friend shows that she no longer perceives and treats the person concerned as a friend, that (as far as she is concerned) the friendship is gone. One who denies that people in general have a duty of special concern for the well-being of their friends shows that she does not understand what friendship is.

Andrew Mason has offered an argument for the duty of special concern for the well-being of compatriots based on the value embodied in our relationship to compatriots, that of common citizenship. By “citizenship” he does not mean mere legal status, but takes the term in a moral sense, which involves equal standing. Citizenship in this sense is an intrinsically valuable relationship, and grounds certain special duties fellow citizens have to one another. Now citizenship obviously has considerable instrumental value; but how is it valuable in itself?

Citizenship has intrinsic value because in virtue of being a citizen a person is a member of a collective body in which they enjoy equal status with its other members and are thereby provided with recognition. This collective body exercises significant control over its members’ conditions of existence (a degree of control which none of its members individually possesses). It offers them the opportunity to contribute to the cultural environment in which its laws and policies are determined, and opportunities to participate directly and indirectly in the formation of these laws and policies. (Mason 1997, 442)

Mason goes on to claim:

Part of what it is to be a citizen is to incur special obligations: these obligations give content to what it is to be committed or loyal fellow citizen and are justified by the good of the wider relationship to which they contribute. In particular, citizens have an obligation to each other to participate fully in public life and an obligation to give priority to the needs of fellow citizens. (442)

The first of these two special duties can be put aside, as it is not specific to patriotism, but rather pertains to citizenship. It is the second that is at issue. If we indeed have a duty of special concern towards compatriots, and if that is an associative duty, that is because our association with them is intrinsically valuable and bound up with this duty. The claim about the intrinsic value of our association might be thought a moot point. But even if it were conceded, one might still resist the claim concerning the alleged duty. If someone were to deny that she has a duty of special concern for the well-being of her country and compatriots, beyond what the laws of her country mandate and beyond the concern she has for humans and humanity, would she thereby cease to be a citizen (in the sense involving equal standing)? If she were to deny that citizens generally have such an obligation, would that betray lack of understanding of what citizenship (in the relevant sense) is? If she came across two strangers in a life-threatening situation and could only save one, would she have a prima facie moral duty to save the one who was a compatriot? Mason’s position commits him to answering “yes” in each case, but all three claims are implausible (Primoratz 2009).

All the main arguments for the claim that patriotism is a duty, then, are exposed to serious objections. Unless a new, more convincing case for patriotism can be made, we have no good reason to think that patriotism is a moral duty.

If not a duty, is patriotism morally valuable? Someone showing concern for the well-being of others well beyond the degree of concern for others required of all of us is considered a morally better person than the rest of us (other things equal), an example of supererogatory virtue. Patriotism is a special concern for the well-being of one’s country and compatriots, a concern beyond what we owe other people and communities. Isn’t a patriot, then, a morally better person than the rest of us (other things equal)? Isn’t patriotism a supererogatory virtue?

One standard example of such virtue is the type of concern for those in an extreme plight shown by the late Mother Theresa, or by Doctors Without Borders. But they are exemplars of moral virtue for the same reason that makes a more modest degree of concern for others a moral duty falling on all of us. The same moral value, sympathy for and assistance to people in need, grounds a certain degree of concern for others as a general moral duty and explains why a significantly higher degree of such concern is a moral ideal. This explanation, however, does not apply in the case of patriotism. Patriotism is not but another extension of the duty of concern for others; it is a special concern for my country because it is my country, for my compatriots because they are my compatriots. Unlike Mother Theresa and Doctors Without Borders, whose concern is for all destitute, sick, dying persons they can reach, the concern of the patriot is by definition selective; and the selection is performed by the word “my.” But the word “my” cannot, by itself, play the critical role in an argument showing that a certain stance is morally valuable. If it could, other types of partialism, such as tribalism, racism, or sexism, would by the same token prove morally valuable too.

If patriotism is neither a moral duty nor a supererogatory virtue, then all its moral pretensions have been deflated. It has no positive moral significance. There is nothing to be said for it, morally speaking. We all have various preferences for places and people, tend to identify with many groups, large and small, to think of them as in some sense ours, and to show a degree of special concern for their members. But however important in other respects these preferences, identifications, and concerns might be, they lack positive moral import. They are morally permissible as long as they are kept within certain limits, but morally indifferent in themselves. The same is true of patriotism (Primoratz 2002).

2.2.5 Ethical patriotism

All four types of patriotism reviewed so far seek to defend and promote what might be termed the worldly, i.e. non-moral, interests of the patria : its political stability, military power, riches, influence in the international arena, and cultural vibrancy. They differ with regard to the lengths to which these interests will be promoted: adherents of extreme and robust patriotism will ultimately go to any length, whereas those whose patriotism is moderate or deflated will respect the limits universal moral considerations set to this pursuit. Marcia Baron also calls for expanding patriotic concern for the flourishing of one’s country to include its “moral flourishing” (see 2.2.3 above).

Thus Baron’s position is half-way between the usual, worldly kind of patriotism, and what might be described as its distinctively ethical type. The latter would put aside the country’s well-being in a mundane, non-moral sense, and would focus instead on its distinctively moral well-being, its moral identity and integrity. A patriot of this sort would not express his love for the patria by seeking to husband the country’s resources and preserve its natural beauty and its historical heritage, or make it rich, powerful, culturally preeminent, or influential on the world scene. Instead, he would seek to make sure that the country lives up to moral requirements and promotes moral values, both at home and internationally. He would work for a just and humane society at home, and seek to ensure that the country acts justly beyond its borders, and shows common human solidarity towards those in need, however distant and unfamiliar. He would also be concerned with the country’s past moral record and its implications for the present. He would support projects exploring the dark chapters of the country’s history, acknowledging the wrongs perpetrated in the past and responding to them in appropriate ways, whether by offering apologies or making amends, and by making sure such wrongs are not perpetrated again.

A patriot of this, distinctively ethical type, would want to see justice done, rights respected, human solidarity at work at any time and in any place. But her patriotism would be at work in a concern that her country be guided by these moral principles and values which is more sustained and more deeply felt than her concern that these principles and values should be put into practice generally. She would consider her own moral identity as bound up with that of her country, and the moral record of the patria as hers too. Unlike a patriot of the more worldly type, she might not feel great pride in her country’s worldly merits and achievements. She would be proud of the country’s moral record, when it inspires pride. But her patriotism would be expressed, above all, in a critical approach to her country and compatriots: she would feel entitled, and indeed called, to submit them to critical moral scrutiny, and to do so qua patriot.

While we have no moral reason to be patriots of the more usual, mundane kind, we do have reason to show special concern for our own country’s moral well-being. As a rule, when someone is wronged, someone else benefits from that. When a country maintains an unjust or inhumane practice, or enacts and enforces an unjust or inhumane law or policy, at least some, and sometimes many of its citizens reap benefits from it. Sometimes such a practice, legislation or policy affects people beyond the country’s borders; in such cases, the population as a whole may benefit. The responsibility for the injustice or lack of basic human solidarity lies with those who make the decisions and those who implement them. It also lies with those who give support to such decisions and their implementation. But some responsibility in this connection may also devolve on those who have no part in the making of the decisions or in their implementation, nor even provide support, but accept the benefits such a practice, law or policy generates.

A degree of complicity may also accrue to those who have no part in designing or putting into effect immoral practices, laws or policies, do not support them or benefit from them, but do benefit in various ways from being citizens of the country. One may derive significant psychological benefit from membership in and identification with a society or polity: from the sense of belonging, support and security such membership and identification afford. If one accepts such benefits, while knowing about the immoral practices, laws or policies at issue, or having no excuse for not knowing about them, that, too, may be seen as implicating him in those wrongs. To be sure, he makes no causal contribution to those wrongdoings, has no control over their course, and does not accept benefits from them. But in accepting benefits from his association with the wrongdoers, he may be seen as underwriting those wrongs and joining the class of those properly blamed. His complicity is lesser and the blame to be laid at his door is lesser too – but he still bears some moral responsibility and deserves some moral blame on that account. He cannot say in good faith: “Those wrongs have nothing to do with me. I am in no way implicated in them.”

If this is correct, we have reason to develop and exercise a special concern for the moral identity and integrity of our country. By doing so, we will be attending to an important aspect of our own moral identity and integrity. While patriotism of the more usual, worldly kind is neither morally required nor virtuous, but at best morally permitted, ethical patriotism can, under certain fairly common circumstances, be a moral duty (Primoratz 2006).

While moral philosophers debate the standing of patriotism as an instance of the problem of reconciling universal moral considerations with particular attachments and loyalties, political theorists are primarily interested in patriotism as an ethos of the well-ordered polity and an antidote to nationalism. Since the rise of the nation-state, it has been widely held that some form of nationalism is indispensable as a pre-political basis of the unity of the state that makes for solidarity among citizens and provides them with motivation to participate in public life and make sacrifices for the common good. As Roger Scruton put it, “for a liberal state to be secure, the citizens must understand the national interest as something other than the interest of the state . Only the first can evoke in them the sacrificial spirit upon which the second depends” (Scruton 1990, 319). But in the course of the 20 th century nationalism was deeply compromised. That has led political theorists to look for alternatives. Some have argued that an emphatically political patriotism could perform the unifying function of nationalism while avoiding its perils. This “new patriotism” puts aside, or at least de-emphasizes, pre-political ties such as common ancestry, language, or culture, and enjoins love of, and loyalty to, one’s political community, its laws and institutions, and the rights and liberties they make possible.

In view of the disastrous record of national socialism, it is not surprising that German thinkers in particular should be suspicious of patriotism as long as it has not been dissociated from nationalism. As early as 1959, political theorist Dolf Sternberger called for a new understanding of the concept of fatherland. “The fatherland is the ‘republic,’ which we create for ourselves. The fatherland is the constitution, to which we give life. The fatherland is the freedom which we truly enjoy only when we ourselves promote it, make use of it, and stand guard over it” (Sternberger 1990, 12). In 1979, on the 30 th anniversary of the Federal Republic, he coined the term “constitutional patriotism” ( Verfassungspatriotismus ) to describe the loyalty to the patria understood in these terms (13–16). The term was later adopted by Jürgen Habermas in the context of a case for overcoming pre-political, i.e. national and cultural, loyalties in public life, and supplanting them with a new, postnational, purely political identity embodied in the laws and institutions of a free and democratic state. Habermas argues that this identity, expressed in and reinforced by constitutional patriotism, can provide a solid foundation for such a state, given the ethnic and cultural heterogeneity characteristic of most countries in western Europe. It can also facilitate further European integration, and provide an antidote to the “chauvinism of affluence” tempting these countries (Habermas 1990).

Constitutional patriotism is the most widely discussed, but not the sole variety of “new patriotism.” Another is “covenanted patriotism” advocated by John H. Schaar as appropriate for countries whose population is much too ethnically and culturally heterogeneous to allow for “natural patriotism.” Schaar’s paradigmatic example is the United States, whose citizens “were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the walls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea … by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments” (Schaar 1981, 291). Still another variety is the “patriotism of liberty” propounded by Maurizio Viroli, who calls for a return to what patriotism used to be before it was harnessed in the service of the nation-state and submerged in nationalism: love of the laws and institutions of one’s polity and the common liberty they make possible (Viroli 1995).

This new, emphatically political version of patriotism has been met with both sympathy and skepticism. Those sympathetic to it have been discussing the prospects of a European constitutional patriotism (see Müller 2007, 93–139). Skeptics have argued that patriotism disconnected from all pre-political attachments and identities can generate only much too thin a sense of identity and much too weak a motivation for political participation – that, thus understood, “patriotism is not enough” (Canovan 2000).

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Thanks to Simon Keller, Stephen Nathanson, and Thomas Pogge for helpful comments on a draft of this article.

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In defense of a reasonable patriotism

Subscribe to governance weekly, william a. galston william a. galston ezra k. zilkha chair and senior fellow - governance studies.

July 23, 2018

22 min read

This essay is adapted from remarks delivered by William Galston at the Estoril Political Forum on June 25, 2018. Galston was invited to deliver the forum’s Dahrendorf Memorial Lecture on the topic of “Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and Democracy.”

Introduction

In this essay, adapted from a lecture I recently delivered on the topic of “Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and Democracy,” I will defend what I term a “reasonable patriotism,” and I will argue that separate and distinct political communities are the only sites in which decent and—especially—democratic politics can be enacted.

I begin with some conceptual clarifications.

Cosmopolitanism is a creed that gives primary allegiance to the community of human beings as such, without regard to distinctions of birth, belief, or political boundaries. The antithesis of cosmopolitanism is particularism , in which one’s primary allegiance is to a group or subset of human beings with shared characteristics. There are different forms of particularism reflecting the varying objects of primary allegiance—communities of co-religionists (the Muslim ummah ), ethnicity, and shared citizenship, among others.

Patriotism denotes a special attachment to a particular political community, although not necessary to its existing form of government. Nationalism , with which patriotism is often confused, stands for a very different phenomenon—the fusion, actual or aspirational, between shared ethnicity and state sovereignty. The nation-state, then, is a community is which an ethnic group is politically dominant and sets the terms of communal life.

Nationalism, with which patriotism is often confused, stands for a very different phenomenon—the fusion, actual or aspirational, between shared ethnicity and state sovereignty.

Now to our topic. We gather today under a cloud. Throughout the West, nationalist forces—many tinged with xenophobia, ethnic prejudice, and religious bigotry—are on the rise. The recent Hungarian election featured nakedly anti-Semitic rhetoric not heard in Europe since the 1940s. Citizens are being invited to discard unifying civic principles in favor of divisive and exclusionary particularism.

It is tempting to respond by rejecting particularism root and branch and pinning our hopes on purely civic principles—to embrace, that is, what Jurgen Habermas has called “constitutional patriotism.” But matters are not, and cannot be, so simple.

The United States is often seen as the birthplace and exemplar of a civic order. You are or become an American, it is said, not because of religion or ethnicity but because you affirm, and are prepared to defend, the community’s basic principles and institutions. “All men are created equal.” “We the People.” What could be clearer?

And yet, the very document that famously holds certain truths to be self-evident begins by invoking a concept that is far from self-evident—namely, a distinct people may dissolve the political bands that have connected it to another people and to assume a “separate and equal standing” among the nations of the earth to which it is entitled by nothing less than “the laws of nature and of nature’s God.” The equality and independence of peoples is grounded in the same sources as the rights of individuals.

But what is a people, and what separates it from others? As it happens, John Jay, the least known of the three authors of the Federalist, went the farthest toward answering this question. In Federalist 2, he wrote that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general liberty and independence.”

This description of the American people was only partly true at the time. It did not apply to African Americans, not to mention Catholics and those many denizens of the colonies for whom German was the language of daily life. It is much less true today. Nonetheless, it calls for reflection.

We can read Jay to be suggesting that certain commonalities foster the identity and unity of a people and that the absence of these commonalities complicates this task. Religious differences can be divisive, especially when they are linked to controversial ideas about government, as Catholicism was until the middle of the past century and Islam is today. The absence of a shared language makes it more likely that linguistic sub-communities will think of themselves as separate peoples, as was the case throughout much of Canada’s history and remains the case in Belgium today. Conversely, participation in shared struggle can forge popular unity and foster civic equality.

It is no accident, I suggest, that the strands of universality and particularity are braided through the history of American peoplehood, as they are I suspect, for political communities throughout the West. Nor is it an accident that during periods of stress—security threats and demographic change, for example—the latent tension between these strands often reemerges. A reasonable patriotism gives particularity its due without allowing the passions of particularism to drown out the voice of broader civic principles.

There is a difference between cosmopolitanism and universalism. We speak of some principles as universal, meaning that they apply everywhere. But the enjoyment of these principles requires institutions of enforcement, most often situated within particular political communities. In this vein, the U.S. Declaration of Independence attributes certain rights to all human beings but adds immediately that securing these rights requires the establishment of government s . Note the plural: not only will there be a multiplicity of governments, but they may assume a variety of forms, all legitimate as long as they defend rights and rest on the consent of the governed.

As you can see, there is no contradiction, at least at the level of principle, between universal principles of right and patriotic attachment to particular communities. For many Americans and Europeans, in fact, their country’s willingness to defend universal principles intensifies their patriotic pride. Universality denotes the range in which our principles apply; it has nothing to do with the scope of our primary allegiance.

By contrast, there is a contradiction between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. You cannot be simultaneously a citizen of the world and of a particular country, at least in the sense that we must often choose between giving pride of place to humanity as a whole as opposed to some subset of humanity.

There is a contradiction between patriotism and cosmopolitanism. You cannot be simultaneously a citizen of the world and of a particular country, at least in the sense that we must often choose between giving pride of place to humanity as a whole as opposed to some subset of humanity.

This formulation assumes what some would contest—that the phrase “citizen of the world” has a discernible meaning. In a much-discussed speech, British Prime Minister Theresa May declared that “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” On the surface, this is obviously true, because there is no global entity to be a citizen of . But if we dig a bit deeper, the matter becomes more complicated.

For example, we can observe many kinds of cosmopolitan groups—scientists and mathematicians, for example, whose quest for truth depends on principles of evidence and reason that take no account of political boundaries. As the son of a scientist, I have vivid memories of conferences in which hundreds of colleagues (the term itself is revealing) gathered—it didn’t really matter where—to discuss their latest experiments, wherever they were conducted, on fully common ground. Similarly, I suspect we have all heard of the organization “Doctors without Borders,” which rests on the principle that neither human need nor medical responsibility respects national boundaries.

There is a form of cosmopolitanism, finally, that may be observed among some government officials—the belief that it is their duty to maximize human wellbeing, regardless of the nationality of those who stand to benefit. This global utilitarianism, defended by philosophers such as Peter Singer, shaped the thinking of some officials who successfully urged then-Prime Minister Tony Blair to throw open Britain’s immigration gates after the EU expansion of 2004, without availing himself of the extended phase-in period that the terms of accession permitted. As subsequent events showed, there is a tension between global utilitarianism and the expectation that leaders will give priority to the interests of their own citizens. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a political community in which the belief in the legitimacy of collective self-preference does not hold sway—which is not to say that most citizens attach a weight of zero to the interests of human beings beyond the borders of their community, or that they should do so. Self-preference is one thing, moral obtuseness another.

There is a distinction, on which I need not dwell at length, between liberal and populist democracy. Of late, we have heard much about a “democracy deficit” in the European Union and throughout the West. Unelected bureaucrats and experts, it is alleged, are making decisions over the head and against the will of the people. Populist democrats endorse this complaint, at least in principle, because they believe that all decisions should ultimately be subject to the people’s judgment. The referendum is the purest expression of this conception of democracy.

Liberal democracy, by contrast, distinguishes between decisions that the popular majorities should make, either directly or through their elected representatives, and issues involving rights, which should not be subject to majority will. The defense of fundamental rights and liberties is not evidence of a democracy deficit no matter how intensely popular majorities may resent it. Along with independent civil society, institutions such as constitutional courts give life to democracy, so understood. It is this conception of democracy on which I rely in the remainder of my remarks.

How patriotism can be reasonable

The philosopher Simon Keller argues at length against the proposition that patriotism is “a character trait that the ideal person would possess,” at least if one’s conception of the good or virtuous human being includes a propensity to form and act upon justified belief rather than distorted judgments and illusions. The core of Keller’s thesis is that patriotic attachment leads patriots to deny unflattering truths about their country’s conduct, hence to maintain their attachment in “bad faith.” Patriotism should yield to truth, in short, but it doesn’t.

Keller has put his finger on a dangerous tendency, one that I suspect most of us can feel within ourselves. It is often hard to acknowledge that one’s country has erred, perhaps even committed hideous crimes. Sometimes monsters masquerade as patriots and manipulate patriotic sentiments to serve their own ends.

Just as patriots can go astray, they can also acknowledge their mistakes and do their best to make reparations for them. No one ever accused Ronald Reagan of being deficient in patriotism, but he was the president who formally apologized to Japanese-Americans on behalf of the country for their unjust internment during World War II.

But just as patriots can go astray, they can also acknowledge their mistakes and do their best to make reparations for them. No one ever accused Ronald Reagan of being deficient in patriotism, but he was the president who formally apologized to Japanese-Americans on behalf of the country for their unjust internment during World War II.

In classic Aristotelian fashion, patriotism can be seen as a mean between two extremes—blinding zeal for one’s country at one end of the continuum, culpable indifference or outright hostility at the other. Or, if you prefer, we can see patriotism as a sentiment that needs principled regulation. Carl Schurz, who left Germany for the United States after the failed 1848 revolution, became a Union general during the Civil War and then a U.S. senator. Attacked on the Senate floor as too willing to criticize his adopted country, Schurz replied, “My country, right or wrong: if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be set right.” This is the voice of the reasonable patriot.

Patriotism does not mean blind fidelity, no matter what. It means, rather, caring enough about one’s country to try to correct it when it goes astray and, when that is not possible, making a difficult choice. A number of non-Jewish German patriots left their country in the 1930s because they could not stand what Hitler was doing to their Jewish fellow-citizens, did not want to be complicit, and hoped to ally themselves with external forces that might eventually bring down Hitler’s evil regime.

In sum: I can believe that my country has made serious mistakes that must be acknowledged and corrected without ceasing to be a patriot. I can believe that my country’s political institutions are evil and need wholesale replacement without ceasing to be a patriot. I can believe that other objects of regard (my conscience, or God) on occasion outrank my country without ceasing to be a patriot. The fact that zealous patriotism can have terrible consequences does not mean that reasonable and moderate patriotism does so.

The fact that zealous patriotism can have terrible consequences does not mean that reasonable and moderate patriotism does so.

Despite these arguments, it is understandable that morally serious people may continue harbor doubts about the intrinsic value of a sentiment that can yield evil. Even so, it is possible to endorse patriotism as an instrumental good—as necessary to the preservation of political communities whose existence makes the human good possible.

Another well-known philosopher, George Kateb, hesitates to take even this step. Patriotism, he argues, is an intellectual mistake because its object, one’s country, is an “abstraction”—that is, a “figment of the imagination.” Patriotism is a moral mistake because it requires (and tends to create) enemies, exalts a collective form of self-love, and stands opposed to the only justified morality, which is universalist. Individuals and their rights are fundamental; one’s country, he says, is at most a “temporary and contingent stopping point on the way to a federated humanity.”

Intellectuals, especially philosophers, should know better, Kateb insists. Their only ultimate commitment should be to Enlightenment-style independence of mind, not just for themselves, but as an inspiration to all. In this context, “A defense of patriotism is an attack on the Enlightenment.” From this standpoint, it is hard to see how civic virtue can be instrumentally good if the end it serves—the maintenance of one’s particular political community—is intellectually and morally dubious.

But Kateb is too honest an observer of the human condition to go that far. While the existence of multiple political communities guarantees immoral behavior, government is, he acknowledges, not just a regrettable fact but a moral necessity: “By providing security, government makes possible treating other persons morally (and for their own sake).” It would seem to follow that the beliefs and traits of character that conduce to government’s security-providing function are ipso facto instrumentally justified, as civic virtues. That is the basis on which a reasonable patriotism may be defined and defended. Yes, the individual community that makes moral conduct possible is embedded in an international system of multiple competing communities that invites, even requires, immoral behavior. But as Kateb rightly says, rather than positing and acting on a non-existent global community, “One must learn to live with the paradox.” As long as we must, there will be a place for patriotism.

Isn’t it better to spread, hence mitigate, the threat of tyranny with multiple independent states so that if some go bad, others remain to defend the cause of freedom?

One more step, and I reach the end of this strand of my argument. The existence of multiple political communities is not just a fact that moral argument must take into account; it is preferable to the only non-anarchic alternative—a single global state. Dani Rodrik, a politically astute economist, spells out this case. There are many institutional arrangements, none obviously superior to others, for carrying out essential economic, social, and political functions. But some may be better suited than others to particular local circumstances. Groups will strike varying balances between equality and opportunity, stability and dynamism, security and innovation. In the face of Joseph Schumpeter’s famous description of capitalist markets as “creative destructive,” some groups will embrace the creativity while others shrink from the destruction. All this before we reach divisions of language, history, and religion. Individual countries struggle to contain these differences without repressing them. How likely is it that a single world government could preserve itself without autocracy or worse? Isn’t it better to spread, hence mitigate, the threat of tyranny with multiple independent states so that if some go bad, others remain to defend the cause of freedom?

These questions answer themselves. If the human species best organizes and governs itself in multiple communities, and if each community requires devoted citizens to survive and thrive, then patriotism is not the way-station to the universal state. It is a permanent requirement for the realization of goods that human beings can know only in stable and decent polities.

Why impartiality is not always right

One familiar line of objection to patriotism rests on the premise that partiality is always morally suspect because it violates, or at least abridges, universal norms. By treating equals unequally for morally arbitrary reasons, goes the argument, we give too much weight to some claims and too little to others.

Critics note that patriots are devoted to a particular political order because it is their own and “not only” because it is legitimate. That’s true, but so what? My son happens to be a fine young man; I cherish him for his warm, caring heart, among many other virtues. I also cherish him above other children because he is my own. Am I committing a moral mistake? I would be if my love for my son led me to regard other children with indifference—for example, if I voted against local property taxes because he is no longer of school age. But it is perfectly possible to love one’s own without becoming morally narrow, or unreasonable, let alone irrational.

It is perfectly possible to love one’s own without becoming morally narrow, or unreasonable, let alone irrational. This is so because a certain degree of partiality is both permissible and justified.

This is so because a certain degree of partiality is both permissible and justified. Two philosophers’ examples will make my point. If I’m sunbathing on a beach and hear two young swimmers—my son and someone else—crying out for help, I should want to rescue both if I can. But suppose I can’t. Does anyone really think that I’m obligated to flip a coin to decide which one? On what theory of human existence would that be the right or obligatory thing to do?

But now the second example. As I’m walking my son to school, I see a boy in danger of drowning in the local swimming-hole, where he is unwisely playing hooky. Although I’m pretty sure I can rescue him, it will take time to pull him out, dry him off, calm him down, and return him to his parents. In the process, my son will be late for school and miss an exam he has worked hard to prepare for. Does anyone think that this harm would justify me in turning my back on the drowning boy?

These considerations apply not only to individual agents, but also to governments. There are situations in which one country can prevent a great evil in another, and do so at modest cost to itself. In such circumstances, the good that can be done for distant strangers outweighs the burden of doing it. In this vein, Bill Clinton has said that his failure to intervene against the genocide in Rwanda was the biggest mistake of his presidency.

What’s going on is obvious, I think: in ordinary moral consciousness, both partial and impartial claims have weight, the proper balance between which is determined by facts and circumstances. While it is hard (some would say impossible) to reduce this balance to rules, there is at least a shared framework—based on the urgency and importance of conflicting interests—to guide our reflections. As a rule of thumb, we can presume that because human beings tend too much toward partiality, we should be careful to give non-partial claims their due. But that doesn’t mean that they should always prevail.

Why patriotism is not so different from other loyalties

Sensing the danger of proving too much, the critics of patriotism draw back from the root-and-branch rejection of partiality. Instead, they try to drive a wedge between patriotism and other forms of attachment.

George Kateb does not offer a generalized critique of partial attachments. Instead, he argues, patriotism represents the wrong kind of partiality, because its object—one’s country—is an abstraction, and a misleading one at that. Individuals are real; countries aren’t. Individuals are worthy of special attachments in a way that countries are not. That is why he works so hard to drive a wedge between love of parents and love of country.

A country is, among other things, a place, a language (one’s “mother tongue”), a way of life, and a set of institutions through which collective decisions are made and carried out. One can love these things reasonably, and many do.

I disagree. While love of parents and of country are not the same, it does not follow that one’s country cannot be a legitimate object of affection. To be sure, a country is not a person, but it begs the question to say that love is properly directed only to persons. It abuses neither speech nor sense to say that I love my house and for that reason would feel sorrow and deprivation if disaster forced me to leave it. (I have had such an experience.) A country is, among other things, a place, a language (one’s “mother tongue”), a way of life, and a set of institutions through which collective decisions are made and carried out. One can love these things reasonably, and many do.

Consider immigrants who arrive legally in the U.S. from impoverished and violent lands. Their lives in their new country often are arduous, but they at least enjoy the protection of the laws, the opportunity to advance economically, and the right to participate in choosing their elected officials. Is it unreasonable for them to experience gratitude, affection, and the desire to perform reciprocal service for the country that has given them refuge?

Kateb is clearly right to insist that citizens don’t owe their “coming into being” to their country in the way that children owe their existence to their parents. But here again, his conclusion does not follow from his premise. Surely we can love people who are not responsible for our existence: parents love their children, husbands their wives. Besides, refugees may literally owe their continuing existence to countries that offer them sanctuary from violence. Is it less reasonable and proper to love the institutions that save our life than the individuals who give us life?

As another philosopher, Eamonn Callan, has suggested, if patriotism is love of country, then the general features of love are likely to illuminate this instance of it. Among his key points: “love can be admirable when directed to objects whose value is severely compromised and admirable then not despite but because of the compromised value.” An example of this is the love of parents for an adult child who has committed a serious crime, a bond that demonstrates the virtues of constancy and loyalty. This does not mean that parents are free to deny the reality of their child’s deeds or to make up bogus excuses for them. To do that would be to surrender both intellectual and moral integrity. But to say that parental love risks crossing the line in these ways is not to say that parents are required to turn their backs on criminals who happen to be their children, or to cease all efforts to reform them. (Nor is it to fault parents who have wrenchingly concluded that they must cut these ties.)

Conclusion: the last full measure of devotion

There is one more objection to my conception of reasonable patriotism: it is irrational to choose a life that puts you at heightened risk of dying for your country. The objector may say that there is nothing worth dying for, a proposition I reject. More often, the suggestion is that even if there are things that warrant the sacrifice of one’s life (one’s children, for example), one’s country is not in this category. Children are concrete and innocent, while countries are abstract (“imagined communities,” in Benedict Anderson’s phrase) and problematic.

Must a political community be morally unblemished to be worth killing or dying for? The United States was a deeply flawed nation when it went to war after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The servicemen on the Normandy beaches harbored none of the dulce et decorum est illusions that led young Englishmen to welcome the outbreak of the first world war; the GIs fought against pure evil in the name of a partial good. They were neither wrong nor deceived to do so, or so I believe.

Suppose one’s country is attacked and thousands of fellow-citizens die. Is everything done in response an expression of delusion? Not at all: some reactions are necessary and justified; others are excessive and illegitimate. I favored retaliation against the Taliban, which asked some Americans to kill and die for their country. Most Americans agreed, and I think we were right. Attacking those who did not attack us was—and is—another matter altogether.

As long as we have multiple communities, and as long as evil endures, citizens will face choices they would rather avoid, and patriotism will be a necessary virtue.

Lurking behind the critique of patriotism is the longing for an unattainable moral purity in politics. I take my stand with Max Weber, with the ethic of responsibility that embraces the necessary moral costs of maintaining our collective existence—all the more so when our government rests on the consent of the governed. It is only within decent political communities that citizens can hope to practice the ordinary morality we rightly cherish. As long as we have multiple communities, and as long as evil endures, citizens will face choices they would rather avoid, and patriotism will be a necessary virtue.

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8) Is patriotism more important than humanity? Justify. In your opinion, how patriotism should be inculcated among citizens? Comment.

Topic : role of family, society and educational institutions in inculcating values.

8) Is patriotism more important than humanity? Justify. In your opinion, how patriotism should be inculcated among citizens? Comment. (150 Words)

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Patriotism

Introduction, general overviews, introductions, and collections of papers.

What Is Patriotism?
Constitutional Patriotism
General: Morality
Critical Views
Cosmopolitanism
Communitarianism
Multiculturalism
Recent Political Debates

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Patriotism by Nenad Miscevic LAST REVIEWED: 13 December 2022 LAST MODIFIED: 26 November 2019 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396577-0398

Patriotism, love for or devotion to one’s country, as the dictionary definition has it, is a popular topic in the literature on political theory and philosophy. One reason for its popularity is probably the preponderance of conceptions that see it as moderate, in contrast to nationalism. As George Orwell wrote in his 1945 book Notes on Nationalism , “patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.” The other contrast, the one between attachment to one’s country (patriotism) versus attachment to one’s people and its traditions (nationalism), has also played a role. Together, they are often taken as the defining features of patriotism. Of course, the actual use of the term in political discourse is much less regimented than the one standard in theoretical writings. In the United States, “patriotism” is often used for attitude(s) that would in the theoretical literature be described as “nationalistic”; see the newspaper debates on Donald Trump’s self-alleged patriotism. The contrast is strengthened by the need of theoreticians to have a concept-term that could be used for moderate attachment to one’s country. The other problem, right around the corner, so to speak, is that love for a country is not really just love of a piece of land; normally it involves attachment to the community of its inhabitants, and this introduces “nation” into the conception of patriotism. After a brief discussion of anthologies and general overviews of the area, this article focuses on particular topics. It starts with writings dedicated to the very concept of patriotism, and to the descriptive-explanatory issues—the central one being, “What is patriotism?” Next come normative issues, focusing on the morality of patriotism; it presents moderate and more radical defenses, and then passes to the relations of patriotism to its “relatives.” This section begins with relation between patriotism and cosmopolitanism, followed by the relation between patriotism and communitarianism, and ends with the one between patriotism and multiculturalism. The article concludes with two “hot topics,” first, populism, and second, migration.

This section contains the most useful overviews and collections. Nussbaum and Cohen 2002 collects now-classical papers on patriotism, some of which are also cited in this section. Barber 2002 offers a rationale for constitutional patriotism. Canovan 1996 and Canovan 2000 problematize the status of patriotism. Primoratz 2002 is a fine anthology of papers, Oldenquist 1982 offers a typology of patriotisms, and Viroli 1995 formulates a framework of republican patriotism. Primoratz and Pavković 2016 collects recent work on patriotism, Kronenberg 2013 offers a defense of patriotism from a specific German political tradition, and Sardoč 2020 is an encyclopedic anthology of most recent papers on patriotism. Healy 2020 talks about loyalty in patriotism, and Baron and Rogers 2020 defends the view that patriotism is compatible with impartiality.

Barber, Benjamin R. “Constitutional Faith.” In For Love of Country? Debating the Limits of Patriotism . Edited by Martha Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen, 30–37. Boston: Beacon, 2002.

Notes that patriotism and nationalism should be made safe, rather than being rejected; the author argues that American tradition offers the attachment to the particular, in the form of a constitutional patriotism, as the way of gradually approaching the universal.

Baron, Marcia, and Taylor Rogers. “Patriotism and Impartiality.” In Handbook of Patriotism . Edited by Mitja Sardoč. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2020.

Patriotism is compatible with impartiality. Patriotism is not loyalty to but love of one’s country. There is no need to demand impartiality at the level of individual actions, and when applied to a higher level, one of moral principles, impartiality is compatible with moderate patriotism. Impartiality consists in treating people fairly, and this does not require that we act literally in the same way toward everybody, just that our conduct be justifiable by principles applying to everyone.

Canovan, Margaret. Nationhood and Political Theory . Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1996.

Patriotism normally means the political loyalty of citizens to the free polity they share, whereas nationalism is a matter of ethnicity and culture. This makes it very attractive. However, such a low-profile patriotism is incapable of fulfilling the statist promise: offering a kind of attachment that would ground a viable state. The tension between universalism and particularist loyalty remains, and makes patriotism unusable for its lofty function.

Canovan, Margaret. “Patriotism is Not Enough.” British Journal of Political Science 30.3 (July 2000): 413–432.

DOI: 10.1017/S000712340000017X

Recent proposals in favor of constitutional patriotism are more a rhetorical response to embarrassing historical heritage, than persuasive proposals on their own. Perhaps there is a way out, but it is not visible in the canonical texts of such patriotism. Available online for purchase or by subscription.

Healy, Mary. “Patriotism and Loyalty.” In Handbook of Patriotism . Edited by Mitja Sardoč. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2020.

Traditionally the loyalty of patriotism is directed toward one’s state; this is nowadays being challenged on several fronts, in particular by the problems caused by global migration (coexisting patriotic loyalties to country of origin and the country of work), the rejection of national borders, and the development of supranational loyalties (from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIL] to anarchists).

Kronenberg, Volker. Patriotismus in Deutschland: Perspektiven für eine weltoffene Nation . 3d ed. Wiesbaden, Germany: Springer VS, 2013.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-531-19869-9

As the title suggests (in English, Patriotism in Germany: Perspectives for a nation open to the world) the author defends patriotism, in its morally open variety, close to cosmopolitan attitudes. Such patriotism would characterize a community that is tolerant, open to the world, and enlightened.

Nathanson, Stephen. Patriotism, Morality and Peace . Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993.

A now classical work on morality of patriotism.

Nussbaum, Martha, and Joshua Cohen, eds. For Love of Country? Debating the Limits of Patriotism . Boston: Beacon, 2002.

Many chapters in this book have become classics in the patriotism debates.

Oldenquist, Andrew. “Loyalties.” Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982): 173–193.

DOI: 10.2307/2026219

There are three types of patriotism: first, impartial patriotism, appealing only to universal principles; second, sports patriotism, similarly affirming universal principles, valid for each “particular team”; and third, loyalty patriotism. The first arises from the demands of wider loyalties, the second from pressure to universalize patriotic judgements, and only the third is the real patriotism. It is similar to loyalty to one’s family. Nation is a moral community whose members are bound together by a common good that is not instrumental.

Primoratz, Igor, ed. Patriotism . Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2002.

The book brings together very useful articles on patriotism, some of them now famous as pioneering and successful works. Primoratz in his introduction notes that patriotism is often brought up as an instance of the importance of non-universalist considerations, like the moral force of local loyalties and identities. He distinguishes the value-based and egocentric reasons for patriotic special concern for one’s country; both together constitute the rationale of this concern. He then critically discusses particular contributions to the volume, and states his own preferences.

Primoratz, Igor, and Aleksandar Pavković. Patriotism: Philosophical and Political Perspectives . London and New York: Routledge, 2016.

DOI: 10.4324/9781315599724

In their introduction, the editors contrast universalism and particularism, and place patriotism within the dichotomy. In his chapter Primoratz offers a fine and detailed analysis of kinds of patriotism and the relation between it and nationalism. He distinguishes (1) extreme patriotism that allegedly trumps moral considerations that conflict with it, (2) extreme patriotism understood as the central moral virtue, (3) moderate patriotism, (4) patriotism as a morally indifferent preference, and (5) a distinctively ethical version of patriotism.

Sardoč, Mitja, ed. Handbook of Patriotism . Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2020.

A truly encyclopedic anthology of high-quality papers, presenting the present-day view of patriotism. In his preface and introduction, Mitja Sardoč stresses the centrality of patriotism in the pantheon of political ideals of our time, gives an overview of theoretical discussions, and explores the descriptive-conceptual and normative difficulties emerging from it.

Viroli, Maurizio. For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

DOI: 10.1093/0198293585.001.0001

Patriotism is the love for the republic, whereas nationalism is attachment to the spiritual and cultural unity of one’s people. The republican love, patriotism, is a charitable and generous love, and in its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. The language of republican patriotism could serve as a powerful antidote to nationalism (p. 8).

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The Ethics of Patriotism: A Debate

John Kleinig, Simon Keller, and Igor Primoratz, The Ethics of Patriotism: A Debate, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, 189pp., $34.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780470658857.

Reviewed by Jill Hernandez, University of Texas at San Antonio

Within the landscape of global terror and amidst the necessary philosophical dialogue about the ethics and scope of just war, it can be difficult to remember that many real-world people across the globe believe they have a patriotic duty to take up arms for their country. But providing a useful definition of patriotism and a moral defense of it can prove to be just as difficult.

The earlier scholarship of the interlocutors in The Ethics of Patriotism already demonstrates that they are up to the challenge, and their latest contributions offer insight into the complexities of the morally relevant considerations that frame the debate surrounding the permissibility of patriotism. John Kleinig's reputation as a scholar who deftly explains complex applied issues in security ethics positions him well to address how patriotism might be conceived as a virtue -- but one that could potentially be corrupted by the vicious. If, indeed, patriotism entails some version of loyalty, then Simon Keller -- whose interesting (and renowned) work denies that loyalty is a virtue -- sets him up as a natural critic of Kleinig's view. A middle position is given by Igor Primoratz, who has made a distinguished career of defending a version of ethical patriotism which he explains further here. Although much of the the initial essays' contents have been articulated elsewhere by the authors, in this volume they each take pains in the middle section to truly engage with the other scholars' arguments. The result is that the "Debate" promised in the title is delivered at least as a "Dialogue", which culminates in a short final section in which each author summarizes his own view, the criticisms of it offered in the other authors' initial essays, and his replies to those criticisms.

This dialogue begins with an explanation of what the authors actually agree on -- which turns out to be (surprisingly) some very important things. They all believe that patriotism conceptually must involve an agent's love for a country rather than for a people group (4). (The latter affect is identified as "nationalism" as opposed to patriotism, and throughout the authors are careful to both separate the two and also to remind the reader how difficult it really is to separate them.) Collectively, the authors agree also that if an agent is a patriot, then she favors her country over others, which they argue indicates that given "the right circumstances, the patriot will do things for her country that she would not do for other countries" (5), including performing actions to protect the country's defense, health, and prosperity. Finally, they think that being a patriot means that an agent's self-conception integrates a patriotic identification with her country in a way that impacts how others view her character (5). The patriot identifies with her country in relational terms: her country is hers, and the reciprocal obligations between country and patriot matter morally. The disagreements that emerge out of these agreements fuel the book's content and include questions about the nature and scope of patriotic actions, the moral permissibility of identifying with a country, the value of patriotism, and even whether one could be a patriot without also being a scoundrel.

Part One clearly demarcates the distinctive features of the authors' previous work and sets up the interesting dialogue function of Part Two. Kleinig's view is laid out first. He argues that, all things being equal, a country is an associative object (regardless of whether it is loved for its own sake or instrumentally, 24) that may be justified in demanding our patriotic commitment (35). When we have a dispositional attitude to behave towards an associative object with which we identify, we exhibit loyalty. And, although this loyalty is subject to corruption (and so may be exploited by a country's government towards its own morally nefarious purposes), as long as agents are aware of patriotism's potential susceptibility, they can be patriotic in a virtuous way (36). Since whether patriotism becomes a virtue or vice depends in part on whether the agent is able to spatially delineate between nationalism and patriotism and take the best bits of each (42), the moral justification of patriotism is tied to agential volition, and so not every version of patriotism is imbued with bad faith.

Keller argues differently. Patriotism rests on a particular positive picture an agent has of the country, not just on the agent's positive belief that the country conforms to some positive picture (169), with the result that patriotism is fundamentally, constitutionally flawed. Patriotism cannot function as a virtue (contra Kleinig) because it is intertwined with bad faith (164) and motivates agents to hide displeasing truths about the country to which they are patriotic or to present ugly truths about it as pleasing untruths (35). Keller worries that governments take advantage of the patriot's willingness to be deceived, and more, that the patriot's participation in institutional deception is glossed with a veneer of moral permissibility when the patriot 'spins' as true whatever evidence is at her disposal in order to maintain an image of what her country should be. (Americans who continue to justify the invasion of Iraq because they believe the evidence suggests there could have been weapons of mass destruction in Iraq would fall into this category.) Keller thinks that advocates of patriotism can only at best tell us that we cannot know if patriotism is required for a state to flourish, and if we cannot know if it is required then we need not conclude that it is. Indeed, there might be examples of countries that had success without widespread patriotic feeling (see West Germany in the late twentieth-century). But, intrepid fans of the Star Spangled Banner need not worry too much about Keller's rejection of the virtue of patriotism because although he cautions against the epistemic and moral pitfalls of patriotism, he wants to replace it with good citizenry (170).

Primoratz's middle position resides between Kleinig's contention that patriotism is not a vice and can be morally obligatory and Keller's view that patriotism is a vice that leads the agent to join in systemic deception and potential harm. His goal is to distinguish among cases in which "patriotism is morally unobjectionable and … [when] … it is morally required or virtuous" (83). He identifies the concern that agents have for a country's defense, health, and prosperity as "worldly patriotism" and the concern they have for a country to perform well in its laws and policies and to act rightly in relationships with other countries (without having the same feeling for those other countries) as "ethical patriotism" (5). Primoratz thinks that there are three main reasons to adopt ethical patriotism, or a patriotism that focuses on the country's moral record and the implementation of just and humane laws (176). First, ethical patriotism better positions agents to repair past injustices because agents are in a better position to know what laws and activities of their home country are unjust -- and patriots have a better chance of being heard by their governments when they argue against one of their government's practices (96). Second, and much stronger, ethical patriotism is morally mandatory for any citizen who tacitly benefits from a government's public policies. Finally, ethical patriotism ought to be adopted because we ought to "cultivate and exercise a special concern for the moral well-being of my country and compatriots" (98). Ultimately, Primoratz contends, the moral responsibility for a government's actions -- even if those actions are unjust -- falls on the citizenry of a country (99). If this is true, Primoratz's grounding for ethical patriotism becomes clearer: citizens ought to care and work to repair unjust action because if they do not, they are complicit in the actions of their government.

The volume provides an excellent and timely reminder as to some of the moral questions that weigh on how we identify with our country (of origin or residence), and a background knowledge of the authors' antecedent work is not required to follow the argument trajectories from the beginning. Dabblers in applied ethics will be disappointed by some obvious constraints of the book, including its diminutive size and its argumentation's correlatively thin scope. For example, the moral arguments are solely framed by either a virtue ethical or deontological background, and the authors do not really consider the question from consequentialist or intuitionist perspectives, which (to me) seem oddly excluded. (Igor Primoratz is the only author to address the possibility for a utilitarian argument, but he dismisses the potential for a successful utilitarian standpoint in two small statements: first, "Both the consequentialist argument and that of reciprocity present the patria as an association . . . . But- at least as the patriot sees it -- patria is something quite different: it is community," 90, and second, that "The special concern for the well-being of one's country and compatriots that is grounded in utility will be found much too tenuous by a patriot worth his salt. Nor is such concern part and parcel of citizenship" 73.) And, although the book need not exhaustively treat the moral issues involved in the ethics of patriotism, a utilitarian perspective is one of the most widely-represented views when it comes to justifying patriotic action. The state, for example, minimally seems to have strong utilitarian pragmatic reasons to want its citizens to be patriotic (including the need to secure stability and trust within and between nations, see Føllesdal 2000), and a number of scholars have argued for the stronger position that a citizenry ought to be patriotic for the utilitarian benefit reaped by the patriotism (Nathanson 2009).

But, there are deeper worries than its failure to connect with major moral theories. The primary difference between the writers really is not about what patriotism is or where it falls on the scope of what virtues are considered to be. Fundamentally, they disagree about the value of patriotism. Kleinig's view that loyalty to the state can be morally obligatory means that patriotism ought to have a positive moral value -- especially if it functions as a virtue. But much of the book is a morality play about the dangers that can come with attributing patriotism as a virtue. This worry conflates with the difficulty most writers on the topic have: just how can you preserve patriotism without preserving nationalism? These authors state at the beginning they just aren't talking about nationalism, but the equivocation between the concepts lurks in the background of the arguments. For example, when Primoratz responds to Keller's and Kleinig's criticism that 'ethical patriotism' really is 'collective responsibility' he replies that a "I can have a lively sense of collective responsibility in relation to many groups, large or small, but I can be an ethical patriot only when the collective is my patria " (176). While it is true that a patriot's moral obligations are to country , and so to patria , we do not mean that her moral obligations are to place . Rather, those moral obligations are to the state, as populated by people. So, the strict delineation between place and people that the authors want (20-21) is difficult to maintain when discussing what moral obligations patriots might have. If I think I have moral obligations to Texas, what I mean is that I have moral obligations to the people and, perhaps, institutions that are populated by people, within the state, and not to the land circumscribed as 'Texas'. Similarly, a patriot would have obligations to country only insofar as she has relationships within it. Interestingly, I think Primoratz would agree with me on the last point. Ethical patriotism only works if the obligations we have to rectify state policy are placed on agents because of action by a country's institution (decided upon by the people within that institution).

Finally, a main concern about the content of the book should be what it does not present -- namely, the strongest arguments against patriotism. The debate over whether patriotism is a virtue or a vice pales in comparison to the view that patriotism is morally abhorrent. (MacIntyre argued that the difference depended on whether someone viewed patriotism as merely a set of empty practical slogans or as potentially always in conflict with an impersonal moral standpoint, 1984, 6). Keller's articulation of patriotism as a vice that ought to be avoided in favor of good citizenship, for example, seems innocuous in comparison to some of the most vocal critics against patriotism. Among them, George Kateb argues that conceiving of patriotism as a vice is insufficient to prevent patriotic humans from participating in atrocities because the fact that something ought not morally be done has historically never been a good constraint on human action.

The horror is that hyperactive and inactive imagination (or moral blindness) in combination make it easy, or easier, to commit atrocities on a large scale and not feel regret or remorse, whether after victory or defeat. On every level, the participants have little or no conviction of vice (2006, 390).

Even if we as a citizenry were able to make incremental moral improvements, human nature does not change, and so "unchanged human nature … produces discontinuity in the scale of atrocious effects of deliberate state or movement policy, and could produce yet greater atrocities in the future, and even culminate in the extinction of humanity and much of nature" (387). And, for the debate within the book about the moral value of patriotism (whether extrinsic or intrinsic), comparatively, what value does patriotism have when it is grounded in loyalty to countries that facilitate "humanly inflicted and humanly endured catastrophes" and which deliberately perpetuate atrocities?

Andreas Føllesdal, "The Future Soul of Europe: Nationalism or Just Patriotism?", Journal of Peace Research , 37:4, July 2000, 503-518.

George Kateb, Patriotism and Other Mistakes , (Yale University Press), 2006.

Simon Keller, The Limits of Loyalty , (Cambridge University Press), 2007.

-- -- . "Patriotism as Bad Faith," Ethics, 115: 3, 2005, 563-592.

John Kleinig, "Patriotic Loyalty," in Patriotism: Philosophical and Political Perpsectives , Igor Primoratz and Aleksandar Pavković (editors), (Ashgate), 2008, 37-53.

Alasdair MacIntyre, Is Patriotism a Virtue? Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas, 1984.

Stephen Nathanson, "Patriotism, War, and the Limits of Permissible Partiality," The Journal of Ethics , 13:4, January 2009, 401-422.

Igor Primoratz, "Patriotism and the Value of Citizenship," Acta Analytica, 24:1, 2009, 63-67.

Igor Primoratz and Aleksandar Pavković (editors), Patriotism: Philosophical and Political Perspectives (Ashgate), 2008.

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Citizenship
George W. Bush

Patriotism versus Comopolitanism: Is your loyalty to America and Americans more important than the common humanity you share with everyone on the globe?

Listening Notes

What is patriotism? Ken proposes that it is love for your country just because it is your country. John distinguishes between good and bad patriotism. Is favoring your country above others different from favoring members of your race over others? John introduces Debra Satz, professor at Stanford. Is it right for Americans to be more concerned with poverty at home rather than abroad? Satz think it is defensible to give preference to those we know over strangers, although she says at the least we have to avoid causing harm to others. Where do our duties to strangers come from? Satz says that the cosmopolitan ideal is that all humans are morally equal.

The relationship of my government's action to me is different from my relation to other governments' actions. Am I responsible for the actions of my government even if I oppose those actions? Satz gives the example of German reparations to Jews after World War 2. Satz distinguishes between personal and civic responsibility. The primary responsibility of a state is to its own people, but if a state cannot provide for its people, should we step in and help? Can we take pride in our nationality since it was mere chance that we were born in the US? Satz thinks that our nationality involves us in a historical project.

What does it mean to be cosmopolitan? There is no worldwide city or community of which to be a member. Satz says that there is a global community in a weak sense. Why do we have a sentiment of obligation toward people we know? Satz thinks these feelings do not have a rational basis but that they are extremely important. Satz emphasizes that loyalty to a country has to be bounded by other obligations.

Amy Standen the Roving Philosophical Reporter (Seek to 04:15): Amy Standen interviews a car factory manager, an internet salesman, and an economist about “buying American.”
Ian Shoales the Sixty Second Philosopher (Seek to 37:15): Ian Shoales gives a quick biography of Diogenes the Cynic, the man who told Alexander the Great to get out of his light and was the first person in recorded history to claim to be a citizen of the world.
Conundrum (Seek to 48:00): Mary Lee from Oregon asks whether the relationship between adoptive parents and their children is any less real than that of biological parents and their children.

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The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought

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2 Nationalism and Patriotism

Stephen Backhouse (DPhil, Oxford) is Lecturer in Social and Political Theology at St Mellitus College, London. He is the author of a number of books and articles on history, politics, national identity, and theology, including Experiments in Living (2010), The Compact Guide to Christian History (2011), and Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism (2011).

Published: 03 June 2013
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This chapter, which first defines nationalism by describing its features, looks at nations, states, and nation-states, and then examines nationalism's relationship to patriotism. It then turns to the history of the nation and considers its existence as an imagined community. The narrative and liturgical nature of nationalism places it firmly in the sphere of religion. It is theology, and not race, politics, geography, or law that provides the best lens through which to critically observe nationalism. Søren Kierkegaard is one theological critic who is well placed to challenge nationalism's idolatrous and anti-social tendencies. His attack upon the self-deified establishment of Christendom contains many points of contact with theological nationalism. The chapter examines the outlines of his critique and then considers the positive contributions that a non-nationalistic, nonpatriotic account of identity can make to a Christian theology of social life.

I. Introduction

What kind of animal is nationalism? Commentators often assume that while nationalism is difficult to define, it is easy to know when you see it, that its expressions are overt and intermittent, that nations are synonymous with states, that nationalism is different from patriotism and that it is a distinct phenomenon from religion. Furthermore, at a popular level and among nationalists themselves, nationalism and national identity is thought to represent that which is long-standing and obvious—an inviolable brute fact of nature. Membership of a nation and allegiance to that nation is thus often assumed to be the bedrock upon which any account of personal identity or social participation must be constructed.

This chapter seeks to demonstrate how none of these notions are true. We will first consider the thorny issue of defining nationalism and describing its features. We will look at nations, states, and nation-states and from there examine the question of nationalism’s relationship to patriotism. Next we will turn to the history of the nation and consider its existence as an imagined community. The narrative and liturgical nature of nationalism places it firmly in the sphere of religion. It is theology, and not race, politics, geography, or law that provides the best lens through which to critically observe nationalism. A prime example of a theological critic who is well placed to challenge nationalism’s idolatrous and anti-social tendencies is Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s attack upon the self-deified establishment of Christendom contains many points of contact with theological nationalism. We will look at the outlines of his critique and then consider the positive contributions that a non-nationalistic, non-patriotic account of identity can make to a Christian theology of social life.

II. Features of Nationalism

‘Nationalism’ is notoriously difficult to define and it is therefore more useful to describe it by tracing its contours and familiar shapes. Any workable description will have to reflect the fact that ‘nationalism’ itself names a web of other notoriously difficult terms. Nationalisms are powerful ideologies that harness ideals of personal identity, history, race, and language, putting them to work in order to promote, at best, good citizenship and flourishing of a named people group, and, at worst, violent repression and extinction of other people-groups.

Whether they are explicitly violent or not, all nationalisms serve to underwrite the privileging of one particular cultural identity over and against other identities. Here it is important to recognize the pervasive nature of nationalism in a culture. Michael Billig helpfully uses the term ‘banal nationalism’ to refer to the everyday expressions of identity and affiliation, which undergird the (usually subconscious) self-understanding of members of a people-group. Instead of only paying attention to overt expressions of violent nationalism, Billig instead draws our attention to the ‘ideological habits’ which set the tone for daily life. ‘Nationalism, far from being an intermittent mood in established nations, is the endemic condition’ (Billig 1995 : 6–7). 1 Here, nationalism encompasses that which establishes a ‘sense of the common’ in a society, including religious and generational wisdom that is privileged for racial and ethnic reasons. Nationalism contributes to the narratives by which people live their lives and base their prejudices. The kinds of people one decides are potential friends, appropriate mates, or deserving recipients of public money for healing and education (to name but a few examples) are all decisions often governed by nationalistic considerations no less then the decisions about who to deport, imprison, or kill.

Primordial and Political

In the absence of total agreement about terms, sociologist Anthony Smith has proposed some helpful working formulations. Nationalism , he writes, is ‘an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of autonomy, unity and identity of a human population, some of whose members conceive it to constitute an actual or potential “nation” ’. Furthermore, nation is defined as ‘a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and memories, a mass, public culture, a single economy and common rights and duties for all members’ (Smith 1999 : 37).

With these formulations, Smith incorporates the two main forces at play in any incarnation of nationalism, namely the primordial and political (Geertz 1963 ).

We are in the sphere of the primordial when we deal with that which affirms the values of heritage, blood, culture, and the like. It is therefore important to note that nations do not arise from states whose borders have been negotiated by diplomats and drawn up on a map, but from pre-rational (or a-rational) ‘givens’ of kin, religion, language, and custom (Geertz 1963 : 109). In this way, the primordial gives life to the political. The political force describes nationalism’s drive towards civic autonomy, which in turn creates various movements towards defined borders, national independence, and the relations of national groups sitting together at the world’s table. A synthesis of the primordial and the political is evident in all forms of nationalism when they maintain that ‘the people’ must be free to pursue their own destiny. This involves fraternity, unity, the dissolving of all internal divisions, and being gathered together in a single historic territory and sharing a single public culture. In nationalism, culture and territory are determined by historic rights, heritage, and generational inheritance which together are taken to constitute ‘authentic identity’ (Hutchinson and Smith 1994 : 4). The belief in blood ties and heritage leads to, and is in turn protected by, the political drive towards boundary identification and civil autonomy.

States and Nations

The doctrine that each nation should inhabit a territory of its own brings into view the problematic relationship between states and nations . Although the terms are commonly used interchangeably, states are not nations. Indeed, most modern countries, and certainly the countries of North America and Europe, are states hosting a multitude of nations. A state is a relatively straightforward object. It is a matter of geography, borders, and legal jurisdiction. As we have seen, the nation is much more fluid. It is detrimental to the study of nationalism then, that the term nation is often employed as a substitute for a legal, geographical unit, namely the state (or, even more misleading, the ‘nation-state’). The common confusion of concepts is a problem because commentators often rightly recognized that nationalism is one of the world’s most powerful socio-political forces, but then incorrectly apply and diagnose it.

Nationalism does not demand that the individual focus his loyalty upon the state , but upon the nation . As such, nationalism is a force that often works against the state, not in service to it. The point is of relevance to so-called ‘nation-builders’ whose business is actually in the building of stable states. With few exceptions, ‘the greatest barrier to state unity has been the fact that the states each contain more than one nation, and sometimes hundreds’ (Conner 1978 : 383). One example can be seen in the efforts to institute new economic, political, and legal frameworks in post-invasion Iraq. In the face of constant fighting between Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, and other groups within that country, since 2003 the western allies are dealing with the fact that while Iraq might be lacking in the infrastructure of state , it is certainly not short of nations .

Patriotism and Nationalism

The confusion of states and nations is bound up with the ongoing conversation about the relationship between patriots and nationalists. Treatments of patriotism in political, theological, and popular thought tend to fall into three categories. As we have suggested, the first (and largest) belongs to those commentators who do not substantially differentiate between states, nations, patriotism, and nationalism.

The second school delineates patriots from nationalists (although not always states from nations). Here, those who wish to repudiate the vice of nationalism consider patriotism a virtue. Patriotism is seen as a middle way between bland apathy and excessive devotion: ‘a particular loyalty compatible with universal reasonable values’ (Vincent 2002 : 111). The category covers philosophers and theologians as well as constitutional political scientists.

One theological defence of Christian patriotism can be found in the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who lost his life as a result of his staunch opposition to Nazi nationalism. In a field of straw men, Bonhoeffer stands out as an example of thoughtful Christian patriotism. His works chart a Christian ethic that eschews nationalism and yet at the same time attempts to be recognizably patriotic. Here, patriotism is a positive force, distinct from the idolatry of nationalism. Bonhoeffer bases his distinction on the former’s love of authentic reality as opposed to the latter’s reliance on man-made and deceptive elements. Awareness and love for reality is an important concept for Bonhoeffer. ‘Reality’ is the totality of God’s creation affirmed by the incarnation. To love this reality is to love the orders of preservation and purpose that God has put in place for human flourishing. For Bonhoeffer, this includes the web of tradition, relationships, religion, and history that can best be described as one’s cultural heritage. Bonhoeffer’s patriotism then, is love for God’s order and intention for human life, and affiliation with others who share that form of life (Bonhoeffer 1955 ). It is significant that Bonhoeffer took pains to identify himself with Germany’s plight for Germany’s sake (Bonhoeffer 1973 : 135). Bonhoeffer’s private letters, journals, and books intended for publication are filled with passionate reference to the culture, inherited traditions, and land of his people. It would seem that Bonhoeffer rightly earns the sobriquet of ‘true patriot’ (Clements 1984 : 87).

Many sociologists and political writers also assume that distinguishing patriotism from nationalism is a fairly straightforward task. Elie Kedourie defines patriotism as ‘affection for one’s country, or one’s group, loyalty to its institutions, and zeal for its defence’. Kedourie claims that unlike nationalism, the sentiment of patriotism does not depend ‘on a particular anthropology, [or] assert a particular doctrine of the state or of the individual’s relation to it’ (Kedourie 1960 : 73–4). Jürgen Habermas compares the purely political loyalty of patriotic citizens with the focus on cultural ethnicity that manifests in nationalism (Habermas 1992 ). Habermas is a prime proponent of constitutional or civic patriotism defined as those movements that seek to channel nationalism’s passion and make the political institutions and constitution of the state the focus of collective loyalty (Smith 1998 : 211).

Constitutional patriotism is supposed to be an alternative to nationalism in certain key ways. First, it places emphasis on the intentional political identity of citizens within a free rational polity. This is opposed to the unwitting cultural and ethnic identity of some other kinds of nationalism. Secondly, where nationalism tends towards tighter conceptions of exclusivity, patriotism is thought to be more socially inclusive. Thirdly, patriotism is closely connected to the what of the state—its democratic form and constitutional status. Nationalism is more concerned with who wields power, and is ultimately indifferent to democracy or rule of law, as long as the ‘right’ nation runs the country. With civic patriotism, loyalty to the state is specifically set against loyalty to the nation, and it is supposed that in this way ‘patriotism saves populations from nationalism’ (Vincent 2002 : 114). Whereas nationalism is love of nation, it is hoped that patriotism, truly, is love of country.

The third school of thought acknowledges the attempt to differentiate between patriotism and nationalism but concludes in the end that patriotism is not sufficiently distinct from nationalism to offer it a viable alternative. While the intent is to rescue populations from nationalism by focusing attention on shared and supposedly neutral symbols such as constitutions and flags, the reality is that patriotism effectively operates as nationalism and derives its power from the same sources. The third school of thought shares many similarities with the first, it is simply that here the synonymy of patriotism with nationalism is a conclusion rather than an assumption.

Following Margaret Canovan ‘the notion that constitutional patriotism can provide a substitute for ties of birth and blood is incoherent’ (Canovan 2000 : 432). Patriotic language and ideas often draw from the same well as those of nationalism, despite the deliberate intention to the opposite. Commentators who wish to preserve patriotism while avoiding nationalism often unwittingly use nation language to support their cause. Bonhoeffer’s ‘true patriotism’ relies heavily on the language of land, language, and inherited tradition. Canovan points out how even Habermas constantly betrays possessive, localized language in his discussion of supposedly supra-national identity and allegiance. Kedourie thinks it straightforward that patriotism as ‘loyalty to one’s group and zeal for its defence’ is totally different from the outlook of nationalism. For him and other civic patriots, patriotism is not supposed to rely on a ‘particular anthropology’ or ‘doctrine’ of individual relations as nationalism does, and yet it is these very things that patriotic rhetoric manifestly does rely on. The reality is that patriotism, understood as allegiance to the strictly political and constitutional structures of state, still enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the nationalist ideas of particularity, sentiment, and selective memory. Furthermore, these confusions of patriotism and nationalism are inevitable, due to the foundations that patriotism and nationalism share but which many commentators do not acknowledge. Nationalism poses serious hazards for which patriotism is a well-meaning, but inadequate, solution.

Like nationalism, there is a ‘theoretical cultural homogenization’ and a ‘moral chauvinism’ implicit in patriotism (Gomberg 2002 : 106; Vincent 2002 : 23). This is because despite its language of rational/objective allegiance to laws and states, in practice the citizen is being asked to identify herself morally and emotionally with one particular form of life. Yet these laws and ethical rules that are the objects of patriotic affection are themselves deeply rooted in the collective (un)consciousness of an historical community. In other words, pledging allegiance to a flag is not simply a way to unite disparate groups around a neutral, objective symbol. It itself represents a complex web of cultural, religious, and geographical assumptions and developments.

True History?

It is often assumed, and occasionally made explicit, that patriotism names a virtue that applies to real people and concrete situations. So it is that Hegel can praise patriotism as: ‘The political disposition [which is] certainly based on truth (whereas merely subjective certainty does not originate in truth , but is only opinion) and a volition which has become habitual ’ (Hegel 1991 [1821]: §268, p. 288).

Bonhoeffer contrasts nationalism’s love of man-made concepts with patriotic allegiance to the reality of the created order. Similarly, Alasdair MacIntyre defends patriotism based on a country’s ‘true history’ over and against the ‘irrational attitude’ of pledging allegiance towards those nations which have built themselves on ‘largely fictitious’ narratives (MacIntyre 2002 : 55). Yet the assumption about the ‘truth’ of patriotism’s love, or the assumption that there can be any country whose story is not largely fictitious, begs precisely the question at hand. Following George Kateb, patriotism (love of country) is ‘a mistake’ in large part because countries are ‘best understood as an abstraction…a compound of a few actual and many imaginary ingredients’. Of course a country has a ‘rational’ place, a setting, a landscape, cities, a climate, and so on, ‘but it is also constructed out of transmitted memories true and false; a history usually mostly falsely sanitized or falsely heroized; a sense of kinship of a largely invented purity’ (Kateb 2006 : 3, 8).

Even if patriotism is not overtly focused on race or ethnicity, it is still focused on things that are the result of selective historical memory. And any act of selection involves multiple deselections of elements that do not fit the preferred patriotic picture. By telling you who you are and what you should love, patriotic narratives make overarching identity claims along similar lines to nationalism, appealing to ‘a kind of communal identity formation’ that depends, in part, on a story of people and place ‘to provide both identity and direction to the citizen-ideal’ (Coleman 1995 : 54).

American Experience

The United States of America endorses a form of civic patriotism that is, theoretically, an alternative to ‘primitive’ nationalism. Politicians and commentators routinely look to the USA as their positive example of a patriotic society that avoids demanding affiliation to a particular cultural or ethnic group in order to belong. Civic patriotism’s hypothetical appeal is to the objective aspects of the state and its ‘goods’ that all people in the country can sign up to. And yet, as Charles Taylor has noted, mere appeals to democracy, justice, equality, and constitution is too ‘thin’ even for this country that places such a high value on the above named political goods (Taylor 1992 ). Almost as soon as it was introduced, the model patriotism provided by the USA has relied on the trappings of nationalism and nation-states, including appeals to founding fathers and myths, religiously endowed symbols and ideals, and references to historical, or quasi-historical narratives with ancestral/ethnic overtones. So, for example, Benjamin Franklin expressed his resentment of German immigrants in his new America. ‘They will never adopt our language or customs,’ he wrote, ‘any more than they can acquire our complexion’ (quoted in Florina 2006 : 69). For Taylor, such a drift was inevitable. ‘Nationalism has become the most readily available motor of patriotism.’ The American Revolution was not nationalist in intent. Later, however, ‘so much did nationalism become the rule, as a basis for patriotism that the original pre-nationalist societies themselves began to understand their own patriotism in something like nationalist terms’ (Taylor 1997 : 40–1).

The collapse of patriotism back into nationalism is also borne out in recent American experience. When American sociologist Deborah Schildkraut examined conceptions of US identity in the aftermath of the 11th September 2001 attacks she found that the most popular expressions saw American identity in the light of cultural and ethnic affiliation. Schildkraut also studied numerous reports of ‘patriotically’ motivated violence and disparagement of non-white, non-Christian American citizens concluding ‘lingering ethnocultural conceptions of American identity have been awakened by the attacks’ (Schildkraut 2002 : 512). Despite the academic desire to see American patriotism as being ‘decoupled from ethnicity, separated from religion and detached even from race’ (Renshon 2001 : 258), the reality seems to be that this decoupling exists more in theory than in practice. ‘The place of race, ethnicity, and religion in determining what people think it means to be an American is still very much an active debate’ (Schildkraut 2002 : 514).

Modern Invention

We saw above how Taylor wrote of ‘original pre-nationalist societies’. The idea of a pre-nationalist society might come as a surprise to those accustomed to the assumption that nations are as ancient as humanity itself. Yet while it is true to find affinities with tribalism, feudalism, or other iterations of local organized allegiance, nationalism proper is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Nations as we know them today are an early modern invention, with their ideology and discourse only becoming prevalent in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Habermas refers to nationalism as ‘a specifically modern phenomena of cultural integration’ that emerges ‘at a time when people are at once both mobilised and isolated as individuals’ (Habermas 1992 : 3). Key dates in the growth of the idea of nationalism include: 1775 (First Partition of Poland); 1776 (American Declaration of Independence); 1784 (Herder’s cultural-linguistic historical theories in Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind ); 1789 and 1792 (the two phases of the French Revolution); and 1807 (Fichte’s Address to the German Nation [Hutchinson and Smith 1994 : 5]). The English word ‘nationalism’ has been traced back to occasional use in literature in 1798 and again in 1830, but it did not appear in lexicographies until the late nineteenth century (Conner 1978 : 384). During the Great War of 1914–18, men fought in the name of nations that their grandparents had never heard of.

Our conception of ‘the nation’ is relatively new and in constant flux, its contours continuing to develop while ever-newer forms of nationalism spring up.

Because nations are continually imagined and re-imagined, nationalism requires an ambiguous relationship to history in order to thrive. It is a constantly developing construction, not simply a legal, geographic, or biological given. ‘A nation must be an idea as well as a fact before it can become a dynamic force’ (Barker 1927 : 173).

Imagined Community

The ‘nation’ is an idea and consequently ‘nationalism’ is an act of imagination. For some, these notions are cause for righteous indignation. In her book Londonistan , the commentator Melanie Phillips quotes with derision a report from the Runnymede Trust which suggests that the ‘nation’ is an artificial construct, and that there is not a fixed conception of national identity and culture (Phillips 2006 : 111). 2 In what Phillips claims is yet another example of ‘British society trying to denude itself of its identity’ she then attacks the Arts Council for saying ‘British culture is not a single entity; we should rightly speak of British cultures’ (Phillips 2006 : 112). Is this, as Phillips and others suggest, an example of political correctness gone mad?

It would seem not. Quite apart from whatever recommendations they might make, the statements from the Runnymede Trust and the Arts Council regarding the reality of ‘nations’ and ‘cultures’ is straightforwardly true. There simply is more than one culture sheltering under the umbrella of ‘Britishness’. At the very least there are four: Welsh, Northern Irish, Scottish, and English. And each of these national identities are themselves divisible into other identifiable cultures which, incidentally, have nothing to do with race. The indigenous population of Northern Ireland share the same (Caucasian) race but they are hardly one nation. Although they are both English, a Yorkshireman is not a Cornishman. A Shetland islander enjoys a different cultural identity than that of her Scottish Highlands cousin, and so on. What is more, these national identities are not part of the apparatus of the physical world like mountains or rivers—they are the psychological/cultural productions of human beings. Following Eric Hobsbawm, ‘nations’ are sets of invented traditions comprising national symbols, mythology, and suitably tailored history (Hobsbawm 1983 : ch. 1). In other words, they are artificial constructs. It is thus that Benedict Anderson can famously say of the nation that it is an ‘imagined political community’ (Anderson 1991 : ch. 3).

The question is not whether nations are real , but rather in what way they exist. Even though they may exist only as invented constructions—kept alive by symbols, ethnic memory, myth, and common consent—it is worth emphasizing that they are still actual enough in the way they operate: ‘Nations and nationalism are real and powerful sociological phenomena, even if their reality is quite different from the tale told about them by nationalists themselves’ (Smith 1999 : 36–7). The task for commentators is to deal with nationalism for what it is. Nations are not prehistoric, natural features of human life and the contours of nationalism are not primarily structured along racial, linguistic, legalistic, or geographic lines. Indeed, if we are to think of nationalism in terms of an analogous subject at all we would go less wrong less often if we thought of it in terms of religion.

Essence. Sacrifice. Destiny. Any student of nationalism cannot help but notice the religious flavour that nationalist narratives inevitably take. Of course, many nationalisms do not attempt to hide the religious nature of their self-expression. Yet even the secular or non-religious rhetoric that accompanies some modern nationalism is, in fact, a later addition masking a foundational premiss. A common engine drives the original creation of the nation, and that engine is faith.

At nationalism’s root is an explicit attempt on behalf of European nationalism’s founding fathers to provide an alternative home for the passions that the people used to pour into the Christian Church. One of these threads can be traced back to 1789, when Abbé Emmanuel Sieyès published his pamphlet entitled ‘What is the Third Estate?’ and declared the nation to be the ground of all politics (Sieyès 1963 [1789]). Indeed, it seems that for Sieyès, the nation is more than just the ground of politics, for it is also ‘the origin of all things’ and it ‘exists before all else’, independent of ‘all forms and conditions’ (Schneider 1995 : 38). Its law is the supreme law.

Sieyès did not produce the supposed divine attributes of the nation ex nihilo , for behind them lies Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s doctrine of the sovereignty of the people. Rousseau is similarly a theologian in disguise with his volonté générale . Often understood by social historians as a political construct referring to the general will of the people, Rousseau’s volonté générale’ is, in fact, originally a theological term meaning simply the will of God. 3 In the Social Contract , Rousseau explicitly states his desire for a social order in which the nation, and not the (Roman Catholic) Church, attracts the fidelity of the people. Rousseau supports an inward and moralistic version of Christianity, which he calls a ‘religion of man’ (Rousseau 1954 [1762]: 154). Such a religion will not command the same hold over men as will his new civil religion (which, in William Cavanaugh’s phrase, is ‘the fully public cult of the nation-state’ (Cavanaugh 2009 : 114)). For Rousseau it is the people’s sovereign, and not God, who ‘is entitled to fix the tenets of a purely civil creed, or profession of faith’. Furthermore, any betrayal of these ‘articles of faith’ is to be punished by death, for such a national traitor ‘has committed the greatest of all crimes’ (Rousseau 1954 [1762]: 160). Is it any wonder that nationalisms encroach upon allegiances and functions normally attributed to Christianity? From the start, nationalism appropriated Christian concepts. In short, it is plausible to suggest that nationalism is essentially a reworked religious construct.

That the nation poses as a rival for individual’s spiritual allegiance is not lost on sociologists or theologians. In his Ethics , Bonhoeffer traces the roots of nationalism back to the revolutionary age (Bonhoeffer 1955 : 80). He too consistently notes the ‘idolatrous’ nature of nationalism. Nationalism, he concludes, is a markedly religious form of ‘western godlessness’ in which national affiliation forms part of the people’s new ‘god’ (Bonhoeffer 1955 : 82). The sociologist Carlton Hayes sees nationalism filling the religious vacuum left by collapsing support for Christianity in the west. Indeed, as a locus of faith nationalism is more successful—worship of the nation is more tangible than that of the Christian God, and the nation is quicker to exact violent retribution on its rivals than is the Christian Church (Hayes 1960 ). What humans once projected on to God, they now entrust with the nation: ‘Nationalism…substituted the nation for the deity, the citizen body for the church and the political kingdom for the kingdom of God, but in every other respect replicated the forms and qualities of traditional religions’ (Smith 1998 : 98).

III. Theological Nationalism

The logic of nationalism follows contours recognizable to Christian theology. With their special days, chants, and revered cult objects, nationalisms clearly have their own liturgies. Hobsbawm is not alone in pointing out the symbolic and ritualistic life of the citizen of the modern secular nation: ‘Indeed most of the occasions when people become conscious of citizenship…remain associated with symbols and semi-ritual practices (for instance, elections), most of which are historically novel and largely invented: flags, images, ceremonies and music’ (Hobsbawm 1983 : 12). But it is not only doxology that can be mapped on to the theology of nationalism.

From the theological underpinnings of nationalism naturally flow claims of providing authenticity and identity to individuals. This is nationalism’s doctrine of creation: it is not God but the nation that grounds our existence and gives our lives shape.

A prime component of nationalism is that it must tell the story of the essential character of the people who belong to the nation. Defining the authentic identity of ‘the people’ involves notions of unity, dissolving all internal divisions, and subsuming the needs of the individual into the group. Such unity requires a single public culture, which in turn is determined by historic right, heritage, and generational inheritance.

As a necessary condition for authentic identity, nationalist narratives advertise themselves as historically inviolable, rooted in self-evident or common-sense truths. Only certain useful aspects of history and culture are selected for the narrative, and even then they are often radically transformed. Dead languages are revived, traditions invented and fictitious pristine purities restored. This is readily apparent, for example in N. F. S. Grundtvig’s poetical and mythological project for the Norse people. 4 The same trend can also be seen in the successful reinvention of ‘the Celts’ in the service of Scottish nationalism. ‘I believe that the whole history of Scotland has been coloured by myth; and that myth, in Scotland, is never driven out by reality, or by reason’ (Trevor-Roper 2008 : 1). 5 Contrary to its self-image as an ‘inevitable’ expression or movement of ‘the people’, nationalism is in fact a product of intellectual endeavour and (re)education. Nationalism is a cultural invention, indoctrinated into a people with the aim of producing the People .

Ecclesiology

As with Christian theology, the theology of nationalism accounts for the rightful congregation of the people. The creation of authentic life leads to the meaningful aggregation of that life. The creation of the People and their story also constructs an identity for the individual within the group. The story of a nation is, for nationalism, effectively the story of a ‘group person’ created by individuals, a factor clearly seen in Ernest Renan’s influential treatise:

A great aggregate of men, with a healthy spirit and warmth of heart, creates a moral conscience which is called a nation. When this moral conscience proves its strength by sacrifices that demand abdication of the individual for the benefit of the community, it is legitimate, and it has a right to exist. (Renan 1882 : 29)

The story of national identity co-opts, and claims definitive rights over, the identity of its individuals. The collective identity of the group names the essential component of individual identity: the collective defines the individual, and not the other way around. For example, for the Axis nations ‘Japan to the Japanese [and] Germany to the Germans was something far more personal and profound than a territorial-political structure termed a state; it was an embodiment of the nation-idea and therefore an extension of the self ’ (Conner 1978 : 385). In nationalism’s doctrine the destiny of ‘the people’ takes priority over that of any one individual in that group (Smith 1998 : 99).

Within a social context, there are negative implications for personal identity when the national idea is taken to constitute not part of what goes into establishing an individual’s identity, but is instead considered to account for the whole of who a person is. Kateb refers to ‘group-sustaining fictions’ which ‘offer to help persons carry the burden of selfhood, of individual identity’. The greatest part of the burden is ‘the quest for meaningfulness, which is tantamount to receiving definition of the self’ (Kateb 2006 : 4–5). Nationalisms act as group-sustaining fictions in that they provide the what, why, and wherefore for their individual adherents. Primordial appeals to ancestral culture and heritage (such as Bismarck’s purported exhortation to the German people to ‘think with their blood’) are key elements within the construct of a nation, giving it the psychological dimension of an extended family or blood lineage when often, in fact, no such clear genetic link actually exists. These familial myths add credence to the demand that the destiny of ‘the people’ takes priority over that of any one individual in that group. Indeed, for nationalism, the sublimation of an individual into the group marks the highest point of authentic existence for that individual, in so far as each personal sacrifice contributes to the authentic identity of the whole (see Kedourie 1960 : 81).

Soteriology

Nationalism is sometimes referred to as a ‘salvation drama’ (Smith 1998 : 43). The Messianic ardour of nationalism is related to the national narrative that identifies and preserves ‘a people’ as distinct from any other ‘people’. ‘In order to attain the highest ideal of authentic existence, the main task of the nationalist must be to discover and discern that which is truly “oneself” and to purge the collective self of any trace of the “other” ’ (Smith 1998 : 44). Hence the importance of having an ‘authentic’ history, which marks out and excludes the influence of any other culture or admits of recent, opportunistic invention on behalf of the nationalist dogma. With uniqueness comes purpose. Nationalist history reconstructs and appropriates the communal past in order to become the basis of a ‘vision of collective destiny’, and in so doing, it ‘offers a kind of collective salvation drama derived from religious models and traditions’ (Smith 1998 : 90).

Nation-talk often betrays a soteriological enthusiasm that draws heavily from Judeo-Christian roots. As Max Weber notes, there is in nationalism ‘a fervour of emotional influence’ that does not have, in the main, a political-economic origin (Weber 1948 : 171). Instead, nationalism is based upon what he calls ‘sentiments of prestige’ (Weber 1948 : 173). The prestige of a nation is directly linked to the foundational idea (albeit not always explicitly addressed) of that nation’s saving mission to the world. It is thus an idea emphasizing the notion that a particular nation’s culture and spirit is set apart from other nations. Its mission provides significance to the national group and justifies sentiments of superiority, or at least the idea that the nation’s culture values are irreplaceable. The nation, with its constructed culture and selective historical memory, assumes for itself an ‘authentic identity’, uniquely distinguished and set apart from other nations, with a divinely-sanctioned role to play in the unfolding of history and the development of humanity.

Eschatology

The Messianic fervour and sense of cultural mission is here translated into a story of the grand, inevitable, future for the chosen nation. Following closely on the heels of the story of essential identity comes nationalism’s appeal to destiny . It was precisely the problems connected to the dogma of a nation’s unique purpose that prompted Amartya Sen’s concern with what he calls ‘civilizational partitioning’, that is, the tendency from some quarters to essentialize cultures into easily manageable, supposedly predictable, units. His target is ‘the odd presumption that the people of the world can be uniquely categorized according to some singular and overarching system of partitioning’ (Sen 2006 : p. xii). 6 The process of identifying the supposed ‘essence’ of a unique culture inevitably leads to speculation about that culture’s role and purpose on the world’s stage, as well as the assumption that certain nations are destined to clash. For Sen, this is a less accurate scientific prediction than it is a self-fulfilling prophecy: ‘The illusion of destiny, particularly about some singular identity or other (and their alleged implications), nurtures violence in the world through omissions as well as commissions’ (Sen 2006 : p. xiv).

Sen is sceptical about the way national culture is seen, rather arbitrarily, ‘as the central, inexorable, and entirely independent determinant’ of a society (Sen 2006 : 112). Many of the conflicts of the world are sustained through the illusion of a ‘unique and choiceless identity’ (Sen 2006 : p. xv).

Doubtless the essentialist approach is attractive for it appeals to cultural common sense while invoking the rich imagery of history. Furthermore, the appeal to ‘destiny’ appears to have profundity ‘in a way that an immediate political analysis of the “here and now”—seen as ordinary and mundane—would seem to lack’ (Sen 2006 : 43). The appeal is not merely confined to academics. It applies of course also to common beliefs and sentiments. Newspapers and politicians often talk of their nation’s destiny and its values as opposed to others with little reflection on what these values are or how they developed. And yet the reality of the make-up and construction of cultural identity is always far more fluid and complex than an essentialized version can account for. In other words, this approach is based on an ‘extraordinary descriptive crudeness and historical innocence’ (Sen 2006 : 58). Cultural generalizations are limited, and do not provide a good basis for predicting the future. ‘When a hazy perception of culture is combined with fatalism about the dominating power of culture, we are, in effect, asked to be imaginary slaves to an illusory force’ (Sen 2006 : 103).

Divinization

The theological threads of nationalism are bound together to create that in which we live and move and have our being. The speculative apotheosis of national cultures has happened and is happening still within the Christianized societies of the west. Many of these, of course, are specifically Christian forms of divinization, using Christian motifs and concepts, often appropriating incarnational language to describe the divine mission of the nation itself. Behind the welter of Christianized European nationalist parties and American Christian patriotic movements lies Hegel’s Sittlichkeit and his claim that ‘the wisest of antiquity have therefore declared that wisdom and virtue consist in living in accordance with the customs of one’s nation’ (Hegel 1979 [1807]: 214).

Hegel’s vision of social morality provides a narrative of identity that effectively confers divine legitimacy on the powers that be. If, as Hegel says, the laws of the state are the material manifestation of God’s divine design on earth, then God is woven so fundamentally into the fabric of the nation and the historical development of human cultures ‘that it may be legitimately assumed that he must prefer one set of people to another, he must, that is, be given to nationalistic fervor’ (Dooley 2000 : 15). Other nationalisms eschew overtly Christian rhetoric but, by effectively laying claim to be the source, meaning, salvation, and destiny of individuals under its aegis, they are no less absolutized for all that.

IV. Towards a Theological Critique

The mix of politics, religion, social morality, group dynamics, individual identity, and divinization of the established order that is encompassed by nationalism renders Kierkegaard a singularly suitable interlocutor. Kierkegaard’s works comprise a series of pseudonymous and eponymous books aimed at reintroducing Christianity into Christendom (Kierkegaard 1998 [1850]: 42, 123–4). His project involved close examinations of faith and knowledge, time and history, crowds and individuals, and culminated in the scathing polemics now known as the ‘attack upon Christendom’.

This critique of cultural Christianity invites dialogue with modern critics of cultural nationalism. Kierkegaard can agree with Kateb’s caution concerning group-sustaining fictions, or with Bonhoeffer, Smith, Weber (and others’), critical assessment of the pseudo-religious nature of nationalism. With Sen, Kierkegaard would be sceptical about the way national culture is seen, rather arbitrarily, ‘as the central, inexorable, and entirely independent determinant of a society’ (Sen 2006 : 112). But Kierkegaard outruns these critiques, with a positive account of identity and identity formation that goes deeper than the sense of self offered by others. A Kierkegaardian assessment of the dangers of nationalistic ‘group’ ideology and identity politics not only anticipates critical social theorists; it also incorporates a theological impetus, which speaks directly to nationalism’s pseudo-religious roots and expressions of Christianized patriotism that are alive and well (even especially) in the present age.

For Kierkegaard, the heart of the problem of post-Christian Christendom is that it fails to differentiate between quantitative information and qualitative truth: logical assent to collections of data and subscription to the sense of the common have become substituted for the demand of an individual choice of trust and love when faced with the ever-present—and potentially offensive—person of Christ. Authentic Christianity (for Kierkegaard) posits a cataclysmic decision: does the individual ground her identity in her membership of a certain civilization, abrogating all responsibility to the group, or does she orient herself before the divine as present in the God-man, with all the ethical and social consequences that follow? By contrast, Christendom takes its populations, historical maturity, and accumulation of cultural artefacts as proof of its inherent righteousness. It is not being before Christ but membership of the culture and subscription to its norms that is required for authentic existence. In other words, Kierkegaard’s attack upon Christendom is an attack upon any society that deifies itself—a self-deification of the established order that can be more succinctly described as ‘nationalism’.

The Social Individual

Kierkegaard is sometimes dismissed as individualistic bordering on misanthropic. However, while it remains appropriate to refer to Kierkegaard’s individualism, he is not for that reason atomistic or antisocial. Kierkegaard’s ‘single individual’ is inextricably intertwined with his Christological commitments and critiques of Christendom. Although he is uninterested in proving such things as the existence of God or the doctrine of the incarnation, nevertheless Kierkegaard takes them seriously. Kierkegaardian individualism assumes the priority of the divine as the ground and source of all being, and it builds from the effect of the incarnation upon human existence. As such, Kierkegaardian individualism provides an account of authentic identity that rivals commonly accepted socio-historical models. It cannot be squared with a merely socio-economic materialist view of human identity and it resists attempts to ground identity primarily in a group, class, or nation. It is precisely this theological aspect of Kierkegaard that makes him singularly well suited as a critic of nationalism. Kierkegaard’s individualism offers a route to healthy interpersonal relationships and an alternative to the idolatrous deification of the nation.

Kierkegaard’s single individual represents a repudiation of the wisdom of the crowd, in so far as the crowd is assumed to have a monopoly over the content and means of what a person can know. If a personal creator-God exists, then there is truth that lies at the heart of authentic human existence that cannot be accessed via social structures and congregations. A personal God relates to other persons therefore God cannot be related to en masse . Man is ‘a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal’ (Kierkegaard 1980 [1849]: 13). Kierkegaard’s claim is that to be a human being is to have kinship with the divine, and this kinship—what each person shares with the divine—is ‘the eternal’.

The radical egalitarianism implicit in Kierkegaard’s anthropology of what it is to be a human being again suggests how Kierkegaardian individualism is not antisocial. His stress on the equal opportunity open to all persons bypasses absolutizing social structures in the service of authentic sociality. True relations between persons can only occur when both parties in the relationship are aware of their status as persons, rather than units in an amorphous group. If identity is wrapped up entirely within the frame of reference provided by the social web, then interpersonal relations can only be based on historically contingent factors comprised of like-for-like qualities. In short, only the person who shares your set of identity markers is ‘real’ to you.

Neighbourhood Not Nationhood

Kierkegaard’s individualistic social contribution becomes especially apparent when we consider the moral implications of an individual-focused social ethic as worked out in Works of Love, an extended reflection on the biblical command to love. To this end, it is also interested in the persistent existence of the ‘other’ (who, of course, is always also an individual ‘I who is not me’). Who or what constitutes the locus of our responsibility? Is it those who share the same social matrix, the social matrix itself or a ‘person’ whose definition transcends these socialized models? In other words, the ‘who’ of who should receive your love is affected by the ‘how’ of how you think that person is primarily defined.

Kierkegaard distinguishes between the love of passionate preference ( Elskov ) and the love of neighbour ( Kjerlighed ). Passionate preference is the love that is a matter for poets, of strong feelings and that which lends itself to extremes (Kierkegaard 1995 [1847]: 45). It is the sort of affection for others that is sustained through cultural similarity and shared inclinations. Set against this is neighbour love, a distinctly Christian concept. Neighbour love stresses the duty towards others irrespective of shared interests or origins. Whereas the drift of love based on passionate preference is always towards ‘the one’, the drift of neighbour love is always towards ‘the many’ (Kierkegaard 1995 : 49).

The one who loves only according to passionate preference must necessarily reduce his field of vision—he does not allow his range to extend to the people near him, but only to people like him. Thus, it soon becomes apparent that despite its poetic expressions or patriotic sentiment, passionate love is self-love: we desire the object of our admiration to the extent that they look like us and sound like us and share our qualities. The contrast with neighbour love is stark. Love for the neighbour does not seek to make me ‘one’ with the neighbour in some abstract ‘united self’. Love for the neighbour is a relationship that respects the distinctions that exist between individuals, without pretending to collapse the difference (see Kierkegaard 1995 : 55–6).

Neighbour love has a further advantage over preferential love in that the identification of the subject to be loved is infinitely simpler. The love of preference (as with national/patriotic affiliation) needs to draw up endless distinctions and exclusions, in order to attain the purest expression of its passion. Bookshops, libraries, and chapters in Oxford Handbooks may devote much space to the subject of describing national identity and cultural allegiance. There is no corresponding space devoted to ‘neighbour’. This is because her identification is not in question. Kierkegaard remarks that when one is searching for one’s neighbour, all one needs to do is open the door and go out. ‘The very first person you meet is the neighbour, whom you shall love…There is not a single person in the whole world who is as surely and as easily recognised as the neighbour’ (Kierkegaard 1995 : 51–2).

As individuals, neighbours are real (not abstract) and their reality includes the fact that their personhood cannot be defined solely by recourse to an exhaustive inventory of cultural influences. They are in this sense objectively indefinable precisely because they are complex subjects—not simplified units defined primarily by their membership to certain groups such as nations. A social life based on selfish infatuation for the group is far less stable and useful to members of that society than one based on practical regard for others. True sociality cannot be based on affection for the compatriot, trumped up and maintained by self-serving fictions. It must be directed instead at the existing subject in the here and now. ‘Love for neighbour does not want to be sung about—it wants to be accomplished’ (Kierkegaard 1995 : 46).

V. Conclusion

What kind of animal is nationalism? A description of its features paints a picture of a phenomenon that is abstract, fluid, and imaginatively constructed. Nationalisms appeal to primordial values of kith and kin, yet nations as we know them are relatively recent inventions. Nationalisms stake a political claim for autonomy for its distinct people, yet on closer inspection it is unclear how to define ‘the people’, or whether, in fact, they can be so easily delineated along racial, legal, or geographic lines.

It is the imaginative and narrative nature of patriotism and nationalism that recommends a theological critique of these powerful social forces. And they should be critiqued. The narrative of national identity is a story that focuses ever more tightly on a few core essentials, selecting sentiments and excluding facts that do not fit its desired picture of ‘the people’. In modern societies where many nations inhabit one state, these narratives of nationalism lead their proponents inexorably towards isolation and alienation within the wider group. The story of the good patriot hardly fares better, drawing from the same unstable mix of self-selecting history, pseudo-religious ideas, and desire to adhere to an overarching destiny. To secularist proponents of nationalism and patriotism we wish to ask: don’t you see how religious this is? And to Christian defenders of nationalism and patriotism we wish to ask: don’t you see how religious this is? Casting nationalism as a primarily religious impulse is not to root it in something inviolable and ahistoric. Religions too are human constructs. The task for the theologian is to talk as excellently about the divine and the religious impulses in man as possible. Nationalism is not essentially a political movement, a legal invention, a natural feature,or a racist doctrine. It has been built from theology and it is with theology that it can best be engaged. Here Kierkegaard is offered as a fruitful guide. Not only is he the pre-eminent critic of deified establishment; he is also able to provide a positive, theological route for authentic identity that bypasses membership in the nation, country or group. Against the destabilizing and abstract nature of nationalistic fervour, Kierkegaard the individualist offers an account of social life inaccessible to the patriot in this present age.

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Nationalism.

Renaud-Philippe Garner Renaud-Philippe Garner Department of Political Science, Aarhus University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.2039
Published online: 18 May 2022

Nationalism is a set of beliefs about the nation: its origins, nature, and value. For nationalists, we are particular social animals. On the one hand, our lives are structured by a profound sense of togetherness and similarity: We share languages and memories. On the other hand, our lives are characterized by deep divisions and differences: We draw borders and contest historical narratives. For nationalism, humanity is neither a single species-wide community nor an aggregation of individuals but divided into distinct and unique nations. At the heart of nationalism are claims about our identity and needs as social animals that form the basis of a series of normative claims. To answer the question “what should I do” or “how should I live,” one must first answer the questions “who am I” and “where do I belong.” Nationalism says that our membership in a nation takes precedence and ultimately must guide our choices and actions. In terms of guiding choice and action, nationalist thought proposes a specific form of partiality. Rather than treat the interests or claims of persons and groups impartially, the nationalist demands that one favors one’s own, either as a group or as individual persons. While nationalism does not claim to be the only form of partiality, it does claim to outrank all others: Loyalty or obligations to other groups or identities are subordinated to national loyalty. Together, these claims function as a political ideology. Nationalism identifies the nation as the central form of community and elevates it to the object of supreme loyalty. This fundamental concern for the nation and its flourishing can be fragmented into narrower aims or objectives: national autonomy, national identity, and national unity. Debate on nationalism tends to divide into two clusters, one descriptive and one normative, that only make partial contact. For historians and sociologists, the questions are explanatory: What is nationalism, what is a nation, how are they related, and when and how did they emerge? Philosophers and political theorists focus on the justification of nationalism or nationalist claims: Is national loyalty defensible, what are the limits of this loyalty, how do we rank our loyalties, and does nationalism conflict with human rights?

nationalism
perennialism
civic nation
ethnic nation
liberal nationalism
globalization

Introduction: A Contested Concept

Nationalism is not a consensual idea: We might say that it is doubly contested. On the one hand, there is little consensus on what it is . Primarily, historians and sociologists have conducted descriptive research: They argue for a definition of nationalism as well as an account of its emergence, and they advance typologies of nationalism or stages of its transformation. Arguably, the central debate concerns the origins of nationalism and nations: When did they emerge and why did they do so? Modernists claim that nationalism emerged in the past few centuries and created nations: The ideology invents a new and artificial form of community. Their critics, often experts on premodern eras, either respond that nations are far older than the modernist paradigm allows or that they are transformations of older communities rather than ex nihilo creations.

These debates are not merely about dates. Behind the answer to the question “when did nationalism first emerge?” we find questions like “what is nationalism?” “what is its function?” and “which conditions made it possible or inevitable?” Even among those who agree on an approximate timeline or place for its emergence, we find a range of competing explanations on what produced nationalism: new economic conditions, political transformations, or the power of new ideas.

Nor is there any consensus on the precise relationship between nationalism and nations. For some, nations predate nationalism but are transformed by it, while for others, nationalism creates nations, and for others yet, nations are the modern transformation of prenational communities.

On the other hand, we find intense disagreement about the morality or justification of nationalism. While some scholars seem ambivalent, noting both achievements and failures, and others defend some version of it, there is no gainsaying that nationalism is the object of sustained criticism. The normative debate is further complicated by the fact that what philosophers call “nationalism” only partially overlaps with what historians and sociologists mean by it. Many philosophers and political theorists seem interested in national partiality— the idea that one can, should, or must be partial to fellow nationals—rather than an ideology that orders domestic life and the international order.

Generally, the seminal works on nationalism are explanatory accounts. In addition, to this difference in age and output, there is a question of reliance. Normative debates depend on descriptive ones. Those making normative arguments tend to draw on the descriptive research—from their conception of nationalism to the extent to which they think the nation is artificial. Consequently, this entry focuses on central descriptive and normative questions, with a longer examination of the former. It begins with a clarificatory section (“ Nationalism or Patriotism? ”) that distinguishes the two eponymous concepts and provides a “core” definition of nationalism. The section “ The Origins and Nature of Nationalism ” provides a critical survey of the central descriptive debate: How and when did nationalism emerge? This section divides into subsections: “ Modernism and Its Proponents ” as well as “ Antimodernism .” The section “ Conceptions of the Nation ” addresses the question of what kind of community the nation is through a critical discussion of the ethnic–civic distinction. Normative questions are considered in the section “ The Justification of Nationalism .” The subsection “ Liberal Nationalism and Its Defense ” distinguishes liberal nationalism from core nationalism before turning to prominent arguments made in favor of and against the former.

Nationalism or Patriotism?

While nationalism and patriotism are sometimes treated as synonymous, there are good reasons to differentiate them. First, patriotism is far older than nationalism. While modernists all believe that nationalism is recent, none contest Greek patriotism during the Medic Wars ( Kohn, 1944 ). This chronological difference depends upon a more basic one: Nationalism and patriotism belong to different categories. Typically, patriotism is viewed as a love for or loyalty to one’s community, whether an emotion or character trait ( Kedourie, 1960 ; Kleinig et al., 2015 ; MacIntyre, 1984 ; Oldenquist, 1982 ). 1 Either way, patriotism is neither an ideology nor a form of politics. Understood as an emotion or a character trait, we can grasp the futility of asking when it first appeared: We do not ask when courage was invented or which society discovered love. 2

This distinction also helps explain why the two phenomena are related and sometimes conflated. If patriotism is older and more basic, it makes sense that nationalism draws on this emotion or character trait that arises naturally within human communities. Conversely, it is unsurprising that those who cultivate love and loyalty for their community are drawn to an ideology centered on it.

Nationalism, however, cannot be reduced to sentiment or a character trait. The standard view is that it is an ideology, whatever else it might be ( Billig, 1995 ; Eriksen, 2002 ; Kedourie, 1960 ; Smith, 1991 , 1998 , 2010 ). 3 Despite a wide variety of nationalisms and nationalist thinkers, we can still identify a few core propositions that were shared by seminal thinkers as well as by nationalist movements. We can refer to this as “core” or “classical nationalism.”

Nationalism begins with a claim about the nature and order of the world: It is divided into distinct and unique nations (i). 4 Then it adds a claim about the human good: Human freedom (or flourishing) is dependent upon membership in a nation (ii). Upon these claims about the world and our nature, they add normative claims. The nation, and only the nation, is the source of political legitimacy (iii). Nations must be autonomous and express their characters (iv). Finally, national loyalty outranks all other loyalties (v) ( Kedourie, 1960 ; Smith, 1991 , 1998 , 2010 ). 5

Together, these propositions can explain a great deal of what we call nationalism. 6 For instance, the quest for authenticity depends upon (i) and (iv). If nations are not unique, then it is hard to understand why authenticity should matter. Nor does it make much sense to stress the value of self-expression is what is being expressed is banal or common. Similarly, the nationalist aim of achieving statehood largely follows from (iii) and (iv). On the one hand, if all alien rule is illegitimate, then why should a nation accept it? On the other hand, it seems plausible that the best guarantee of autonomy and self-expression is state sovereignty. Or consider how nationalism is associated with mass mobilization and self-sacrifice. This is in part a function of (v). These projects are justified by an appeal to rank-ordering; if national loyalty reigns supreme, then all other loyalties must be subordinate.

In sum, while nationalist thinkers and nationalist movements present us with additions or iterations, these five beliefs capture much of what is shared. When one speaks about the age of nationalism or its spread, one is invariably speaking about some or all of these propositions. 7

The Origins and Nature of Nationalism

Since the mid- 20th century , the origins and nature of nationalism have been fiercely debated between modernists and their critics. While the former view has emerged as the dominant paradigm, steady criticism has produced notable rival views.

Modernism developed as a rejection of previous scholarship. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries , school manuals and scholarship presented nations as ancient, even immemorial. History was taught as a multimillennia narrative of nations and their great members. For example, Germans were taught that their nation long predated unification under Otto von Bismarck. The Hermannsdenkmal— a 19th-century monument celebrating the victory of Arminius, a 1st-century warlord, over the Romans at Teutoburger Forest—embodies this belief in continuity between contemporary Germans and their alleged ancestors ( Grosby, 2005 ).

Modernism and Its Proponents

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist—but it does need some pre-existing differentiating marks to work on, even if, as indicated, these are purely negative. ( Gellner, 1964 , p. 168)

For modernists, nationalism and nations are products of modernity, even necessary features of it. They emerge, together, sometime between the English Revolution ( Greenfeld, 1992 ; Kohn, 1940 ) or Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation ( Kedourie, 1960 ). Central to modernism is the relationship between nationalism and nations: Nationalism invents nations. The latter are not organic communities. Unlike families or religious communities, they have not and cannot emerge anywhere, any time. The nation is created by nationalism, which in turn is the product of a particular set of sociohistorical circumstances.

This shared belief is also the point of departure for deep disagreement. Which features of modernity best explain the emergence of nationalism and the invention of nations? There are roughly five kinds of answers to this question: cultural, economic, political, ideological, and radical constructivism.

Modern man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or a faith, whatever he may say, but to a culture. ( Gellner, 1983 , p. 36)

Primarily associated with Ernest Gellner, the cultural view claims that modernization created nationalism, which in turn created nations, out of necessity ( Gellner, 1964 , 1973 , 1983 ). The disruption of premodern life caused by industrialization made it necessary to produce a homogeneous culture that would allow workers to communicate independently of context. To overcome fragmented local premodern cultures, one needs an overarching culture: a national culture. For this reason, a high culture is constructed and later a mass education system is devised to ensure its uniform transmission. Nationalism is a product of necessity: It constructs a new form of identity and community as a response to urban uprooting and industrialization. The dislocating effects of modernity require a refashioning of culture and identity.

People is all they have got: this is the essence of the underdevelopment dilemma itself. ( Nairn, 1977 , p. 100)

A rival view explains the origins of nationalism by appealing to another modern phenomenon: capitalism. For theorists like Tom Nairn, nationalism is a strategic response to the uneven spread of capitalism and the power that it provides ( Nairn, 1977 ). The unequal development and spread of capitalism distribute resources and power unequally: There are centers that benefited from the development of capitalism and there are poorer peripheries. Peripheral elites design an ideology that takes advantage of their only abundant resource: people. And to effectively mobilize and motivate those who do not share their class or interests, these peripheral elites must create a powerful sense of belonging. The solution is to draw on popular beliefs and practices to create a new interclass community: the nation. Thus, economic variants of modernism explain the advent of nationalism in terms of recent economic change, namely, capitalism.

On these views, nationalism is both a form of elite manipulation and transformation. The elites must construct a new sense of community to persuade the masses to endorse their priorities and projects. Yet, they must also change; they must become conversant in a language that draws on popular culture, its myths, and symbols, to mobilize this sense of interclass community.

But the clarity of focus on the nation as coterminous with the state cries out for a predominantly political explanation. ( Mann, 1995 , p. 48)

Yet another variant considers the territorial state to be the best explanation for the advent of nationalist ideology. Bluntly put, political changes are what call for a new political ideology. Nationalism emerges within the past few centuries because it is intimately linked to the modern state. The latter is not a collection of fiefdoms or local power structures but a stable administrative structure, centered in a capital, ruling over well-defined territories ( Giddens, 1985 ).

Here too modernity is cast as a disruptive force and nationalism is part and parcel of a response to it. Whatever else it disrupts, modernity destroys premodern polities and political frameworks. Instead of drawing on religious symbols or myths of descent, nationalism is the attachment to those symbols or representations of the modern state such as citizenship.

Other political variants of modernism emphasize interstate competition and the role that militarization plays ( Mann, 1986 ; Tilly, 1975 ). Still, the argument is essentially the same: Nationalism is created by modern states to help them function competitively and effectively in domestic or international affairs. Either way, it is a largely psychological phenomenon, a special esprit de corps tailor-made for the inhabitants of these new large administrative states.

Again, since a nation, ipso facto, must speak an original language, its speech must be cleansed of foreign accretions and borrowings, since the purer the language, the more natural it is, and the easier it becomes for the nation to realise itself, and to increase its freedom. ( Kedourie, 1960 , p. 67)

A fourth variant considers nationalism to be the response to the discontentment brought by modernity. Powerfully articulated by Elie Kedourie, this view presents nationalism as a civic religion, complete with a narrative of the fall, a path to redemption, and exhortations to sacrifice and purification. This creed was birthed by disillusioned marginal German intellectuals and then exported worldwide ( Kedourie, 1960 , 1971 ).

Collective humiliation and powerlessness are to be explained by national disunity, loss of identity, and autonomy. Like ancient Hebrews explaining their political subjugation in terms of their sinful ways, the nationalist blames contemporary discontentment on a failure to honor and safeguard one’s unique and distinct nation. The solution is national revival: The nation must be reunited, autonomy restored, and national identity restored to its authentic self.

Unlike other variants of modernism that see nationalism as the creation of elites seeking to secure the rising power structures or to provide the necessary social identity for the changing times, this view of nationalism as civic religion is invented by powerless members of society.

No surprise then that the search was on, so to speak, for a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together. Nothing perhaps more precipitated this search, nor made it more fruitful, than print-capitalism, which made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to other, in profoundly new ways. ( Anderson, 1983/2006 , p. 36)

Finally, there are radical constructivist accounts that emphasize the artificiality of the nation: Nationalism is a narrative and the nation is a cultural artifact. For instance, Benedict Anderson has famously argued that changes in terms of how we conceptualize time, the combination of the printing press and capitalism, as well as political change meant that we could imagine new forms of community in which large groups of people can simultaneously imagine themselves as equal members ( Anderson, 1983/2006 ).

The convergence of factors explains what is needed for the narrative to take form and succeed. Print capitalism provides both the material means and an economic incentive to help construct and sustain reading publics, united by a vernacular language. Yet, the impetus to tell this story, to imagine such communities, comes from disaffected civil servants. Here we find echoes of the ideological account: Disaffected functionaries in Latin America came to resent their careers stunted by imperial metropoles. In short, the construction of nations through the nationalist narrative is made possible by several factors: new technology, changing ideas, and a class of people motivated to reimagine their sense of belonging.

Modernism is an attractive paradigm. Undeniably, nationalism spread and came to prominence in the past few centuries. Moreover, the nation-state and the notion of popular sovereignty certainly do not appear at home in the premodern world of multinational empires and dynastic power. And its advocates are right to show that much of what has been called ancient or authentic by nationalists was, in fact, neither. 8 Yet, for all its strengths, the modernist paradigm faces important hurdles.

The proliferation of variants reveals deep disagreement; irreconcilable modernisms cast doubt on the promise of modernism. For example, while modernists agree that the nation is a recent creation, they cannot agree on who created it. If nationalism invented nations, who invented nationalism?

For authors who defend economic modernism, it is the invention of peripheral elites who need a new form of mobilization to outcompete richer and more powerful elites ( Hechter, 1975 ; Nairn, 1977 ). Similarly, for those who consider nationalism as a form of political messianism, it is the invention of the marginal and frustrated among the educated and the skilled ( Kedourie, 1960 , 1971 ). Yet, conceiving nationalism as a rational strategy for weaker parties cannot be reconciled with the claim that nationalism emerges as the state’s official ideology to reinforce militarization or with the view that it is devised by elites for the sake of modernization and industrialization ( Gellner, 1964 , 1983 ; Tilly, 1975 ). One is left wondering whether nationalism is the ideology of the downtrodden who seek liberation or the ideology of the ruling class who seek consolidation.

There are deeper problems for modernist accounts. All of them purport to offer a unitary explanation and yet none do. Each variant draws its strength from its ability to compellingly explain certain cases, but none can explain all the central let alone the plausible cases. While economic theories rightly show how nationalism can be a strategy in an unequal contest, this hardly proves that nationalism is the consequence of such conditions: Underdevelopment often fails to produce nationalism, and nationalism regularly emerges among the (over)developed ( Connor, 1994 ). Similarly, explaining nationalism as a response to industrialization fails to account for those cases where the former precedes the latter ( Smith, 1983 ). And political accounts of nationalism fail to explain why nationalist energies can focus on something besides the state or sovereignty. If nationalism is only about the pursuit or consolidation of state power, what are we to make of cultural nationalism: artistic renaissances, campaigns for moral regeneration, and attempts to transform through education? And given that cultural and political nationalism feed off each other, why focus solely on the latter ( Hutchinson, 1987 , 1994 )?

Finally, the modernist paradigm struggles to persuasively answer important questions. Even if modern societies require new forms of community, this does not explain why the nation arouses such powerful and awe-inspiring passions. Put otherwise, how can instrumental accounts, which consider the nation an artificial community invented to serve some further end, explain its motivational power? Some modernists try to explain the power of nationalism by pointing to its self-referential quality: It is a form of self-worship ( Breuilly, 1993 ). But such replies must inevitably fail. Even if group worship provides great motivational power, this fails to answer a comparative question: Why is the national identity so much more powerful than other available identities? Why should an artificial and recent form of self-worship prove so effective?

Antimodernism

The appearance of the nation and its continuation over time is not a historically uniform process that can be attributed to one cause, such as the requirements of industrial capitalism, or confined to one period of time, such as the last several centuries. ( Grosby, 2005 , p. 58)

The primary fault line between modernists and their critics concerns not the origins of nationalism as an ideology but the nature of nations and their antiquity. Rather than conceive of nations as artificial and recent, the critics of modernism consider them to be either ancient forms of community or transformations of premodern forms of community.

Either way, critics of modernism tend to stress the extent to which nations must build upon dimensions of human identity that are far from modern, such as ethnicity or religion ( Armstrong, 1982 ; Gat, 2012 ; Grosby, 1991 , 2005 ; Hastings, 1997 ; Reynolds, 1983 , 1984 ; Smith, 1986 , 1991 , 1998 , 2000 ).

The argument tends to center on an existential claim: Is it or is it not the case that a nation has existed before modernity? For modernists, the answer must be negative. Indeed, if a single nation precedes nationalism, then the former can exist independently of the latter. And this demonstrates that nationalism neither invents the nation as a type of community nor all tokens of it. For this reason, considerable time and energy are expended to show that some nations, or at the very least one nation, existed before modernity.

We should distinguish between two antimodernist strands. Primordialism is the belief that nations are natural: They have always existed, or their origins are lost in time. While such views were more common in the 19th century , there are late- 20th-century attempts to defend primordialism. Sociobiological primordialism considers the nation as an extension of kin selection; our national ties are the product of our evolutionary inheritance and our tendency to favor those who are genetically similar ( van den Berghe, 1978 ). However, such views quickly break down. If the nation is primarily about kin selection, then it makes little sense to cooperate with and sacrifice oneself for those who are genetically unrelated. Even ethnic nations are bound by myths of common descent rather than actual genetic proximity.

Alternatively, we can speak of “cultural primordialism” when (national) culture is treated as a social given, something inherited that arouses powerful and nearly irresistible passions, even if this is only how we feel or perceive these ties ( Geertz, 1973 ). However, this view quickly falters. While “given” or “primordial” ties can be powerful, they are also subject to change, revision, and rejection. Moreover, the theory does not explain the power of these ties so much as rename them. Why should the given be stronger than the chosen?

Far more influential, perennialism accepts that nationalism is a modern ideology, that nations are historical objects—they appear at a point in time—but rejects that they were invented by nationalism in the modern era. 9 We can distinguish between perennialists who believe that the nation is persistent and those who argue that it is best understood as a recurrent phenomenon. The former is the idea that nations, or at least some of them, are continuous intergenerational communities that have existed without interruption while the latter is the view of nations as recurring, going in and out of existence throughout the ages ( Smith, 1998 ).

Because the critics of modernity do not claim that all or most nations are ancient, they readily concede that Tanzania is quite modern. Instead, the debate focuses on the antiquity of specific nations that serve as litmus tests. Thus, Adrian Hastings argued that England had already emerged as a functional national community during the Middle Ages. For him, there is an English national identity, modeled on the biblical model of Israel: a united people keenly aware of their identity, possessing a language and territory, a government, and a shared religion ( Hastings, 1997 ). Later developments, like the Reformation and the spread of a vernacular-language Bible, might reinforce and transform English identity, but what is being changed must be older than these transformations.

Naturally, if the English nation is modeled on something older, then the antiquity of the nation can be pressed further. Perhaps the hardest case for the modernist paradigm is that of ancient Israel. Here we are faced with what appears to be the uninterrupted intergenerational community that was conscious of its distinct identity, as well as possessed a unique language and religion and a homeland. In addition, they shared memories of an independent political community and rebellions against foreign occupation ( Grosby, 1991 ).

Again, cases such as medieval England or ancient Israel are designed to show that while premodern nations might be exceptional, modernism is wrong to assert that nationalism invents the concept of the nation and all instances of it. In a way, we might say that critics of modernity imagine nations like democracy: Most democracies are quite young, and the success of the idea is recent, but that does not show that democracy is a modern invention.

While radical critics of modernism argue that some nations have existed long before modernity, others present a moderate critique. Nations might be recent, but they are continuous with premodern communities. It is reasonable to understand these critics as rejecting the radical modernism of Eric Hobsbawm, who denies any serious continuity between older forms of community, ethnic or religious, for instance, and the nations invented by nationalism ( Hobsbawm, 1990 ; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983 ).

These moderate critics argue that nationalism does not create ex nihilo a novel form of community. Instead, nationalism transforms preexisting identities (cultural, ethnic, religious, etc.) to produce the modern nation. For medievalists like Susan Reynolds, it is a mistake to overlook the existence of communities that identified themselves through myths of ethnic descent, customs and laws, and the use of proper nouns. Nations might appear later, but many are rooted in the regnal kingdoms that possessed popular consciousness and a sense of identity ( Reynolds, 1983 , 1984 ).

Yet, the most sophisticated attempt to show continuity between the premodern and modern identity is probably the work of Anthony D. Smith’s. Through several decades of scholarship, Smith has stressed the importance of the longue durée , long-term analysis. To appreciate the emergence of nationalism and nations, we need to look at very long periods in part to avoid becoming narrowly focused on a particular era or set of cases that would lead to hasty generalizations. Where studies of short periods see invention, long-term analysis reveals that “invention” is often reinterpretation or reconstruction of older materials. Attention to the longue durée also helps explain why nationalism resonates. While many of its claims are inaccurate or false, the continuity between ethnic communities and modern nations shows that behind myths of antiquity and rootedness lie real shared memories and practices, an intergenerational sense of belonging that is not the invention of political elites ( Smith, 1986 , 1991 , 1998 , 2000 , 2009 ).

However insightful these rival views are, they are not without their weaknesses. To begin, none of them quite propose a rival grand narrative or general theory that explains the emergence of nationalism or nations. Again, many arguments center on the most convincing cases that can falsify modernism’s claims. Consequently, these case-study arguments often leave us with important questions about patterns and widespread change. Why do some nations like Israel emerge so early while others like Germany emerge much later? Why does the age of nationalism arrive so late if the nation is so old? What explains the appearance of major changes to collective identity if modernity does not invent nations?

Modernists also raise important methodological objections for their critics. For one, they accuse them of assuming that there is more continuity than the evidence supports ( Breuilly, 1996 ). A leitmotiv is that we have little idea what ordinary or plain persons believed in the premodern world given that they have left behind few writings. The writings of literate elites cannot be presumed to represent widespread beliefs or sentiments. 10 Furthermore, even when we do have some insight into what plain persons thought thanks to partial or fragmentary testimony, we must be careful to avoid reading the past through contemporary lenses.

In turn, this focus on written sources has itself been criticized. Azar Gat (2012) has argued that too much has been made of the written word or the lack of it. Not only is very little of human history covered by written documentation, but it is far from the only available evidence. For instance, while we have few texts documenting the sentiments of ordinary people, we have accounts of events that depended upon ordinary people. Gat repeatedly returns to the case of mobilization and war in the premodern world to argue that it is unrealistic to maintain that ordinary sentiments or identities are unknown or unknowable. Small and weak states did not simply coerce thousands if not tens of thousands of men to fight who barely recognized themselves in their elites. A fortiori , this is true of popular uprisings. 11 Simply put, Gat rejects the idea that we are begging the question of national identity or consciousness if they are part of the best explanation of phenomena ( Gat, 2012 ).

Still, this question of national consciousness is not solely methodological. It is one thing to ask on what grounds we attribute such beliefs or sentiments, and it is quite another to ask why this must be demonstrated. Here we shift from a discussion about whether nationalism invents nations to the very nature of the nation. Even if modernists and their critics could agree on how to conduct their inquiry, they might still disagree on its object. If a nation is defined as a group in which mass national consciousness must exist , then demonstrating that nations existed in the premodern world is far harder than if nations only require moderate consciousness. 12 Fundamentally, the question of how to prove the existence of premodern nations is a function of what the nation is.

Conceptions of the Nation

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things that, in truth, are but one constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. ( Renan, 2018 , p. 261)

Despite its centrality, the question “what is a nation?” has been debated since Ernest Renan’s eponymous lecture at La Sorbonne in 1882 . Disagreement over what the nation is—what kind of community is it, how does it differ from other forms?—has produced some striking responses.

Faced with this question, Hugh Seton-Watson admits that there is nothing else to say save that a nation exists when enough people within a community believe that they belong to a nation or act as if they do ( Seton-Watson, 1977 ). Others like Rogers Brubaker deny that the nation is a particular kind of object. Instead, we should consider the “nation” as a category of practice rather than a form of community with set properties. Hence his proposal to “think about nationalism without nations” ( Brubaker, 1996 , p. 21).

Nevertheless, we can identify some broadly consensual beliefs about the nation. To begin, nations are territorial communities: They claim land as rightfully theirs. The homeland is sacred territory. It is imbued with meaning because it is the site of past events that define the group: where battles were fought, the dead are buried, and past generations flourished.

Moreover, nations are always understood as bounded and limited communities. No nation, however ambitious, understands itself as universal. Unlike certain religious communities, the nation does not aspire to or imagine itself as encompassing humankind. Finally, the nation is primarily a group in which membership is inherited, even when it is open to outsiders. Newborns are not without nationality until they reach the age of reason; one receives a nationality at birth even if one later opts to renounce it or to try to obtain another.

Beyond these shared and widely accepted features, we remain confronted by a central question: What is the nature of the community? What unites conationals?

Civic and Ethnic Views of the Nations

Two main concepts of nation and fatherland emerged in the intertwining of influence and conditions; conflicting and fusing, they became embodied in currents of thought in all nations and, to a varying degree, in entire nations. The one was basically a rational and universal concept of political liberty and the rights of man, looking towards the city of the future. In it the secularized Stoic-Christian tradition lived on: in England, it is Protestant form, in France, in its Catholic form. It found its chief support in the political and economic strength of the educated middle classes and, with a shift of emphasis, in the social-democratically organized labor movements. The other was basically founded on history, on monuments and graveyards, even harking back to the mysteries of ancient times and of tribal solidarity. ( Kohn, 1944 , p. 574)

Nations, and nationalisms, are often sorted according to two ideal types: French and German, Western and Eastern, or civic and ethnic. 13 This typology refers to the nature of the community or the identity that defines the nation. The Western or civic nation is primarily a political association and therefore more of a voluntary community. On this view, the nation is a pact or covenant, a social contract. The nation qua political community occupies a territory that is governed by laws and institutions. This is the view of the nation most associated with Western nations, particularly France, where republicanism played an important part in defining membership in the nation.

The Eastern or ethnic nation is defined by descent, or rather the presumed shared descent of its members. Here members understand themselves as ancestrally related, possessing an identity that is inherited and unchosen on the model of the family. The idea of the ethnic nation is often compared to the family as in Walker Connor’s well-known claim that it is perceived as “the family fully extended” ( Connor, 1994 , p. 202).

We might summarize these two views of the nations in terms of competing conceptions of nationality and its attribution— jus soli and jus sanguinis . How one acquires membership is a function of the nature of the community. The former attributes nationality to those born within the national territory while the latter attributes nationality based on the identity of one’s parents. 14

Of course, one’s conception of the nation is linked to other crucial concepts, namely, national identity. How one understands the nature of the community called the nation affects one’s conception of national identity. What it means to be an X—American or Turkish—will depend on the nature of the community in question. If one considers that the United States of America is a civic nation, a social contract in which members of the republic share political ideals and obey the same laws, then being or becoming an American is a function of becoming a member of a political union. On the civic view, who one’s parents are or which religion one practices will often be orthogonal to determining one’s national identity. Yet, if one holds an ethnic view of the nation, then the identity of one’s parents is no longer irrelevant but essential. On this view, to be Turkish is to be ancestrally related to other Turks and thus filiation is central.

However, these are ideal types. They allow us to make analytical distinctions, to explain patterns of thought and behavior, but they do not correspond to social reality. No actual nation is purely civic or purely ethnic but contains both civic and elements. For example, during the Third French Republic, while students learned about la Répulique, une et indivisible , they also learned that their country used to be called Gaul and their ancestors were Gauls. We find both the civic view embodied by the Republic and the ethnic view embodied in shared ancestry. While it is useful to speak of civic or ethnic to pick out what is emphasized, real nations only approximate these models ( Smith, 1991 ; Yack, 1996 , 2012 ). It is perhaps most useful to think of nations as ranging from more civic (e.g., the United States of America) to more ethnic (e.g., Japan).

The division of nations into civic and ethnic communities is not merely a descriptive question. Behind this categorization loom normative issues: We consider the civic nation to be more open and compatible with consent while the ethnic nation is bound through unchosen features—hence the reason why the civic nation is referred to as voluntarist conception while the ethnic nation is an organic conception. While ethnic nationalism might like to describe itself with the language of the family— fatherland, motherland, brotherhood, and so on —a less controversial unchosen association, it remains the case that the ethnic conception of the nationality makes it harder for newcomers to join. One can profess one’s faith in the republic, one can consent to the social contract, but one cannot so easily choose to change one’s (presumed) descent.

Here again, we must not lose sight that if we consider civic nations to be voluntary and ethnic nations to be organic, and that all actual nations combine elements of both models, then no nation is purely voluntarist or organic. This mixed view, which combines consent and inheritance, was already present in Ernest Renan’s seminal lecture. As it is often highlighted, he insists on the importance of consent, famously calling the nation an “everyday plebiscite” ( Renan, 2018 , pp. 262–263). Nevertheless, he also speaks about the importance of an indivisible past, an inheritance of “glory and regrets” ( Renan, 2018 , p. 261).

The Justification of Nationalism

Despite its unrivaled appeal and motivational power, nationalism has seduced few scholars. Several of its most prominent scholars could hardly disguise their contempt like Elie Kedourie or Eric Hobsbawm. Among philosophers and political theorists, it is often met with skepticism or hostility. Ethnic nationalism, the most ubiquitous form, past and present, is largely thought to be indefensible. Civic nationalism, while judged less harshly, is not universally embraced. In the words of an eminent political theorist, nationalism is “the starkest political shame of the twentieth century , most intractable and yet most unanticipated blot on the political history of the world since the year 1900 ” ( Dunn, 1979 , p. 55). Normatively, nationalism is on the back foot.

And yet, there is also considerable misunderstanding. To a large extent, the descriptive and the normative work fail to make contact. Consider what is arguably the most prominent anthology of high-profile philosophical papers on the justification of nationalism, The Morality of Nationalism ( McKim & McMahan, 1997 ). The endnotes reveal that many chapters contain few or no references to major or minor studies of nationalism. Several philosophers base their arguments on a commonsense understanding or on one or two works. Something similar holds the other way around. In Nations and Nationalism: A Reader ( Spencer & Wollman, 2010 ), 3 out of 19 of the authors from the above anthology appear very cursorily in the references. None of those contributing to the first anthology are the authors of any essential texts in the reader.

There are likely many reasons for this situation, but two should retain our attention. First, many normative works on nationalism either fail to distinguish it from patriotism or conflate them. In his defense of “nationalism,” Hurka defines it as “people being partial to their conationals” ( Hurka, 1997 , p. 140). However, so defined, it is indistinguishable from a widespread understanding of patriotism. Similarly, Judith Lichtenberg seems to think that the only difference between nationalism and patriotism is that the former applies before the establishment of the state while the latter applies after it ( Lichtenberg, 1997 ). This is an astonishing claim as it would make patriotism more recent than nationalism.

Second, and more fundamentally, many normative theorists use “nationalism” to mean something very different from the core ideology of nationalism or some variant. Typically, they mean national partiality , which amounts to the idea that one may, should, or must favor the claims or interests of one’s conationals over those of foreigners. For instance, when Thomas Hurka defends a moderate form of national partiality, he is very far from justifying the claim that national loyalty outranks all others, which was proposition (v). It is perfectly possible to favor one’s conationals over foreigners and yet believe that friends and family command a greater loyalty still.

We can add that nationalists, with few notable exceptions, do not have a purely instrumental view of loyalty and sacrifice: They do not love the nation to better serve humankind. 15 Rather, the nation itself is the ultimate end. In other words, the instrumental defenses of national partiality that we find in the philosophical literature share little with the classical view of nationalism. 16

In short, many philosophers are using “nationalism” in a very narrow sense compared to the scholars of nationalism. While we can find important contributions in these piecemeal or partial discussions of the morality of nationalism, we can also find defenses of something that goes beyond some measure of partiality or an isolated defense of self-determination. 17 However, we do not find much of a defense of classical or core nationalism. Commonly, we find a defense of liberal nationalism .

Liberal Nationalism and Its Defense

Liberals then need to ask themselves whether national convictions matter to their way of thinking, to their values, norms, and modes of behaviour, to their notions of social justice, and to the range of practical policies they support. In other words, they must rethink their beliefs and policies and seek to adapt them to the world in which they live. ( Tamir, 1993 , pp. 3–4)

Liberal nationalism is not part of an explanatory theory of nationalism. 18 Instead, it is an attempt to revise nationalism so that it can be reconciled with the dominant post-Enlightenment political framework, liberalism. Recall that the core ideology of nationalism involves certain claims about morality and human flourishing. On the one hand, we find claims about the value of community and membership. For instance, we saw that proposition (ii) of core nationalism was that individual freedom or flourishing required membership in a nation. Either way, the point is the connection between membership in a nation and human well-being. On the other hand, we find claims that are action-guiding: Proposition (v) is that national loyalty always comes first.

To be schematic, the classical view of the nation can be summarized as an ideology with a demanding view of partiality, which rests upon very strong claims about the value of nations. This demandingness is captured by the insistence that one sacrifice everything on the national altar. We find it in a Swiss “political catechism,” exhorting citizens to “sacrifice willingly and joyfully” their property and lives to the fatherland ( Kohn, 1944 , p. 385). Or in the poetry of Thomas Babington Macauley famously taught to British schoolchildren:

Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate; “To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods.”

In sum, the morality view put forward by classical nationalism emphasizes the utmost importance of national membership in human flourishing and consequently affirms a rigid hierarchy of duties that places national loyalty above all else. These features—its demandingness, its absolute claims about communal life and flourishing—help explain why many have been so critical.

On the one hand, internal critiques seek to show that the classical view of nationalism is incapable of defending its strong claims. Prominently, we find objections concerning the relative value of the nation and nationality. A popular form of this objection lists the various communities to which one belongs and asks for a clear explanation as to why membership in the nation is so important. To be clear, the argument is not that the nation does not matter but that even if one can establish that it plays a very important role in human flourishing, perhaps even that it is the most valuable form of communal life, this does not yet show that national loyalty must always trump other loyalties ( Lichtenberg, 1997 ).

Here it is worth pointing out how descriptive research is mobilized to make normative arguments. If modernism is true, then the defenders of nationalism must explain why human flourishing depends so much upon a recent invention. Were premodern lives all deeply marred? If nations were invented, why can we not invent more inclusive communities to replace them? Conversely, if the critics of modernity are right, then it is easier to argue that national membership like family membership is a deep feature of human life and flourishing.

On a similar line of thought, one can admit that national autonomy is valuable or defensible and accept that national identity should be expressed and yet challenge precisely what is required to achieve either. If neither national autonomy nor national self-expression requires a nation-state, at least not in all cases, then it becomes much harder to justify nationalist demands for one.

On the other hand, we find external critiques that point to the conflict between nationalism and other normative beliefs or commitments we might have. First, it is difficult to reconcile the core ideology of nationalism with any demanding form of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, given the rigid rank-ordering of loyalties in core nationalism, one’s loyalty to humankind is at best something to be attended to once one’s duties to the nation are discharged. If cosmopolitanism is a commitment to impartial benevolence and the belief that our common humanity is our overriding identity and the object of our strongest loyalty, then they are flatly incompatible.

A similar point can be made about human rights. Understood as bedrock normative claims, human rights would represent (nearly) absolute side constraints. Here too there is a very real possibility that human rights and nationalism conflict. If national loyalty dominates all other loyalties, then it is difficult to understand how a nationalist can coherently choose to honor human rights when these conflict with the demands of the nation. Indeed, when scholars and plain persons evoke how nationalism can be belligerent or fanatical, this is largely what they mean. If loyalty always takes precedence, then there is little or nothing nationalists will not do. And this, its critics say, is precisely why the 20th century was so bloody. 19

Finally, classical nationalism can seem hard to reconcile with a strong commitment to autonomy or political consent. One is obligated to one’s nation and fellow nationals, and yet one’s nationality is often unchosen. This worry is at its strongest when applied to ethnic nationalism as on this view, membership is doubly unchosen: One cannot choose one’s ancestors at birth, nor can one easily later choose to be ancestrally related to members of a new group. Yet, ethnic nationalism is not unique in imposing obligations based on unchosen identities ( Scheffler, 1994 ). Even membership in civic nations is largely unchosen and can be demanding.

Liberal nationalism seeks to reconcile nationalism and liberalism, even showing them to be mutually reinforcing. Proposed initially by Yael Tamir in her seminal Liberal Nationalism , variants of this moderate form of nationalism have also been prominently defended by David Miller and Chaim Gans ( Gans, 2003 ; Miller, 1995 , 1999 , 2007 , 2016 ; Tamir, 1993 , 2019 ). Before addressing arguments for liberal nationalism, we should consider how it generally differs from classical or core nationalism.

First, liberal nationalists abandon the rigid acontextual hierarchy of duties of core nationalism. National loyalty may still outrank other loyalties, but it does not always do so. Most notably, when the human rights of foreigners are at stake, our duties to fellow nationals or to the nation itself must come second. This is the spirit of the “weak cosmopolitanism” we find endorsed by liberal nationalists ( Miller, 2016 ). We might also say that while we have stronger positive duties to fellow nationals than to foreigners, our negative duties to not violate human rights apply equally to all and take precedence over positive duties to fellow members ( Miller, 2005 ).

Second, liberal nationalism is essentially a nonethnic form of nationalism. This does not make it a pure civic nationalism because it focuses on the preservation and transmission of a national identity and a public culture that are not exhausted by constitutionalism. 20 However, it does essentially abandon myths of ethnic descent or ancestral relatedness as a part of national identity ( Smith, 2010 ). While nationality might still be attributed at birth, it becomes considerably easier to join and become accepted within another nation once ethnic descent is jettisoned.

Third, liberal nationalists are more concerned with the relationship between the nation and liberal democracy ( Tamir, 1993 , 2019 ). While many classical nationalists were strong advocates of democratic or republican regimes, it was by no means universal. Indeed, core nationalism is compatible with an authoritarian government so long as it is authentic or expressive of the national character. Indeed, some very prominent nationalists were antidemocratic, like Charles Maurras and l’Action française as well as Russian nationalists, who summed up their view as “Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality” ( Riasanovsky, 2005 ).

To justify their views, liberal nationalists essentially offer two kinds of arguments. Recall, their project is not to revise or rehabilitate democracy or liberalism as it is to revise and rehabilitate nationalism; this explains why their arguments presume the value of democracy and liberalism and focus on establishing the ethical credentials of (a reformed) nationalism.

The first kind of argument put forward by nationalists might be called communitarian . These arguments are all noninstrumental in the sense that they do not derive the value of national community or loyalty from its contribution to either liberal democracy or liberal conceptions of justice. The arguments focus on the value of community independently of its contribution to democracy or social justice. We might further divide this argument into arguments over the intrinsic worth of national communities and the constitutive role of national communities in human flourishing.

The former strives to demonstrate that nations are valuable communities; they are the site of shared meaning and values. Cultures or cultural communities are good things, and they should continue to exist. Moreover, if we add that these cultures are distinct and unique—proposition (i) from core nationalism—then we ought to appreciate that preserving and sustaining nations provides the world with a diversity of cultures ( Berlin, 1976 ). If culture is good, then nations are valuable as incarnations of culture, and if we value a diversity of cultures, we ought to value the irreducible plurality of nations.

The latter kind of argument seeks to show how nations are constitutive of human flourishing. In their strongest form, they claim that one cannot flourish outside of the nation while weaker versions simply highlight how dispensing with the nation or national makes human flourishing harder or less complete than it otherwise might be. Here, we find various iterations. Some focus on the relationship between national identity and self-esteem ( Berlin, 1979 ; MacCormick, 1982 , 1991 , 1996 ; Margalit & Raz, 1990 ; Nielsen, 1999 ; Tamir, 1993 ; Taylor,1992 ), others on how our understanding of morality is conditioned by our membership in a nation and our participation in its moral traditions, its interpretation of principles or values ( MacIntyre, 1981 , 1984 , 1988 ; Taylor, 1989 ; Walzer, 1983 , 1987 , 1994 ). Others still insist on how choice and personal development require communal membership ( Kymlicka, 1995 ; Tamir, 1993 ).

The key point is that all these arguments seek to show that without the nation, human life would be greatly impoverished. Our national identities and our national loyalty constitute, at least for many of us, part and parcel of what it is to live a meaningful or good life.

The second kind of argument is instrumental: The value of the nation is derived from its role in sustaining either liberal democracy or liberal conceptions of justice. National identity and loyalty are either presented as necessary or uniquely valuable means of achieving our political aims of popular rule or social justice. Put otherwise, these arguments all work back from our commitments to democracy or justice and argue that once we properly appreciate how nations can help us achieve our aims, we will value them.

The most famous, the trust argument , has many variations. Essentially, we begin with the need for trust: To cooperate, to sacrifice for others, we must trust that others will reciprocate. For instance, in a democracy, the minority must believe that the majority will not abuse its power and will relinquish it when it loses. All must believe that others are equally committed to the common good. Yet, within large groups, trust cannot rest on personal knowledge of individual track records. To establish trust and motivate people to cooperate and make sacrifices, people need to feel committed to something above and beyond the partisan factions. The nation is presented as an engine of social trust because national identity will bind together and motivate nationals to work as a team. Liberal nationalists present the nation as (uniquely) capable of providing the identification and trust necessary to overcome the various forces, like disagreement or egoism, that threaten social cooperation, sacrifice, and trust ( Canovan, 1996 ; Kymlicka, 2001 ; Miller, 1995 ; Moore, 2001 ; Schnapper, 1998 ).

Of course, not only democracy requires social trust. Redistributive policies and social justice also require cooperation and sacrifice from people who are personally unacquainted. Here too, the argument goes, national identity provides the necessary identification and motivation.

In short, liberal nationalism is defended on two grounds. Noninstrumental arguments are fundamentally arguments about the value of community tout court or its constitutive role in human flourishing. Either way, they need to defend a certain conception of human nature or one about intrinsic value. The instrumental arguments are less ambitious as they begin from the commitments held by many critics of nationalism, such as democracy and social justice, and seek to show the cost of eliminating national identities and loyalties.

While more moderate than classical nationalism, liberal nationalism has not been spared criticism. On the one hand, it faces internal critiques. For instance, the trust argument has been the target of a fair amount of skepticism. Does national identity bind and motivate as its advocates claim? Critics have argued that it is far from clear that national identity can or does create the kind of affective bond and trust that its proponents claim. For instance, there appear to be plenty of cases in which fellow nationals distrust each other and would prefer to deal with foreigners if they had the choice ( Abizadeh, 2002 ). Moreover, given that a central claim can be empirically verified, we are entitled to ask what quantitative evidence can be produced in addition to sociohistorical narratives about the relationship between nation-states and welfare states. Here, even defenders of liberal nationalism concede that testing the claim has only provided partial support ( Miller & Ali, 2014 ).

Multiple external criticisms have been formulated, but two are particularly noteworthy against the backdrop of globalization. 21 An older and quite prominent critique is egalitarian. Essentially, these critics begin by identifying our commitment to equality and then show how nation-states contribute to inequality: They favor nationals at the expense of foreigners. While this might be tolerable in a world where everyone had access to a decent life, it is intolerable when so many lack so much and others live in abundance. In sum, the argument seeks to show that liberal nationalism, or any variation that does not significantly depart from the status quo, is deeply incompatible with a commitment to human equality ( Caney, 2005 ; Pogge, 2002 ; Singer, 1972 ; Steiner, 1994 ).

The second critique focuses on how liberal nationalism remains at odds with certain conceptions of human rights. Here, research is undeniably influenced by the political reality of the early 21st century ; migration and refugee crises have stimulated debate on the morality of borders. Behind talk of borders, we find the deeper conflict between, on the one hand, the notion of collective autonomy or the self-determination of peoples and, on the other hand, a human right to free movement or to immigrate. If liberal nationalism allows that one can exclude people from one’s group or territory, then we must ask whether self-determination comes at the expense of a basic right. For those who endorse a human right to immigrate, liberal nationalism’s support for borders and exclusion is objectionable ( Carens, 2013 ; Oberman, 2016 ).

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1. Classically, patriotism was classified as a virtue (i.e., an admirable character trait). Yet, its ethical credentials have been increasingly questioned in the wake of World War I. Still, proponents and opponents of patriotism tend to agree that it is a character trait.

2. One view is that patriotism is loyalty to political institutions, specifically republican, rather than to an ethnocultural community ( Connor, 1994 ; Dietz, 1989 ; Taylor, 1997 ; Viroli, 1995 ). However, this definition is questionable. Even if “patriots” has often been used to name advocates of republicanism, it is certainly not the only recorded use. Nor does this view match the common uses of “patriot” or “patriotism” to speak of the intense loyalty of those who have no institutions or do not necessarily believe in republicanism (e.g., patriotic Kurds). Worse, if patriotism is loyalty to institutions and nationalism is loyalty to an ethnocultural group, then those who defend this distinction seem committed to the claim that nationalism is ancient. How else can they describe loyalty to the Jewish people and Kingdom during the Jewish-Roman wars?

3. A prominent dissenter in the literature is Benedict Anderson. He claimed that nationalism was more like kinship or religion, no doubt in part due to what he considered to be its philosophical poverty and even incoherence ( Anderson, 2006 , pp. 4–5).

4. We might say that nations are numerically distinct and qualitatively distinct as opposed to manufactured objects that are numerically distinct but qualitatively indistinct.

5. The point is not that there existed a clear doctrine called “core nationalism” that people simply adopted or not. There are and have been nationalists of all ideological stripes—conservative, liberal, socialist, and so on. The point of putting forward core nationalism is to identify those beliefs most shared between them that allow us to recognize that despite their differences and nuances, there are common threads.

6. This view is open to the challenge that it primarily summarizes Western nationalism. For those interested in an influential non-Western perspective, see Chatterjee (1986 , 1993 ).

7. An example is the way in which proposition (iii) has become so central to nationalist movements in the wake of the French Revolution. The age of nationalism and later decolonization delegitimized the millennia-old institution of empire by spreading the proposition that all alien rule is illegitimate.

8. From Thanksgiving that commemorates events in the early 17th century but only becomes a national institution in the late 19th century, to the 19th-century invention of distinct clan tartans in Scotland, more than one practice or symbol is far more recent than commonly believed ( Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983 ).

9. Authors like Azar Gat would be unhappy with this label. Nevertheless, his overall argument is far more critical of modernism than anything else. Indeed, insisting on the antiquity of the national state seems like a form of perennialism ( Gat, 2012 ).

10. Modernists are skeptical of identity unsupported by institutions. Identity that is not affirmed and transmitted through institutions is “fragmentary, discontinuous and elusive” ( Breuilly, 1996 , p. 156).

11. The battle of Raphia and the subsequent popular Egyptian revolt against Hellenistic rule is a textbook case drawn from the premodern world ( Gat, 2012 , pp. 118–119). Similar examples abound in Gat’s account.

12. For instance, Walker Connor insists that nations begin at the end of the 19th or early 20th century because they require mass consciousness, which in turn depends upon mass communication and standardized education. Adrian Hastings believed that so long as national consciousness extends to many people beyond government circles and the ruling class, then one can speak of a nation ( Connor, 1994 ; Hastings, 1997 ).

13. These are the most prominent, but they are not the only classification of nations and nationalism. For instance, one may draw the line between secular and religious forms of nationalism ( Juergensmeyer, 1993 ).

14. While many accept that there are different kinds of nations, some reject this pluralism in favor of a monolithic view. Walker Connor insists that all nationalism is ethnic nationalism ( Connor, 1994 ).

15. Perhaps the most notable exception is Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who often defends nationalism as essential for the progress of humanity ( Fichte, 2008 ). Notwithstanding these passages, Fichte certainly sounds like an ardent nationalist.

16. Authors who defend loyalty to the nation or national partiality purely as a means of achieving the greatest happiness or to ensure the maximal discharging of moral duties, such as R. M. Hare and Robert Goodin respectively argue, are hardly endorsing “nationalism” ( Goodin, 1988 ; Hare, 1981 ). Few nationalists think of their nation as a mere tool let alone believe that humanity is the ultimate object of loyalty.

17. An excellent example of the way that debate has proceeded is the way that Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) is cited or discussed. MacIntyre does not discuss let alone defend nationalism but patriotism. His focus is clearly on a character trait and not an ideology: Nowhere does he claim that all political legitimacy comes from the nation or that nations must be as autonomous as possible. Of course, this does not mean that MacIntyre’s defense of patriotism is irrelevant—he does after all make strong claims about communal life and human flourishing. The point is that many philosophers and political theorists treat nationalism and national partiality as interchangeable. Consequently, what is discussed on the heading of “nationalism” in the normative debate is often an anemic understanding of what historians and sociologists are discussing.

18. Authors like David Miller might reply that liberal nationalism is not a contemporary reconstruction of nationalism but a view inspired by historical nationalists such as Giuseppe Manzini and John Stuart Mill ( Gustavsson & Miller, 2019 ). While one might convincingly argue that Manzini advocated something sufficiently like contemporary liberal nationalism, things are less clear for Mill. While he did believe that national sentiment was crucial to representative government, he also advocated colonialism on the grounds that it made the colonized better off—a point hard to square with core nationalism ( Bell, 2010 ).

19. The accusation that nationalism is particularly responsible for brutal and total wars in the 20th century is widespread ( Smith, 1998 , 2010 ). Even if the accusation is correct, nationalism was also a driving force, if not the driving force, behind decolonization. Whatever historical debates are to be had about what causes what, the cost-benefit analysis of nationalism is likely more complex than François Mitterand’s “ Le nationalisme, c’est la guerre .”

20. If by “constitutional patriotism” we mean that people are primarily loyal not to a cultural community but the norms and values of a liberal democratic constitution, then liberal nationalism remains a form of nationalism ( Habermas, 1994 ).

21. There is no shortage of external critiques. Feminist authors have pointed out the extent to which nationalism can be understood as a gendered ideology: one that rarely grants women an equal role in the nation or addresses their concerns ( Elshtain, 1993 ; Enloe, 1989 ; Walby, 1992 ). Similarly, those whose argue that we inhabit an increasingly postnational or globalized world argue that the nation and nationalism are obsolete ( Falk, 2002 ; Horsman & Marshall, 1994 ; McNeill, 1986 ).

Nationalism and Foreign Policy
Religious Nationalism and Religious Influence
Nationalism in African Politics

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Patriotism & moral theology.

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John E. Hare; Patriotism & Moral Theology. Daedalus 2020; 149 (3): 201–218. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01812

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This essay examines the question of the moral justification of patriotism, given a Kantian view of morality as requiring an equal respect for every human being. The essay considers the background in Kant's moral theology for his cosmopolitanism. It then considers an extreme version of cosmopolitanism that denies a proper place for love of one's country, and it engages with a contemporary atheist cosmopolitan, Seyla Benhabib, suggesting that there are resources in Kant's moral theology to ground the hope that she expresses but does not succeed in grounding. Finally, it considers patriotism as a perfection of cosmopolitanism, in the same way that love of an individual can be a perfection of love of humanity. The essay suggests that defensible versions of cosmopolitanism put constraints on what kind of love of one's own country is morally permissible. But these constraints require the background in a Kantian moral theology.

Patriotism has often been negatively evaluated. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, said that “patriotism from an absolute perspective is simply another form of selfishness,” that social groups are held together by emotion rather than reason, and that love for one's country “slews into nationalism.” 1 This essay is an attempt to locate a kind of justifiable patriotism. I will be arguing from a modified Kantian ethical framework, which is widely considered by political theorists to be among the major moral frameworks that can guide democratic societies. Since Kant is also one of the founders of cosmopolitanism, which is the view that we are citizens (in Greek, politai ) of the cosmos, I will need to consider whether patriotism and cosmopolitanism are consistent. 2

Kant proposed as the supreme principle of morality what he called a “categorical imperative,” of whose formulations or formulas I will mention two. 3 The formula of universal law states: “Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” 4 I interpret this to mean that Kant is asking us to prescribe for an imagined system of moral permissions: that is, like the system of nature, covered by universal laws that eliminate singular reference from my maxims (where a maxim is the prescription of an action together with the reason for that action), and thus eliminate reference to me, the agent. “It follows from universalizability that if I now say that I ought to do a certain thing to a certain person, I am committed to the view that the very same thing ought to be done to me, were I in exactly this situation, including having the same personal characteristics and in particular the same motivational states.“ 5 The second formula, the formula of humanity, states: ”So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means.“ 6 Kant based this kind of respect for the dignity of a person on what all rational beings have in common: namely, their autonomy.

The kind of justifiable patriotism I want to defend will require a modification of these formulas of the categorical imperative interpreted in these ways. Strictly, for a maxim to prescribe love for a country morally would require, by universalizability, that I be able to eliminate singular reference to that country (that region of space and time). The name for a country is a singular term, making singular reference. If I say, for example, that all Canadians are virtuous, I am making reference to a particular region of space and time in which those people live. I think we should allow that maxims can be morally permissible where singular reference is not eliminable, even in principle. 7 It is morally permissible for me to help my friend Elizabeth get bats out of her house, even if I cannot eliminate reference to her even in principle from the maxim of my action, because my obligation comes out of the particular texture of our relationship and its history.

This kind of moral particularism allows that it might be morally permissible to love a country even if that love is not for universal properties possessed by that country that another country could also possess (such as having lofty mountains and fruitful plains), but for some singular property (for example its history) that it alone can possess. 8 But now we need to make another distinction. Love for one's country can take two different forms and is typically a mixture of both. The first form is love for the country itself. I can love my country without any reference, even implicit reference, to myself being a citizen of it. The second form is that I can love my country in a way that does not allow the elimination of my relation to the country from my love. Consider by way of analogy that I can decide, when watching two sports teams play a match on television, that I will support one of the teams because it makes the game more interesting to me. It is for the moment my team, but I do not care at all about what happens to the team after I have finished watching. On the other hand, I can cheer for the team because of its merits independent of my attachment.

One way to think about the first kind of love of a country is by analogy with the practical love for a person. Suppose a country has an individual indefinable essence in the same way that a person does. Philosopher and theologian Duns Scotus suggested that my individual essence (my “haecceity”) is a perfection of my common essence (my humanity). 9 One basis of my love for another will then be her individual perfection, not something she has in common with all others. By analogy, my practical love for my country and the obligations internal to that love will not be expressible in maxims that eliminate singular reference, even if (by this first kind of love) the maxims can eliminate reference to me. But there are large difficulties with this view. Countries are internally diverse and contain different cultures that are themselves constantly in flux. Even if we grant that there is a personal identity that can survive across a person's life, this is harder to grant for a country. If I ask, “Was England the same country after 1066?” the year of the Norman Conquest, the right answer might be “That is a bad question.” Perhaps England was in some ways the same and in other ways different, and there is no fact of the matter about whether it is “the same country.” The point about singular reference can be made, however, without relying on individual essences of countries. I can love Canada in a way that is not reducible to universal properties or characteristics that another country could also possess. The present objection to an unmodified Kantian morality is that it does not follow from the fact that Canada is a singular term that I cannot have a moral obligation toward or practical love for Canada. The requirement of universalizability has to be modified.

But suppose I love my country in the second way, where the object of my love contains essential reference to my relation to that country, even if that reference is implicit and not articulated as such. Does that mean that this is no longer a morally permitted love? Here, what is required is not a modification of Kant, but a recognition that his way of doing ethics allows in some instances preference for oneself. The formula of humanity requires an agent to treat humanity in her own person always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means. The trouble is that if she treats herself merely as one, and not as more than one, her own purposes are in danger of being morally outweighed by the competing purposes of others. We need a recognition that rationality allows not merely this kind of equal treatment of herself, but a preference for herself. One way to accomplish this is to distinguish between different levels of moral thinking. 10 The critical level is an approximation to the thinking of a being who knows all the relevant facts and loves all people equally. The intuitive level is the level of our everyday moral thinking, when we do not have enough time or calm to think out what principles to live by, but have to rely on principles already established. Here is a statement of a principle from philosopher Derek Parfit, but now to be interpreted at the intuitive level: “When one of our two possible acts would make things go in some way that would be impartially better, but the other act would make things go better either for ourselves or for those to whom we have close ties, we often have sufficient reasons to act in either of these ways.” 11

This principle allows that we can have in certain circumstances sufficient reason both for impartiality and for self-preference at the intuitive level. Here is a typical philosopher's thought experiment: “An adult is plummeting from a tenth-story window, and you, on the sidewalk below, know that you can save that person's life by cushioning his fall. If you did so, however, you would very likely suffer broken bones, which would heal, perhaps painfully and imperfectly, over a period of months.“ 12 To philosopher Richard Miller, it is clear that you can do your ”fair share in making the world a better place while turning down this chance for world-improvement.“ This allows that it is not merely rational but morally permissible to grant some degree of self-preference, even while doing your fair share, though it will take a lot more philosophical work to determine what this fair share would be. I think we should grant that it is a false rigorism to deny any moral permission to prefer ourselves or those to whom we have ties of kinship, friendship, or citizenship. This means that we also have to deny what I will call extreme or strong cosmopolitanism. 13

Cosmopolitanism comes in many degrees. Robert Audi defines cosmopolitanism as giving “some degree of priority to the interests of humanity over those of nations, and the stronger the priority, the stronger the cosmopolitanism.” In this sense, extreme cosmopolitanism holds that the “interests of humanity come first in any conflict between them and national interests (other things equal).” A less prejudicial name would be “strong cosmopolitanism,” which holds, according to philosophers Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, “that we have no right to use nationality (in contrast with friendship or familial love) as a trigger for discretionary behavior.” 14 Applied to global economic justice, this would mean, as philosopher Darrel Moellendorf puts it, that morality requires us all, including the citizens of Switzerland, to aim toward the situation in which “a child growing up in Mozambique would be statistically as likely as the child of a senior executive at a Swiss bank to reach the position of the latter's parent.” 15

There is a tradition of opposition to strong cosmopolitanism in the so-called political realism that has been one ingredient in U.S. foreign policy for over one hundred years. 16 In the United States, the most conspicuous political realists of the twentieth century were Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau. 17 What is surprising is that the political realists followed a teaching of Kant no less than the cosmopolitans did. Kant thought that we are born with radical evil, under what Luther calls “the bondage of the will.” 18 Niebuhr takes a similar view, quoting Luther and insisting that the essential characteristic of Christian love is self-sacrifice. But this leads him to conclude that it is reasonable to hope for love in a tainted form from individuals in some contexts, but it is never reasonable to hope for it from groups. For him, “patriotism from an absolute perspective is simply another form of selfishness.” 19

In the light of the realist argument, Kant's own position seems paradoxical. He starts with the pessimistic premises of the realist and ends with the optimistic conclusions of the liberal and cosmopolitan idealist. He starts with radical evil and ends with the conclusion that humans will ultimately form a foedus pacificum (a zone of peace created by the eventual free association of liberal states). What enables the transition, however, is that he adds divine assistance, which makes the zone of peace really, as opposed to merely logically, possible. 20 Otherwise, he would be vulnerable to the realist attack against the liberals' pie-eyed optimism. Kant's liberal followers have to a large extent dropped the theological context and thus made themselves liable to the charge that they have not taken seriously what the theological sources call original sin. On the other hand, both Kant and the realists have been misled by a false rigorism about local attachment. Niebuhr gives several explanations as to why, in his view, groups are inevitably selfish. Social groups, he says, are held together by emotion rather than reason. They are therefore, he holds, less likely to feel moral constraints, since these cannot operate in the absence of a high level of rationality; moreover, even altruism on the part of the individual is corrupted and “slewed into nationalism,” since what is outside the nation is “too vague to inspire devotion.” 21 Here the implication is that love of the nation cannot be in itself a moral emotion: first, because morality operates at the level of rationality, not emotion and, second, because it is only human beings as such (“what is outside the nation”) who are the proper objects of moral respect. But Niebuhr is surely exaggerating here. Groups can form around rational interest, and cosmopolitans can be emotionally devoted to their own cause.

There are two empirical reasons for rejecting strong cosmopolitanism. 22 Kant made the ambitious prediction in the 1790s that states with a republican constitution would not fight with each other, and that the resulting zone of peace (the foedus pacificum) would gradually expand (though not without setback and tragedy) to a worldwide federation of states that no longer use war as an instrument of policy against each other. 23 This kind of optimism about democracy (understood as the freedom, equality, and independence of every citizen) was one fundamental rationale for a policy of promoting democracy worldwide. It was Woodrow Wilson's rationale during and after World War I and it was Bill Clinton's rationale for U.S. policy enunciated by his national security advisor, Anthony Lake, in 1993, that “The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement, enlargement of the world's free community of market democracies.” 24 But this optimistic story does not take into account that states have gone in and out of the pacific union; moreover, some of the bloodiest wars of history have been fought by powers that were at one time in the union but had left. The first objection to the optimism of the enlargement story is the familiar conservative objection to the corrosive acid of modernism, that the strong cosmopolitan agenda has the effect of fostering a kind of rootlessness that in turn makes the local attachments return in a more virulent form under certain historically observable circumstances. 25 This agenda itself tends to undermine, in certain circumstances, the success of the regimes that are trying to implement it; in other words, the strong cosmopolitan agenda can be self-defeating. The philosophical and ideological differences here are likely to be meshed with all sorts of other causal factors, but they are important all the same. We are seeing in the United States and in Europe swings toward a kind of anticosmopolitan agenda that is a response, in part, to the same kind of neglect of the value of local attachment by the liberal elite.

The second empirical objection to the strong cosmopolitan agenda is that it makes conflict by liberal regimes with nonliberal ones more likely and worse in some circumstances. This was Niebuhr's complaint about Wilsonian idealism. It turned World War I into a crusade to make the world safe for democracy and therefore legitimated a scale of destruction that would otherwise have been intolerable. A similar complaint would be true of World War II. One of the mechanisms at work here is that in order to persuade liberal democracies to go to war, the enemy has to be demonized – painted in subhuman colors – so that negotiating a cessation of hostilities without the enemy's unconditional surrender becomes more difficult. So much momentum, so to speak, has to be generated to get the war started that it is much harder to get it stopped. The idealism becomes itself an obstacle to diplomacy. The picture of the opponent as not fully civilized also legitimates inhumane treatment. Moreover, Niebuhr and Morgenthau pointed to the self-deception that strong cosmopolitanism tends to produce. During the Cold War, for example, a veneer of communist internationalism (paying lip service to cosmopolitanism) disguised Russian hegemony under the Brezhnev Doctrine, and the same confusion of national interest with idealist rhetoric was true of the British in Egypt in 1881–1882 and has sometimes been true of U.S. foreign policy. 26

I said earlier that what made Kant satisfied that he could overcome the objection to a realist pessimism was his moral theology. 27 He believed that there is progress toward and there will eventually be the realization of a juridico-civil union of states, but this requires the activity of providence. If we do not follow Kant's belief in the moral progress of the human race, can we still be cosmopolitans? Yes, because if Kant was right about the juridico-civil union of states, it does not require moral progress at all. He said that the union can be achieved even by “a nation of devils.” 28 But he thought we will still require, for rational stability, a ground in providence for believing in this union as a real (as opposed to a merely logical) possibility.

Let us now look at the work of a contemporary cosmopolitan who denies the place of theology that Kant gave to it: namely, Seyla Benhabib. 29 Benhabib takes from Habermas the theme of what he calls the “Janus face of the modern nation.” 30 “All modern nation-states that enshrine universalistic principles into their constitutions are also based on the cultural, historical, and legal memories, traditions, and institutions of a particular people and peoples.” 31 Benhabib similarly distinguishes between “the ethnos” (“a community of shared fate, memories, and moral sympathies”) and “the demos” (“a democratically enfranchised totality of all citizens, who may or may not belong to the same ethnos”). 32 Because the modern nation-state has these two faces, there will very often be “a dialectic of universalistic form and particular content,“ in which the cosmopolitan aspiration of the demos is in tension with the loyalties to the ethnos. Since we are now living, Benhabib says, ”in a post-metaphysical universe,“ we cannot appeal as Kant does to God as a coordinator of the ethical commonwealth. 33 Nonetheless, her book Another Cosmopolitanism is full of teleology. The final sentence of the book is: ”The interlocking of democratic iteration struggles within a global civil society and the creation of solidarities beyond borders, including a universal right of hospitality that recognizes the other as a potential co-citizen, anticipate another cosmopolitanism – a cosmopolitanism to come.“ 34 But the hope is rationally unstable without the theological ground for the hope. 35 Whether we do in fact live in a postmetaphysical universe, or whether (as most people in the world believe) the moral order is sustained by some kind of divine being or beings, is a different question, and one beyond the limits of this essay.

Benhabib quotes with approval Kant's statement of the principle of cosmopolitan right, “The Law of World Citizenship Shall be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality.” 36 The term “hospitality” here is, as Kant realized, misleading. It refers not to the kindness or generosity one might display to guests, but to the right of an individual to engage in commerce on a foreign territory (in a broad sense of commerce) without being attacked by the nationals of that territory. Benhabib takes hospitality, even though limited in this way, to have implications for “all human rights claims which are cross-border in scope.” 37 And she has confidence that even though there did not exist in Kant's time, and still does not in ours, the enforcement mechanisms that lie behind domestic law, these will come and are “signaled” by this principle. “I follow the Kantian tradition in thinking of cosmopolitanism as the emergence of norms that ought to govern relations among individuals in a global civil society. These norms … signal the eventual legalization and juridification of the rights claims of human beings everywhere, regardless of their membership in bounded communities.” 38

What are the grounds of her confidence in this eventual juridification? I will mention two. 39 The first is the observation of the progress that has already been made. Benhabib is here in the same position as Kant, looking at the international response in Europe to the ideals of the French Revolution. Kant was tremendously encouraged by this response, even though he was horrified by some of what the Revolution produced. 40 If we restrict our attention, however, to the treatment over the last few years of immigrants in Europe and the United States, observation gives us at best equivocal results (this essay was written in 2019 and Benhabib's volume came out of a set of lectures in 2004). Kant himself was aware that he could not ground his hope in observation because the evidence was at best ambiguous, and his argument was therefore transcendental and finally theological.

Second, Benhabib appeals to the notion of “democratic iterations”: that is, “linguistic, legal, cultural, and political repetitions-in-transformation, invocations that also are revocations. They not only change established understandings but also transform what passes as the valid or established view of an authoritative precedent.“ 41 She suggests that politics can be a ”jurisgenerative process,“ which creatively intervenes to ”mediate between universal norms and the will of democratic majorities.“ I think she is right to point to this possibility. But as a ground for hope, we need more than this possibility, because there is equally the possibility of regress. Democratic iterations can go both toward and away from cosmopolitan norms, and she recognizes that these norms do not depend for their validity upon what actually transpires. If democratic practice gets closer to the norms, the norms are the measuring stick for our rejoicing; if the practice gets further away, these same norms are the measuring stick for our lament. But then we have the same objection as the first one; our observation over the last few years gives us at best equivocal evidence.

Should Benhabib keep the elucidation and prescription of the cosmopolitan norms and drop the teleology? The trouble is that this will put her in the difficulty that Kant raises for Mendelssohn: “he could not reasonably hope to bring this about all by himself, without others after him continuing along the same path.” 42 In “Religion,” Kant puts the point in terms of “the idea of working toward a whole of which we cannot know whether as a whole it is also in our power.” 43 Benhabib needs the teleology because she needs the sense that despite the equivocal evidence, she is, so to speak, on the winning side; the cosmopolitan norms will in the end prevail. But then she needs to give us the grounds for the teleology. In Kant's work, the grounds are theological. The question is whether we can have such grounds when we “live in a post-metaphysical universe.”

There is a way to look at the relation between love of country and love of humanity that derives from the distinction mentioned earlier between our individual and our common essence. Scotus suggested that our individual essence, our haecceity, is a perfection of the common essence of our speciesnamely, humanity – in the same way that humanity is a perfection of the common essence of the genus, animality. I have already conceded that countries probably do not have individual essences in the way that individual humans do, so that the analogy here is incomplete. But my point is that we do not have, when the case of patriotism and cosmopolitanism is properly understood, two competing loves. In the same way, my love for another human being in her particularity does not compete with my love for humanity.

There are other sources than Scotus of this sort of view of particularity. Philosopher S⊘ren Kierkegaard says,

Humanity's superiority over animals is not only the one most often mentioned, the universally human, but is also what is most often forgotten, that within the species each individual is the essentially different or distinctive. This superiority is in a very real sense the human superiority; the former is the superiority of the race over the animal species. Indeed, if it were not so that one human being, honest, upright, respectable, God-fearing, can under the same circumstances do the very opposite of what another human being does who is also honest, upright, respectable, God-fearing, then the God-relationship would not essentially exist, would not exist in its deepest meaning. 44

I want to emphasize two things about this passage. First, Kierkegaard is not saying that our distinctiveness is something different from our humanity; he is saying, rather, that our human greatness resides in our ability to be distinctive. Second, he locates this distinctiveness in the unique relation each of us has to God.

George Eliot's novel Daniel Deronda is about a man who discovers as an adult that he has Jewish ancestry. 45

It was as if he had found an added soul in finding his ancestry – his judgement no longer wandering in the mazes of impartial sympathy, but choosing, with the noble partiality which is man's best strength, the closer fellowship that makes sympathy practical – exchanging that bird's eye reasonableness which soars to avoid preference and loses all sense of quality, for the generous reasonableness of drawing shoulder to shoulder with men of like inheritance.

Again, I want to emphasize two points. The first is that Eliot is calling the partiality that presupposes our difference from each other “our [that is, our human] best strength.” The second is that both the bird's-eye view and the shoulder-to-shoulder view are described as forms of reasonableness. We do not need to leave reason behind in order to identify with our particular ancestry.

I will proceed by giving three brief personal vignettes to illustrate what loving one's country might be like if it was construed as a perfection of loving what human collectives do well. I write with a sense of loss, as an emigrant from Britain to the United States, which is now my country. I will also immediately concede the dangers of this way of seeing the love of one's country, and the corruptions to which it is liable. Take, first, the aesthetic style that is characteristic of a particular country's music at its best periods, for example, the Tudor and Jacobean writing of vocal and consort music (say, Byrd and Gibbons and Tomkins). I can love this music in preference to any other, and this is undoubtedly due in part to my having grown up with it in a boys' choir from an early age. There is nothing irrational about such a preference. This is truly great music, and I do not have to be shaken in my love by the recognition that the attachment derives from my upbringing. Perhaps, if I had grown up in New Orleans, I would have loved the jazz of the 1920s and 1930s in just this way. There is a kind of attachment here that requires a person's early contact, so that the music is, so to speak, in the bones. But I can recognize the good fortune that there is an excellent manifestation of the human spirit to which I have been given access by the accident of my circumstances. Second, I can love a particular piece of land, perhaps the downs above the Chiltern village where I grew up, and where I know by name all the species of flowers that grow there. Wendell Berry writes in his novels and essays about this kind of love, that is of the land and, indissolubly mixed with this, of the people who have made that land what it is over the generations. 46 I think this is possible also in a city; one could love Greenwich Village in this sort of way. But if Berry is right, it is harder because this sort of value requires stability across the generations, and the city is constantly in flux. Love of a national musical style (as in the first example) or of a piece of land (as in the second example) are not the same as love of one's country. But they are, so to speak, streams that run into that sea. A third example is the solidarity one feels when one's country is attacked. I remember being surprised by the intensity of my feeling when the United States was attacked on 9/11. Or one can watch in a pub a football match in the World Cup, where one's national team has won a surprising victory, and the communal elation can be overwhelming, hugs and cheers all round, with nothing mean-spirited to spoil it. We seem to need something larger than ourselves to be proud of in order to be at our best.

These are three vignettes, and in each of them we can see how things could easily go wrong. I distinguished earlier different ways we might love our country. We might love it because of universal properties that some other country might have, such as tall mountains and fertile plains, or for some unique property, such as its history. Or we might love it because it is our country. I urged that it was a false dichotomy to allow moral value only to judgments that exclude singular reference and a false rigorism to deny moral permission to any self-preference. Now we can return to the case of the Jacobean motet, which I love because it is great music (perhaps Thomas Tomkins's “When David Heard”), and we can make another distinction. It may be that the object of my love is valuable for its universal properties, but the quality of my love may depend upon my history with this object. I may love the motet because I sang it as a boy, and it has a certain resonance for me because of my memory of the people I sang it with. This fact about the quality of my love does not make my love irrational and does not in any way pollute it. The value of the motet is a human value. By that I mean that it is a manifestation of a particular excellence that humans have, of making music together. The scholastic language of a “perfection” fits well here. Music is a human excellence, but this motet exemplifies spectacularly well what that excellence enables us to do. The fact that I get access to that perfection because of my personal history does not make my preference suspect.

But now suppose the choir master who loves Tudor and Jacobean vocal and consort music refuses to allow the choir to sing anything else. There is other equally great music with the same properties of complexity and expressiveness (perhaps even from roughly the same period, but from Tomás Luis de Victoria, for example, from the Spanish Counter-Reformation), which he cannot enjoy or allow us to enjoy. Now something has gone wrong with his love. It has become blind and bigoted. There is what I will call a “practical contradiction” between his love for the Tomkins motet and his refusal to allow value to the Victoria. A practical contradiction is generated between two maxims when the first maxim prescribes an action or attitude that acknowledges some value and the second prescribes an action or attitude that denies that same value.

We can see the same kind of shift in the other two vignettes. Perhaps I love some particular piece of land. Again, it may be beautiful, if it is farmed land, because it manifests a human excellence, but here there will be a large admixture (in the folds of the hills, for example) of a natural beauty beyond the merely human. If this is in a city, the human excellence will predominate. My love for this land is not made somehow morally suspect by the fact that I grew up there. But there are people who cannot see this beauty anywhere else (in Burgundy, for example), and again, there is a practical contradiction in their refusal. In terms of the third example, if I find myself moved by love for my country when it is attacked, and I endorse that morally as an initial response before going on to evaluate whether the attack was unprovoked, I should (for the sake of consistency) recognize that when my country attacks another, I should endorse the similar initial response of that country's citizens. There is a human value here, a solidarity that manifests the human excellence of our associating with each other into poleis, “cities” in the ancient Greek sense, and this solidarity is a value wherever on the globe it occurs.

We can now propose one criterion for when a local love does become illegitimate by reasonable cosmopolitan standards. It becomes illegitimate when it involves a practical contradiction with a human value. Suppose, for example, that I say “America first,” and I propose that this means closing the national borders, making it almost impossible for refugees to pass the initial standards for credible fear, and separating children from their parents who cross the border whether they are applying for asylum or not, so as to discourage such application. 47 Why should I think that America is at least potentially great and deserves this kind of love? Perhaps I love internal freedom of the will (a human excellence), and therefore the external freedom that allows the expression in outward behavior of this internal freedom. 48 Perhaps I love in America a relatively high degree of external freedom. But now we can see the practical contradiction. There are two maxims here and the first maxim (the love of freedom) prescribes an action or attitude that acknowledges some value and the second (closing the border and separating families) prescribes an action or attitude that denies that same value. Kant himself, as discussed earlier, phrased this failure as a failure of hospitality. There are indeed international laws that guarantee the right of the persecuted to seek sanctuary in other countries, and these make concrete the right to hospitality in Kant's sense. 49 The right to seek sanctuary very plausibly includes the right to have one's story of persecution listened to carefully, and the right not to be forcibly separated from one's family.

How can we avoid this kind of practical contradiction? This returns us finally to the moral theology. Kant did not think, and he was right not to think, that merely pointing out a contradiction is sufficient to change behavior or policy. We are born, he says, under the evil maxim that prefers our happiness to our duty. This is the basis for the American political realists' pessimism about politics in general and international politics in particular, as discussed earlier. If we are under the evil maxim, and we find that some practice that gives precedence to our own group is inconsistent with the moral demand, then we will reject the moral demand for that case. Kant himself, however, was not pessimistic about the prospects of a pacific union. The basis for his optimism was his belief in providence. I will conclude by claiming that a moral theology helps us understand that patriotism, so far from “sluicing into nationalism” as Niebuhr says, can in fact fit a moderate cosmopolitanism. These points start from Kant's moral theology but go beyond it.

The essential point is about the commands of the God of the great monotheisms, though there may be a way to make it in nontheist terms; that is not the project of this essay. This God both includes us within community and then sends us out beyond it. I will try to show the implications of this for love of one's country by distinguishing, as Kant did, God's legislative, executive, and judicial functions. 50 God's including and sending out is part of God's legislative function. We should recognize, Kant says, our duties as God's commands. 51 Much contemporary evolutionary psychology has emphasized the role of religion as what social psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls a “hive switch,” the crucial social practice that enables group formation: “If religion is a group-level adaptation, then it should produce parochial altruism.” 52 It is true that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam emphasize duties within the group, but they also emphasize that God commands us to love or show mercy to the enemy and stranger and they promise resources, because of the nature of the commander, for doing so. I am not learned enough to go beyond the limits of these three faiths, but I believe the same is true beyond those limits in Hinduism and Buddhism. Within Judaism, we should look at the Noahide Laws, for example; within Christianity, at the parable of the Good Samaritan; and within Islam, at the Mu'tazilite position on duties to the stranger. 53 My point is that it is the very same God who does both the including and the sending out, so that the devotion that is encouraged by the group identity of believers itself sends them beyond the group to strangers in need.

In terms of God's executive function, the tension between happiness and duty that lies behind the political realists' pessimism is surmounted if Kant was right about the real possibility of the highest good, which is the union of the two. This is why Kant says, in the preface to “Religion,” “morality inevitably leads to religion.” 54 Real possibility is different, for Kant, from merely logical possibility, and in this case, he thinks the real possibility of the highest good is grounded in the existence of the “supersensible author of nature” who brings our attempts to follow the moral demand and our happiness together. This means that we can rationally believe that we do not have to do what immorally privileges ourselves or our national or political group in order to be happy. Kant held that God coordinates our individual attempts to do good so that “the forces of single individuals, insufficient on their own, are united for a common effect.” 55 How does this coordination work? We need to be modest here in our claims to understand divine working. Kant says in “Toward Perpetual Peace” that “from a morally practical point of view … as e.g. in the belief that God, by means incomprehensible to us, will make up for the lack of our own righteousness if only our disposition is genuine, so that we should never slacken in our striving towards the good, the concept of a divine concursus is quite appropriate and even necessary.” 56 Concursus (concurrence) is where God and mankind work together, though this kind of cooperation goes beyond the limits of our understanding.

In terms of God's judicial function, God is merciful as well as just. Kant here translates a Lutheran version of the Christian doctrine of justification. In strict justice, God would not be able to reward with eternal happiness a life that was not purely good. But God “to whom the temporal condition is nothing” regards, by intellectual intuition, a human life that is moved by the predisposition to goodness as already completely what it is not yet: namely, holy. 57 Intellectual intuition is productive, unlike human intuition which is merely receptive. The divine regard here is, I take it, a translation of the Lutheran doctrine of the divine imputation to us of Christ's righteousness. 58 The present point is that our political attachments are to relative goods not absolute goods. To think of my polis as an absolute good would be idolatry, even though love of country can be a perfection of love of humanity in the way I have been discussing. God's mercy allows our love of human beings to be mediated through our love of a particular political grouping, so long as there is no practical contradiction of the type I have mentioned.

My point in this final section has been that patriotism and moderate cosmopolitanism do not need to be seen as competing loves. I have tried to use some theological resources in order to see how obstacles to this reconciling project might be removed. But it remains to determine what is the best balance of these commitments in any given polity. For example, Germany accepted over one million asylum seekers fleeing war and instability in the Middle East in 2015. 59 Was Germany up to that challenge, or did the sudden influx of immigrants create a backlash that dangerously propelled the rise of nationalist anti-immigrant parties? The moderate cosmopolitanism in my essay does not answer this question. But it points to a possible practical contradiction between large-scale exclusion and a love of Germany that lived through the pulling down of the Berlin Wall and repents of the nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century. 60 It is democracies that are best able to find the balance here because they best give voice to the stakeholders within the country. But a Kantian moral theology adds that the refugees also are ends in themselves, and God's help is offered to meet the moral demand that God makes of us.

I am grateful to Charles Lockwood for an excellent set of questions about an earlier draft of this essay, and to Robert Audi for extensive comments on an earlier draft.

See Harry R. David and Robert C. Good, eds., Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics: His Political Philosophy and Its Application to Our Age as Expressed in His Writings (New York: Scribner's, 1960), 85; and Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Scribner's, 1932), 91.

There is a large literature on the relation between cosmopolitanism and patriotism. One recent collection of sources is Claudia Schumann, “Which Love of Country? Tensions, Questions and Contexts for Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism in Education,” Journal of the Philosophy of Education 50 (2) (2016). She is responding to a shift in Martha Nussbaum's position. Nussbaum had argued for a replacement of patriotism by cosmopolitanism in Martha Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country? Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 3–17. More recently, she has argued for a reconciliation in Martha Nussbaum, “Towards a Globally Sensitive Patriotism,” Dœdalus 137 (3) (Summer 2008): 78–93. An excellent earlier collection of sources is Pauline Kleingeld, “Kantian Patriotism,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 29 (4) (2000): 313–341. I will be making use of some of her distinctions, but she does not acknowledge the centrality of Kant's moral theology.

I have done more exegesis of Kant in John Hare, God and Morality: A Philosophical History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 145–156. I am relying on an interpretation that derives ultimately from H. J. Paton, from whom my father R. M. Hare learnt it as an undergraduate. See H. J. Paton, The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant's Moral Philosophy (Tiptree, United Kingdom: Anchor Press, 1946), 133–164; and R. M. Hare, Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 107–116.

I will reference Kant's texts by the volume and page number of the Berlin Academy Edition (Berlin: George Reiner, later Walter de Gruyter, 1900-). The English translations I will use are from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Immanuel Kant, “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)” [Berlin Academy Edition, vol. 4, 421], in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 73.

Hare, Moral Thinking, 108.

Kant, “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)” [429], 80.

I have defended this kind of moral particularism in John E. Hare, God's Command (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 147–151. It is a good way, but not Kant's way, to understand the formula of humanity, that it requires me to love what is unique about my neighbor as well as her humanity, because (as I argue in this essay) what is unique (the haecceity) is a perfection of what is held in common.

Kleingeld, in “Kantian Patriotism,” distinguishes between three kinds of patriotism: civic patriotism, nationalist patriotism, and trait-based patriotism. In the first, a person is committed to support her own country because it is just and democratic and cannot sustain that character without the support of its citizens. Nationalist patriotism is based on love for one's own nation as necessary for a good psychological identity-formation, and Kleingeld cites Alasdair MacIntyre as a proponent, based on Alasdair MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 209–228. MacIntyre laments the condition of being “doomed to rootlessness, to be a citizen of nowhere.” Trait-based patriotism is loyalty to one's own country because of features it possesses that could in principle be possessed by other countries.

Duns Scotus, Lectura II, dist. 3.

I am taking this distinction from Hare, Moral Thinking, 44–64.

Derek Parfit, On What Matters, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 137. He calls this a “wide value-based objective view,” but he is not distinguishing, as I have just done, between two levels of moral thinking.

This is from Richard W. Miller, “Cosmopolitan Respect and Patriotic Concern,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 27 (3) (1998): 209. It is discussed in Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 164 ff.

The term “extreme cosmopolitanism” is from Robert Audi; see Robert Audi, “Religion, Politics, and Citizenship,” in Reasons, Rights, and Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 286.

Gillian Brock and Harry Brighouse, The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3.

Darrel Moellendorf, Cosmopolitan Justice (New York: Westview, 2002), 49.

Robert Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).

I have written about these two thinkers as well as George Kennan at greater length in John Hare and Carey Joynt, Ethics and International Affairs (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982), esp. chap. 2. See also Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (New York: Scribner's, 1932); and Hans Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946).

Immanuel Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” [Berlin Academy Edition, vol. 6, 29–39], in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. and trans. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

David and Good, Reinhold Niebuhr on Politics, 85. Morgenthau attended Niebuhr's lectures at Harvard and called him the greatest political thinker of his generation. For Morgenthau, as for Niebuhr, morality characteristically demands complete self-sacrifice, and we cannot achieve this politically because we are infected by the animus dominandi. He quoted Luther here, just as Niebuhr did, in Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics, 192–196.

For Kant, real possibility, unlike merely logical possibility, must be grounded in what is actual.

Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 91.

I have addressed this in more detail in John Hare, “Kantian Ethics, International Politics, and the Enlargement of the Foedus Pacificum,” in Sovereignty at the Crossroads: Morality and International Politics in the Post-Cold War Era, ed. Luis E. Lugo (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 71–92. There is an excellent response by David Lumsdaine, “Moral Rationality and Particularity: A Response to John Hare,” in the same volume.

Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace (1795)” [Berlin Academy Edition, vol. 8, 356], in Practical Philosophy, ed. Gregor, 311–351. A state is only a republic in the required sense if it operates three principles of government: the freedom of every member of the society as a human being, the equality with every other member as a subject, and the independence of every member of a commonwealth as a citizen. Michael Doyle, in a series of articles in the 1980s, argued that with a couple of exceptions, Kant's prediction has turned out to be correct. Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (3) (1983): 205–235, 325–253. Kant himself distinguishes between republicanism and democracy. See Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace (1795)” [352–353], but he is talking about democracies that do not respect individual rights.

Anthony Lake quoted in Thomas L. Friedman, “U.S. Vision of Foreign Policy Reversed,” The New York Times, September 22, 1993. This was not a merely partisan commitment. Ronald Reagan already had proclaimed to the British Parliament in June 1982, “a global campaign for democratic development” or “campaign for freedom,” which he claimed would strengthen the prospects for a world at peace; The New York Times, June 9, 1982.

An excellent example is the case of Argentina. See Peter H. Smith, “The Breakdown of Democracy in Argentina, 1916–30,” in The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: Latin America, ed. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 19. Consider also the cases of Germany, Italy, Peru, Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela; see Guillermo O'Donnell, “Permanent Crisis and the Failure to Create a Democratic Regime,” in ibid., 142.

There is a vivid indictment in Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations.

A fuller essay would look at texts from Kant's “Religion,” “The End of All Things,” “Conflict of the Faculties,” and “Toward Perpetual Peace (1795).”

Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace (1795)” [366].

Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). In a longer version of this essay, I would consider also the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah, and especially his Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers.

Jürgen Habermas, “The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship,” in The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1998), 115.

Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 169–170.

Ibid., 177.

The term “unstable” is Kant's, from Volckmann's notes on Kant's “Natürliche Theologie,” Berlin Academy Edition, vol. 28, 1151. Kant thought that perseverance in the moral life without belief in God was rationally unstable, though he knew people who lived with this instability and he thought of Spinoza as one such person.

Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace (1795)” [357] quoted in Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 21. See also Immanuel Kant, “The Metaphysics of Morals (1797)” [Berlin Academy Edition, vol. 6, 352], in Practical Philosophy, ed. Gregor.

Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 149.

In a longer essay, I would add a third: her appeal to Hegel's notion of concrete universals. This is not the right place to discuss whether this notion is coherent, and a more modest point is that the Hegelian dialectic of particular and universal is a history of Geist or Spirit, ending in the Absolute Spirit as the all-in-all. We cannot appeal to this notion in a “post-metaphysical universe.”

Jeremy Waldron in the same volume bases his confidence about the emergence and internalization of cosmopolitan norms on the increasing interdependence of nations and the rising levels of international trade and commerce; Jeremy Waldron, “Cosmopolitan Norms,” commentary in Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 94. But Benhabib is skeptical of this line of analysis. She thinks it sounds like nineteenth-century mercantilism; Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 153–154.

Ibid., 48–49.

Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice (1793)” [Berlin Academy Edition, vol. 8, 307–313], in Practical Philosophy, ed. Gregor, 273–309.

Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” [98].

S⊘ren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 230.

The case is discussed in Appiah, Cosmopolitanism, xvii-xviii. The quotation is from George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (London: Penguin, 1995), 745.

For example, Wendell Berry, Remembering (New York: North Point Press, 1988). In my home village, the descendants of the families who came to build the church and alms-houses and school in 1480 are still living in the village.

See Miriam Jordan, “Big Jump in Rejections at the Border as Asylum Seekers Face New Hurdles,” The New York Times, August 8, 2018.

See Kant, “On the Common Saying” [290].

See Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 46 ff.

See Immanuel Kant, “On the Miscarriage of All Philosophical Trials in Theodicy” [Berlin Academy Edition, vol. 8, 257].

See Immanuel Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason” [129]; Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics (Collins) [Berlin Academy Edition, vol. 27, 274]; and Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” [154].

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind (New York: Vintage Books, 2012), 308. I have discussed this work in Hare, God's Command, 267–272.

I have discussed all of these in ibid., 305 ff.

Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” 6.

Ibid., 98. See Hare, God's Command, 50–53.

Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace (1795),” 362.

Kant, “Critique of Practical Reason (1788),” 123.

I have done some exploration of this theology in John Hare, The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God's Assistance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), chap. 8 and 9.

The question about Germany is Charles Lockwood's, as is the following quotation from Merkel.

Angela Merkel said, “I lived behind a fence for too long for me to now wish for those times to return”; Angela Merkel quoted in Isaac Stanley-Becker, “The Refugee Crises Once Threatened to Sink Angela Merkel's Career. How Did the German Chancellor Weather the Storm?” The Washington Post, September 21, 2017.

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Rishabh B Prasad , Chirag Patel

Humanism has a long and sophisticated history. Secular humanism encourages us to believe that humanism was born and faded in ancient Greece, then reborn in the renaissance as part of the narrative that includes the enlightenment and the modern era. This is only true if we take a very limited view of humanism. In fact, humanist philosophies that deny the supernatural and emphasise the human have been a central part of the development of civilisation over the last two thousand years. This paper unpacks an alternate, more historically accurate and inclusive history of humanism. In this history, humanism begins in ancient Asia and transmits to Europe, China, the Middle East, and back to Europe. In each case, there is a clear point of cultural and conceptual contact, as well as a significant development in the overall philosophy of humanism. NOTE: this paper is the first in a series tracing the development of humanist thought across Eurasia. Subsequent papers detail the development of humanist spiritual, ethical, legal and professional systems through Buddhist & Taoist Indo- China, Han China, Medieval Islam, and modern medical practice respectively.

Nizami Mamedov

The article reveals that the main socio-philosophical doctrines: 1) approach social development mainly in an abstract way, regardless of human nature; 2) do not take into consideration the factors of vagueness and self-organization which are an integral part of human being’s vital activity; 3) do not adequately inquire into the role of cultural facts in a historical perspective. Cataclysms in the modern world, socio-economic, ecologic and other crises appear in a different light if considered in the context of conceptions about human nature. A move of society towards genuine humanistic existence depends, to a great extent, on the prospects of all round development of a human being, his/her personal moral qualities. It is highlighted that the inability to reasonably manage social processes, which are determined by the archaic human nature, causes danger to humankind. The human mind has its own history and many traces of the previous stages of development are imprinted into the psyche...

Harun Yahya Books

Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya) Fascism is known as an ideology that was born and flourished in the 20th century. It spread rapidly across the world in the wake of World War I, with fascist regimes coming to power in Germany and Italy in particular, but also in such countries as Greece, Spain and Japan, where the people suffered greatly from the oppressive and violent methods employed by their governments. Against this oppression and violence, they could do little more than cower before it. The fascist dictator and his administration heading such systems, where brute force, aggression, bloodshed and violence were the rule of the day, sent waves of terror throughout the society with their secret police and fascist militia, paralyzing the people with fear. Furthermore, fascist administration was implemented in almost all levels of society, from education to culture, religion to art, the governmental structure to the military system, and from the policing organizations to peoples' private lives. Ultimately, World War II, initiated by fascists, was one of the gravest calamities in the history of mankind, leaving as many as 55 million dead. However, fascism is not an ideology found only in history books. Although today there are no states that call themselves fascist or who practice it openly, there are, nevertheless, in many countries in the world, governments, political groups and parties who follow fascistic policies. Though the names and tactics have changed, they continue to inflict similar suffering on their people. There is also a possibility that the coming deterioration of social conditions could lead to further growth in the support for fascism. For that reason, fascism is a continuing threat to humanity. This book has been written to confront this impending danger. It is intended to expose fascist tendencies that arise under various methods and forms, and to reveal their true root and aim. Another goal of this book is to remove the "religious" facade that fascism sometimes hides behind, and to reveal it as a system completely opposed to true religion. In order to cure a sickness, it is first necessary to identify the virus that causes it, to then fight it, and find an antidote to it. In this way, the conditions that enable it to thrive can be eliminated, thus doing away with the sickness itself. In a similar manner, to be free of the horror of "fascism," one must fight its ideological basis and the influences that aid it in its growth. As we shall come to see throughout this book, the fundamental principle behind fascism today is Darwinism, which is deceptively portrayed as a scientific theory although it is not. Nevertheless, Darwinism, which professes such claims as "human beings are developed animals," "Some races have been left behind in the evolutionary process," and "through survival of the fittest, the strong survive and the weak need be eliminated," has been the source of numerous harmful ideologies throughout the 20th century, and, especially, fascism. Therefore, as we shall be exploring in detail, Darwinism bears much of the responsibility for the oppression and violence that has been brought about. Even if we live in a country where there is not a fascist movement or fascist practices, where those who have sought to promote them have been checked, and where Darwinism has not been widely accepted, we must not lower our guard. All people of conscience must engage themselves in an ideological struggle against all forces and ideologies that cause mischief in the world and aim to destroy peace and order. God has ordered man to live in peace and security. In the Koran He commands: You who believe! Enter absolutely into peace (Islam). Do not follow in the footsteps of Satan. He is an outright enemy to you. (Koran, 2:208)

The Oxford Handbook of Humanism

J. Brent Crosson

Humanism and Enlightenment are words associated with the birth of rights-bearing Man. Yet this birth was accompanied by the rise of another Enlightenment concept: race. This chapter theorizes the effects of the twinned, contradictory birth of pseudo-biological human difference and "universal" Man. Starting in the Renaissance and concluding in the "posthuman" present, the chapter shows how conceptions of the human emerged from interactions between Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. From the Enlightenment onward, theories of religion, politics, and culture have centered on contestations over the limits of this human. Rather than telling a linear narrative of Man-human-posthuman, such contests present an unfinished project that continues to this day.

Valentyn Stetsyuk

The severity of the systemic crisis in the world became apparent after Russia's unprovoked armed attack on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The world turned out to be powerless to counteract absolute evil, despite the statements of the democratic world about the immediate need to tame the aggressor by peaceful means. While acknowledging the existence of a systemic crisis in the world, the article contains a polemic with the American philosopher Chung-Ying Cheng about the role of Confucianism in the formation of ethical standards. In the process of analyzing the results of studies of prehistoric ethnogenetic processes, some principles and ideas laid down by God as the basis for the earthly civilization created by Him were found: comprehensive structuring and polymorphism of human society, as well as a special psychological quality of a person in the form of the inner voice of conscience, which opens the law, which always calls him to love and do good and to which he must obey.

soghra sayyadi

Humanism is a broad system of values, a program of learning, and a historical development that does not belong to a particular period, people, or place. It cannot be confined within the European context, in particular the Renaissance period, as Lauro Martines does by describing humanism as “a program for the ruling classes”. Martines’ class analysis does well in capturing the class dimension of the Renaissance, the misuse of humanism as a political tool by the elites. However, his analysis is only applicable to a certain place which is Europe, and at a particular time, the fifteenth century. Hence, to describe humanism as merely an elite propaganda is only to recognize a characteristic of the Quattrocento humanism than humanism more broadly. To get a better conceptualization of humanism, this essay aims to take humanism outside its later stages of development in Europe and into the Islamic world wherein earlier stages of development had taken place. Therefore, a great emphasis is given to Islamic humanism.

Human Affairs

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Patriotism vs humanity, and blinkered Indian media

Is the Indian media facing its biggest-ever credibility crisis? Declining patronage, the consequential fall in revenue and growing accusations of being a mouthpiece of people in power have all coalesced to create a toxic mix, raising serious questions about its relevance in the overall societal construct.

Let’s face it, the media in the country has never really been independent due to its undesirable and excessive dependence on governments of the day for survival. For as long as it worked, it was a cosy arrangement. Both sides operated in a mutually understood but unstated sphere, with the media claiming to be independent and the governments not disputing it, knowing full well it could throttle it within a blink.

What has exposed us now is that this carefully crafted image of neutrality has been shattered. The media’s integrity is being rightly questioned as it has largely given up its fundamental obligation to ask questions, preoccupied as it is with pushing the narrative that those in power would want the people to believe. We have reduced ourselves to being stenographers and not journalists; gotten used to predetermined questions and answers while branding them as exclusive interviews; have no qualms in posing to the camera with those in power and then amplifying it on social media to establish loyalty; the long-held belief that news columns are sacrosanct is gone with not many being able to distinguish between paid articles and advertisements; television anchors vie with each other every evening to do a better job of being apologists for the government; we have taken upon ourselves the onerous task of ensuring electoral victory for parties of our choice; and we no longer question mixing religion with politics and instead become part of that process with the tag line, “non-stop coverage on your favourite channel” (no one knows whose favourite—viewers or rulers). So, why crib about declining patronage and respect, exceptions notwithstanding? It’s not as if we have stopped asking questions of only the Union government and those representing it. We don’t ask questions even of those ruling in the states. It took actor Swara Bhasker to seek a direct response from Mamata Banerjee on her stance on the Unlawful Activities Prevention (Amendment) Act (UAPA) and the answer was anything but direct. In what sense is she an alternative to Narendra Modi, as she is seeking to establish, is difficult to comprehend.

To view this in isolation would, however, be a mistake. Large sections of our people have consciously chosen what we have today: disdain for intellectuals; normalising instant justice (remember how the Hyderabad Police were felicitated for killing the alleged rapists of a young woman); controlled mass media; sweeping powers to the military in troubled states; and a draconian process to identify enemies/scapegoats (Sudha Bharadwaj, Disha Ravi). What all this points to is anybody’s guess but it works in an unsettling way.

As acclaimed long-standing UK journalist, John Kampfner, asks in his book Freedom for Sale , how many would actually complain if repression is selective and applied only to those who challenge the status quo? The number is negligible. The vocal ones would be a few journalists who criticise the government or show it in poor light; select lawyers who defend the basic rights of people; and activists who cross the line. The rest of the population has all the freedom to travel wherever they want and do whatever they wish, and would obviously remain unaffected by the curbs on public freedom as long as their private freedom is granted. Call it benevolent dictatorship, as one senior IPS officer put it to me. Who cares if Muslims or Christians are targeted during Friday or Sunday prayers or if a band of Hindutva protagonists openly call for a genocide.

Like in the case of the media, it’s a collusion between a comfortable middle class and the government that enables it to abrogate even basic freedoms so long as the former are in their comfort zones without intrusion into their private spaces. If Aadhaar is now being seen as a weapon to gather every bit of information about citizens, its roots go back to the UPA regime. If UAPA is now being misused, the seeds for it were sown during the previous rule. The same holds true of even the judiciary. A few stood out in the past and some continue to show the same spirit now. But look at how even well-meaning journalists and intellectuals are carried away by the grandstanding of judges at seminars and meetings without having delivered a single order that is seriously uncomfortable to the government. A committee set up to look into whether snooping ever happened is the best way to bury the issue. The judiciary’s approach towards other matters, too, is largely similar.

That’s what thriving consumerism achieves. Citizens start demanding less of governments as long as they are comfortable. Consciously or otherwise, even the liberals are lulled into it with their criticism often being at a very superficial level without questioning the model itself. Ever since globalisation began, we always had only as much freedom as the government of the day chose to accord. In its relentless pursuit to establish this country as the land of Hindus, it’s only natural that the present regime or those claiming to be its supporters seek more compliance from its patrons (media, corporates, etc.) and from citizens without a murmur of protest—from where to pray, when to pray, what to eat, how to dress, whom to marry and so on.

What this government, however, doesn’t seem to realise, at least until now, is that by its very nature, capitalism uses democracy to sustain itself. Not surprisingly, corporates of India are beginning to worry about their future prospects since the social fabric is coming under strain. Not just that. Over the past few years and particularly since Covid, the middle class has been shaken out of its comfort zone. Jobs are diminishing, enormous and often unbearable amounts are being lost in medical expenses, education is getting costlier and income levels are going down for a vast majority even as we have more millionaires and billionaires than ever before. As a result, a good number among the middle class are being pushed into the lower category. Neither the rulers nor their patrons speak of Achche Din or a five trillion dollar economy anymore. The greed because of which we let our freedoms be put up for sale is hurting, and the obvious question is whether the wealth we thought was ours was just an illusion.

To put it in the words of Rabindranath Tagore, “Human freedom stands above everything. Patriotism cannot be our final spiritual shelter; my refuge is humanity. ... I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity.” Let the troll army ponder over it. Here’s wishing you all a very happy Christmas and New Year.

G S Vasu Editor, The New Indian Express Email: [email protected]

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Patriotism and Nationalism as Two Distinct Ways of Loving One’s Country

Maria Ioannou 2 ,
Martijn Boot 2 ,
Ryan Wittingslow 2 &
Adriana Mattos 2
First Online: 21 September 2021

407 Accesses

Love for a country has come to be linked with two terms: patriotism and nationalism. The conceptual distinction between these two ideas has been a matter of controversy. In this chapter we propose that one way of thinking about and distinguishing between patriotism and nationalism is via the very concept of love. We make the claim that what distinguishes patriotism and nationalism is not the quality of love but the type of love invoked. We argue that love in patriotism is similar to familial love (love for one’s parents) whereas love in nationalism resembles intense passionate romantic love. We furthermore argue that love involved in our conception of patriotism can be harmless, while the kind of love associated with the relevant conception of nationalism can be dangerous and easily involves “bad faith,” a deceptive faith in the superior goodness of one’s country. To substantiate our claim, we draw from literature across different disciplines: philosophy, political psychology, and biology.

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Ioannou, M., Boot, M., Wittingslow, R., Mattos, A. (2021). Patriotism and Nationalism as Two Distinct Ways of Loving One’s Country. In: Cushing, S. (eds) New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72324-8_14

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COMMENTS

Which Is More Important: Patriotism or Humanity?
But the mind is still bound by the boundaries, the mind is still bound by the politicians. True freedom is freedom from boundaries, freedom from servitude to one "race" of people, freedom to tell the truth to a person who does not want to accept it, and most importantly, freedom to think. Yes, freedom to think.
Essay on Patriotism for Students and Children
Essay on Patriotism: Patriotism refers to the passionate love one has for their country. This virtue pushes to citizens of a country to work for their country selflessly and make it better. A truly developed country is made up of true patriots. In other words, patriotism means keeping the country's interest first and then thinking about ...
Patriotism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Viroli, Maurizio, 1995, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weil, Simone, 1952, The Need for Roots, trans. A.F. Wills, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ... "Love of Country and Love of Party: Patriotism and Human Nature in Machiavelli," History of Political Thought, 25: 424-45 ...
In defense of a reasonable patriotism
In defense of a reasonable patriotism. This essay is adapted from remarks delivered by William Galston at the Estoril Political Forum on June 25, 2018. Galston was invited to deliver the forum's ...
8) Is patriotism more important than humanity? Justify ...
Topic: role of family, society and educational institutions in inculcating values. 8) Is patriotism more important than humanity? Justify. In your opinion, how patriotism should be inculcated among citizens? Comment. (150 Words) The Hindu The Indian Express
Patriotism
General Overviews, Introductions, and Collections of Papers. This section contains the most useful overviews and collections. Nussbaum and Cohen 2002 collects now-classical papers on patriotism, some of which are also cited in this section. Barber 2002 offers a rationale for constitutional patriotism. Canovan 1996 and Canovan 2000 problematize the status of patriotism.
The Ethics of Patriotism: A Debate
John Kleinig, Simon Keller, and Igor Primoratz, The Ethics of Patriotism: A Debate, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, 189pp., $34.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780470658857. ... Although much of the the initial essays' contents have been articulated elsewhere by the authors, in this volume they each take pains in the middle section to truly engage with the other ...
Patriotism and Humanity on JSTOR
But the real value of patriotism goes back to the value of free self-development for all men in company with their fellows; to the conception that humanity must grow through. the work, not of one individual or of few or of many, but of all, each with a unique value and therefore each with. not only a right but a duty to work out his own contribu-.
For Love of Country: An Essay On Patriotism and Nationalism
While nationalism values the cultural, religious, and ethnic unity of a people, patriotism is the love of a people's common liberty, which gives us the strength to resist oppression by the selfish ambitions of particular individuals. In addition, patriotism is a rational love, since civic virtue is instrumental to the preservation of law and ...
'Patriotism', 'Cosmopolitanism' and 'Humanity' in Victorian Political
It is argued that: (a) there was no neat distinction between 'patriotism' and 'nationalism' in the thought of the time; (b) 'patriotism' was seen as a stepping stone to universalistic commitment to 'humanity' rather than as opposed to or incompatible with the latter; (c) most thinkers avoided the term 'cosmopolitanism ...
Pro Patria: An Essay on Patriotism
This essay focuses on what patriotism is, as opposed to the value of patriotism. It focuses further on the basic patriotic motive: one acts with this motive if one acts on behalf of one's country as such. I first argue that pre-theoretically the basic patriotic motive is sufficient to make an act patriotic from a motivational point of view. In particular the agent need not ascribe virtues or ...
Patriotism
patriotism, feeling of attachment and commitment to a country, nation, or political community. Patriotism (love of country) and nationalism (loyalty to one's nation) are often taken to be synonymous, yet patriotism has its origins some 2,000 years prior to the rise of nationalism in the 19th century. Greek and especially Roman antiquity ...
Patriotism versus Cosmopolitanism
The Wikipedia entry on patriotism; Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" speech; The National Museum of Patriotism's website; Emma Goldman's essay "Patriotism: A Menace to Liberty" An essay entitled "Cosmopolitanism and the Internet" A website about what patriotism is, reasons for it and what each person can do to be ...
Patriotism and Civic Virtue
There is disagreement as to whether civic virtue is a human excellence, whether it contributes to a good life, how much civic behavior it requires, and whether it is relative to contingent social norms. ... Viroli M (1997) For love of country: an essay on patriotism and nationalism. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Book Google Scholar Viroli M ...
2 Nationalism and Patriotism
Here, those who wish to repudiate the vice of nationalism consider patriotism a virtue. Patriotism is seen as a middle way between bland apathy and excessive devotion: 'a particular loyalty compatible with universal reasonable values' (Vincent 2002: 111). The category covers philosophers and theologians as well as constitutional political ...
Patriotism and Its Critics
Abstract. Both historically and conceptually, patriotism has been one of the foundational characteristics that defines the very essence of one's attachment, identification, and loyalty to a political community and a basic virtue associated with citizenship as a political conception of the person. Despite its centrality in the pantheon of ...
Nationalism
Still, proponents and opponents of patriotism tend to agree that it is a character trait. 2. One view is that patriotism is loyalty to political institutions, specifically republican, rather than to an ethnocultural community (Connor, 1994; Dietz, 1989; Taylor, 1997; Viroli, 1995). However, this definition is questionable.
Patriotism & Moral Theology
Patriotism has often been negatively evaluated. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, said that "patriotism from an absolute perspective is simply another form of selfishness," that social groups are held together by emotion rather than reason, and that love for one's country "slews into nationalism." 1 This essay is an attempt to locate a kind of justifiable patriotism.
Developing the Spirit of Patriotism and Humanism in Children
Humanist patriotism has been a theme of many movies, songs, poems, essays, and paintings in India. The governmental promotion of patriotism through national symbols, media, sports, and education has played an important role in the creating within the citizens an awareness of their national identity.
Patriotism vs humanity, and blinkered Indian media
Patriotism vs humanity, and blinkered Indian media. Media's integrity is being rightly questioned as it has largely given up its core obligation to ask questions, preoccupied as it is with ...
Patriotism and Nationalism as Two Distinct Ways of Loving ...
Love for a country has come to be linked with two concepts: patriotism and nationalism. The distinction between these two concepts has been a matter of controversy. In this chapter, we argue that one way of thinking about and distinguishing between patriotism and nationalism is via the very concept of love. More narrowly, we argue that love in ...
Patriotism Vs Human Rights. Linking Patriotism And Human
Patriotism is the love of a nation and human rights is the love of mankind. Bringing them together to show that, no matter your background, having a love for your country and of human beings should be treated the same. Finding a connection between the constitutional patriotism, that gives an understanding of both state and politics, and human ...
Which, according to you, is higher
Humanity vs Patriotism . Humanity is above any boundary or prejudice, whereas patriotism is loyalty to one particular country or place where we live. Both are essential for human beings. We should be loyal and devoted to our country and full of patriotic fervour. ... Essay on Patriotism in 150 Words. asked Apr 1, 2023 in English by ...

Essay on Patriotism for Students and Children

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1.1 What is patriotism?

2. Normative issues

2.2.1 Extreme patriotism

2.2.2 Robust patriotism

2.2.3 Moderate patriotism

2.2.4 Deflated patriotism

2.2.5 Ethical patriotism

Acknowledgments

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In defense of a reasonable patriotism

Introduction

How patriotism can be reasonable

Why impartiality is not always right

Why patriotism is not so different from other loyalties

Conclusion: the last full measure of devotion

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8) Is patriotism more important than humanity? Justify. In your opinion, how patriotism should be inculcated among citizens? Comment.

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Why Is the World So Weird?

2 Nationalism and Patriotism

I. Introduction

II. Features of Nationalism

Primordial and Political

States and Nations

Patriotism and Nationalism

True History?

American Experience

Modern Invention

Imagined Community

III. Theological Nationalism

Ecclesiology

Soteriology

Eschatology

Divinization

IV. Towards a Theological Critique

The Social Individual

Neighbourhood Not Nationhood

V. Conclusion

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Article contents

Introduction: A Contested Concept

Nationalism or Patriotism?

The Origins and Nature of Nationalism

Modernism and Its Proponents

Antimodernism

Conceptions of the Nation

Civic and Ethnic Views of the Nations

The Justification of Nationalism

Liberal Nationalism and Its Defense

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