Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community

By Bernard Yack

Nationalism is one of modern history’s great surprises. How is it that the nation, a relatively old form of community, has risen to such prominence in an era so strongly identified with the individual? Bernard Yack argues that it is the inadequacy of our understanding of community—and especially the moral psychology that animates it—that has made this question so difficult to answer.

Yack develops a broader and more flexible theory of community and shows how to use it in the study of nations and nationalism. What makes nationalism such a powerful and morally problematic force in our lives is the interplay of old feelings of communal loyalty and relatively new beliefs about popular sovereignty. By uncovering this fraught relationship, Yack moves our understanding of nationalism beyond the oft-rehearsed debate between primordialists and modernists, those who exaggerate our loss of individuality and those who underestimate the depth of communal attachments.

A brilliant and compelling book, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community sets out a revisionist conception of nationalism that cannot be ignored.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226944685

Bernard Yack

Bernard Yack is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin.

Book preview

BERNARD YACK is the Lerman-Neubauer Professor of Democracy in the Department of Politics at Brandeis University. He is the author of several books, including The Problems of a Political Animal and Liberalism without Illusions.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12   1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-94466-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-94467-8 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-94466-2 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-94467-0 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-94468-5 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Yack, Bernard, 1952–

Nationalism and the moral psychology of community / Bernard Yack.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-94466-1 (cloth: alkaline paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-94466-2 (cloth: alkaline paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-94467-8 (paperback: alkaline paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-94467-0 (paperback: alkaline paper) 1. Nationalism. 2. Nation-state. 3. Nationalism—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title.

JC311.Y23 2012

320.54—dc23

2011030920

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Nationalism and the Moral

Psychology of Community

BERNARD YACK

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

FOR MARION

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART ONE

PART TWO

INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

General studies of nationalism usually take one of two forms: the short, sharp theoretical essay and the long, exhaustive comparative study. This book, I am afraid, falls somewhere between the two. It is a rather long—though I hope not exhausting—theoretical study of the subject.

As such, the book is relatively unusual. We political theorists have finally begun to pay serious attention to nationalism. But we still rarely devote anything like the sustained analysis to the subject that we devote to other key concepts, such as liberty or justice or the state. Perhaps that is because with nationalism we have few canonical examples to follow. No Marx, no Mill, no Machiavelli. Only minor texts by first-rate thinkers, like Fichte, or major texts by second-rate thinkers, like Mazzini. Or perhaps it is because the success of nationalism has proved such an embarrassment for virtually every major modern school of political thought, from liberalism and Marxism to conservatism and communitarianism. The fact that fascism is the only major modern political ideology that seems unembarrassed by its association with nationalism does not exactly enhance its attractiveness. Whatever the reason, the short, pointed essay—most often directed at our colleagues’ delusions about the subject—seems to be the form in which social and political theorists feel most comfortable dealing with nationalism.

That is the kind of book I set out to write as well. I was astonished by the way in which moral and political philosophers in the 1980s seemed to be ignoring the importance of nationalism, even as they threw themselves into a series of intense debates about the role of community in modern society. As a Canadian living and teaching in the United States in the 1980s, I found it very difficult to connect these debates to my experience of everyday life in this country. How could anyone think of the individuals chanting U.S.A., U.S.A. at the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984 as unencumbered selves, to use the expression Michael Sandel made popular? (The Russians and East Germans boycotted the games that year, so American spectators got to celebrate their encumbrances even more than they usually do on such occasions.) How could social and political theorists talk so much about whether or not American individualists could live without community and yet show no interest in Americans’ intense and noisy attachment to their nation?

I tried to answer these questions in a pair of essays, Does Liberal Practice ‘Live Down’ to Liberal Theory? and The Myth of the Civic Nation. But having explained why many of my colleagues were ignoring the national elephant in the room, I still found it difficult to say what it was doing there or even to give a coherent account of its characteristics as a species. I had, it seems, cleared a construction site rather than an unobstructed view of a previously hidden subject. Rather than return to more familiar and less daunting subjects, I decided to get to work on that site and write the book you have before you.

The key claim of this book—and the primary reason for its length—is that it is the inadequacy of our understanding of the phenomenon of community that has made it so difficult to explain and evaluate our reliance on national loyalties. In other words, it is our misunderstanding of the genus, community, that has created so much confusion and uncertainty in the study of its surprisingly powerful species, the nation. In order to correct this misunderstanding, the book proposes an alternative theory of community, one that develops a broader and more flexible understanding of the moral psychology that animates this form of human association. (Moral psychology here and throughout the book refers to the ways in which we imagine others as objects of our concern and obligation. As such, it is an essential, if often underappreciated, phenomenon for political theorists like myself.) The book argues that we need to replace models of community shaped by images of solidarity or collective identity with a model shaped by the relations of mutual concern and loyalty characteristic of what I call social friendship. It then shows how this alternative understanding of community can help us make better sense of nations and nationalism and the problems that they create for us.

I suspect that many students of nationalism, tired as they are of the seemingly endless and circular attempts to define the nation, may think that the last thing we need is a step back to an even higher level of abstraction. But I hope to show that it is precisely our failure to take this step and rework our understanding of community that has made our efforts to make sense of nations and nationalism so frustrating. Theoretical studies of nationalism have so far shown little of what Hegel liked to call the patience of the concept. I hope that this study will prove that such patience will be rewarded.

Acknowledgments

This project has been supported over the years by a number of institutions: the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (SCASSS) at Uppsala, the Center for European Studies at Harvard, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Brandeis University. I am very grateful to them all for their interest in my work and for their generosity. I would especially like to thank Mark Beissinger, Crawford Young, and the rest of my former colleagues at Madison’s Research Circle on Nationalism and Cultural Pluralism for the encouragement they gave me at the start of this project, as well Johann Arnason, John Hall, Hans Joas, and Björn Wittrock for their intellectual fellowship during my year at Uppsala. My thanks also to Julie Seeger for help preparing the final version of the text.

: : :

I have benefited tremendously from the responses I have received over the years to my ideas about nationalism—much more, I suspect, than I can remember. I would, however, like to take the opportunity to thank a few individuals whose comments were particularly important to the development of my book: Jens Bartelson, Sam Beer, Ron Beiner, Margaret Canovan, Ingrid Creppell, John Hall, Stephen Holmes, John Hutchinson, Margaret Moore, Gary Shiffman, Rogers Smith, and Kamila Stullerova. My greatest debt, as ever, is to Marion Smiley, my co-conspirator in life. I could never have begun—let alone completed—this book if her insight and generosity had not lit the way.

: : :

Portions of this book have appeared in earlier forms, though all have been extensively revised for their publication here. Chapter 1 first appeared as The Myth of the Civic Nation, Critical Review 10 (Spring 1996): 193–212, and then in a revised form in Ronald Beiner, ed., Theorizing Nationalism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998), 103–18. Portions of chapter 6 first appeared as Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism, Political Theory 29 (4): 517–36. © 2001 Sage Publications. One section of chapter 8 draws on material that appeared in Birthright, Birthwrongs: Contingency, Choice and Community in Recent Political Thought, Political Theory 39 (3): 406–16. © 2011 Sage Publications. And some sections of chapter 9 first appeared as You Don’t Have to Be a Fanatic to Act Like One, Studi Veneziani 59 (2010): 27–43.

Introduction

Nationhood and Community

The rise of nationalism is one of modern history’s greatest surprises. Our classic theories of modern society have taught us to associate modern times with the weakening of inherited loyalties, with a shift from intergenerational communities to voluntary associations of individuals. But the near universal spread of nationalism tells a different story. For it suggests that at least one form of intergenerational community has not just survived, but flourished in the modern world. The nation, it seems, has shared the individual’s rise to prominence in modern political life.

When historical developments surprise us in this way, it usually means that there is something wrong with either our assumptions about what should have happened or our interpretations of what actually did happen. With regard to the triumph of nationalism, most scholars seem to have concluded that it is our interpretations of events that need correction. For they have worked very hard at developing accounts of nationalism that bring the phenomenon back into line with the conceptual dichotomies—gemeinschaft versus gesellschaft, tradition versus modernity—that ground our most influential theories of modern society and development. Some argue that despite its bad manners and country dress nationalism is really quite at home, even indispensable, in the modern world of contract and commerce. Others teach us that nationalism is an intruder from the premodern world of blood and soil, an outburst of the primitive passions that modern society has tried so hard to repress. Still others contend that nationalism appears in both forms, as a liberal devotion to shared political principles in civic nations and as an illiberal passion for ancestor worship in their ethnic counterparts.

But if nations and nationalism have become so commonplace in the modern world, then perhaps it is our theoretical assumptions about intergenerational community that cry out for revision, rather than our interpretations of nations and nationalism. If national community plays so large a role in modern societies, then perhaps we were wrong to identify modern life so completely with a shift from the contingencies of intergenerational loyalty to the purposiveness of individual choice and contract. If large and impersonal national forms of community appear in traditional societies, then perhaps we were wrong to identify the premodern world so strongly with kin- and village-centered communities. The nation, with its passionate appeals to inherited loyalties, certainly looks like an anomaly in the modern world when it is viewed through the lens of our most influential theories of history and social development. But if it has nevertheless risen to unprecedented political importance in that world, then perhaps it is time to have our eyes checked and get some new glasses.

This book grinds the lenses for these glasses and shows how to use them in the study of nations and nationalism. It proposes a broader and more flexible theory of community, one that treats community as a generic component of human association, rather than as a special product of traditional family and village life. And it then shows how this theory can help us solve old puzzles and generate new insights into the role of nations and nationalism in modern political life. Part 1 addresses explanatory issues, such as how to understand nations and nationalism as social phenomena and how to account for their unexpected rise to political prominence. Part 2 addresses normative and practical issues, focusing, in particular, on what I call the moral problem with nationalism. Both parts, however, try to show that we can dispel much of the confusion surrounding the study of nationalism once we free our understanding of community from the grip of the dichotomies that shape our most influential social theories.

Benedict Anderson’s account of nations as imagined communities takes an important step toward this goal.¹ Indeed, I suspect that this famous argument owes much of its influence to the way in which it loosens the conceptual straitjacket that modern social theories have placed on thinking about national community. The concept of imagined communities helps us cross the divide that separates gemeinschaft from gesellschaft and begin to think more creatively about the forms of community that bind large and relatively impersonal groups like the nation.

Nevertheless, Anderson’s concept provides us with only a first step in the right direction. For the triumph of nationalism in the modern world challenges us to rethink our understanding of communal membership itself, not just our understanding of how far such membership can be extended. In particular, it challenges us to improve our understanding of the moral psychology of community, by which I mean the way in which we imagine ourselves connected to the concerns of people with whom we share things. If community plays such a powerful role in large, impersonal forms of association like the nation, then it cannot be defined in terms of familiarity, kinship, frequent interaction, or any of the other factors that unite the small face-to-face forms of association with which it is usually identified. Anderson’s concept of imagined community helps us account for the strong connections we feel to people with whom we never interact. But in doing so it raises new questions about what it means to be connected to others in a distinctly communal way.²

In gemeinschaft models, it is the subordination of individuals to the group that makes a community. Communities connect us by submerging our differences in a collective will or identity and are contrasted with forms of association that we construct to serve our interests as discrete individuals.³ Nations, from this point of view, must fall into one category or the other. They must either subordinate individuals or be subordinated to individual needs and interests, hence the familiar contrast between so-called primordialist and instrumentalist (or modernist) theories of nationalism that shapes so much scholarly analysis of the subject.⁴

In my alternative model, it is a moral relationship between individuals, which I call social friendship, that makes a community.⁵ Communities connect us by means of our disposition to show special concern and loyalty to people with whom we share things, rather than through our subordination to or merging with the group. These feelings of mutual concern and loyalty, unlike the submergence of individuals in the group, are a common feature of everyday life, though they vary in depth and intensity from one form of community to another. For the members of some communities we are disposed to sacrifice a minute of our time; for the members of others, our lives. But every form of community relies on these moral sentiments to establish connections among individuals.

Community, I shall argue, has taken so many different forms because human beings share so many different things—from places and practices to beliefs, choices, and lineages—that can be imagined as sources of mutual connection. From this perspective, the relatively small and tightly integrated groups that our theoretical vocabulary associates with the term represent a particular species of community, one that has less prominence in our lives now than it once had. The nation represents a different species of community, an intergenerational community whose members are connected by feelings of mutual concern and loyalty for people with whom they share a heritage of cultural symbols and stories.⁶

Since this alternative model of community does not demand the surrender of individual will or identity associated with older and more familiar models, it does not compel us to choose between nation and individual as the focus of analysis, between primordialist theories of nationalism that exaggerate our loss of individuality and modernist theories that underestimate the depth and genuineness of our communal attachments. We have every reason to unmask the efforts that nations often make to extend their reach deep into the past, all the way back to the kind of small, tightly integrated communities associated with the concept of gemeinschaft. But we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The fact that nations falsely claim one form of inter generational community should not lead us to ignore the kind of inter generational community that they actually do possess. Unfortunately, as long as we continue to employ conceptual dichotomies that oppose community to voluntary, impersonal, and distinctly modern forms of association, we will probably continue to do so.

The rise of nationalism does not represent the return of some repressed desire to surrender ourselves to the group. But it does draw on and intensify our disposition to show special concern and loyalty toward people with whom we share things. That is why I believe that we cannot make sense of the place of nations and nationalism in our lives until we develop a better understanding of the moral psychology of community and its role in everyday life.

Nationalism and Liberal Individualism

The prominence of nations and nationalism in modern political life poses special problems for liberals, since they generally welcome the loosening of intergenerational ties as a measure of moral and political progress. In the liberal vision of history, increasingly cosmopolitan individuals were supposed to inherit the earth from authoritarian patriarchs and religious moralists. As things have turned out, however, they have had to share that inheritance with nations. For the age of liberal individualism has been the great age of nationalism as well, at least so far. Every major landmark in the spread of liberal democracy since the end of the seventeenth century—the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the French Revolution of 1789, the revolutions of 1848, the American Civil War, the collapse of the European empires at the end of World War I, decolonization after World War II, and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire in 1989—is also a landmark in the spread of nationalist sentiments. The modern enhancement of individual rights and autonomy seems to be connected in some way to the spread of a new and immensely powerful expression of communal loyalty.

Most liberal theorists find this development rather perplexing, since inherited community is not, we are repeatedly told, the approach favored in our modern world of free and autonomous individuals.⁷ Marxists, Ernest Gellner once joked, felt compelled to come up with a wrong address theory in order to explain why the message that history had prepared for the workers of the world had been delivered instead to nations.⁸ Liberals, it seems, face a similar challenge, although they are only now beginning to address it. Some, like John Dunn, suggest that there has been a massive betrayal of liberal principles, a habit of accommodation of which we feel the moral shabbiness readily enough ourselves.⁹ Others, like Yael Tamir, suggest that we must have access to a distinctly liberal form of nationalism, one that allows us to translate nationalist arguments into [the] liberal language of individual rights and voluntary association.¹⁰ Both groups agree, however, that the task is to bring liberal practice into line with the familiar image of a modern world of free and autonomous individuals. They disagree merely about whether we need to abandon nations and nationalism in order to do so.

Yet if national loyalties play such a prominent role in our world of relatively free and autonomous individuals, then might that not suggest that there is something wrong with what we are repeatedly told about it? I think so. It appears that there is much more room in that world for communal loyalty and intergenerational connection than we have been led to believe. Imagining nation and state as voluntary associations of independent individuals may have helped us win the fight against patriarchy, paternalism, and aristocratic privilege. But it prepares us poorly for dealing with the communal loyalties that continue to inform our moral life and the forms of membership that most of us enter involuntarily, by means of the contingencies of birth. Whether it is the explanation or the evaluation of nationalism that we seek, we need to broaden the understanding of human association that informs the most familiar pictures of the liberal political world.

If you believe that inherited communal loyalties are an anomaly in the modern political world, then the connections between nationalism and liberal individualism can only be explained if one of these ideologies has triumphed over the other: either liberals have been seduced by nationalist passions or they have found a means of remaking nationalism over in their own image. But if we revise and loosen our understanding of community in the ways in which I have recommended, we open the door to other and better ways of accounting for these connections. For while the tight-knit, tradition-bound, and patriarchal forms of community that we associate with the concept of gemeinschaft leave little room for the individual self-assertion that liberals prize, that tells us little about liberalism’s relationship to the more diffuse and impersonal form of intergenerational community actually introduced by the nation. If national community does not demand the subordination of individuals to the group, then we need not invoke liberalism’s betrayal or nationalism’s liberal makeover in order to explain the surprisingly close connections between nationalism and liberal individualism. We can look, instead, for points of contact between these two ideologies that sustain them both at the same time.

This book zeroes in on what seems to me to be the most important of these links between nationalism and liberal individualism: the new, more indirect conception of popular sovereignty introduced by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European thinkers. This conception of the people as constituent sovereign, the source—not the exerciser—of all legitimate authority, has steadily displaced its rivals as the foundation of a state’s legitimacy. In doing so, I shall argue, it provided the catalyst that has transformed the old and familiar phenomenon of national loyalty into that powerful new social force that we call nationalism, a development that helps explain why nationalism usually follows so closely on the heels of new triumphs of liberal democracy.¹¹ At the same time, liberals have repeatedly found themselves turning to the nation’s intergenerational sense of mutual concern and loyalty to deepen and stabilize the conception of the people upon which they rely for political legitimacy. That is why, I shall try to show, even such distinctively liberal practices as representative government and the constitutional protection of individual rights coexist so comfortably with the sense of intergenerational loyalty and continuity that national community provides.¹² In other words, nationalism and liberal democracy rise to prominence together for two reasons: liberal understandings of political legitimacy make an important, if unintended, contribution to the rise of nationalism; and national loyalties help liberals strengthen the principle of legitimacy that supports their political goals.

This explanation of the relationship between these two ideologies, I shall argue, is not only more plausible than its competitors, it serves us better in dealing with the problems that nationalism creates for liberal ideals and institutions. Standing firm against any political accommodation with the contingencies of birth and cultural inheritance may give us the satisfaction of feeling superior to the moral shabbiness of political reality. But it does little to help us address the problems that national ties create for liberal politics if key liberal practices are sustained by the intergenerational loyalties that they provide. For, in that case, national loyalties will sometimes be an ally as well as an enemy in the struggle with the moral shabbiness of the world. Insisting, instead, that we should translate nationalist arguments into the liberal language of individual rights and voluntary association may give us hope for a relatively safe and domesticated form of nationalism. But it will not help us much in taming nationalism, if, as I shall argue, visions of a purely civic nation or an apolitical cultural nationalism rest upon myths about liberal practice and wishful thinking about the origins of nationalism.¹³ For, in that case, intergenerational loyalties and cultural legacies will play a strong role in whatever forms of nationalism are confronted by liberal ideals and institutions.

Liberalism was never meant to be a utopian doctrine. It was developed to identify and justify practical reforms, taking men as they are and laws as they might be.¹⁴ But by insisting that we live up to a vision of the polity as a voluntary association for the expression of shared interests and principles, many contemporary liberal theorists revert to a kind of utopianism. We enter the world helpless and in need of a very long period of care. If we survive to become fully formed members of our species, it is only because we receive care from people who have entered life before us, care that inevitably establishes important connections between our world and theirs. Instead of chasing false promises of a way round this fact of human existence, promises of a purely principled and voluntary basis for political identity, we need to spend more of our time figuring out what kinds of accommodations with the contingencies of birth and cultural inheritance—and with what moral advantages and disadvantages—are available to us at any particular time and place. And in order to do that, we need to develop ways of talking about how choice and the contingencies of birth work together in the formation of community in modern political life in general, and in liberal societies in particular.

Liberal theorists have generally resisted doing so in the name of a worthy goal: protecting us from the cruel forms of violence and exclusion that have often followed in nationalism’s wake. But they do not serve that goal very well by proceeding in this way. The search for an intrinsically liberal nationalism promotes the illusion that we have nothing to fear from the forms of nationalism that thrive in liberal polities. And the blanket rejection of contingent and inherited communal loyalties not only blinds us to the positive role that such loyalties play in our moral lives,¹⁵ it misleads us about what makes nationalism such a powerful and potentially dangerous force in our lives. For nationalism, I shall argue, blends feelings of social friendship with beliefs about political justice in a way that tends to turn others into wrongdoers and loosen the moral restraints on the actions we are inclined to take against them. It is this explosive combination of feeling and belief that poses a serious threat to liberal ideals and institutions, not our mere inclination to display special concern and loyalty toward the members of our nation.¹⁶ Ironically, the translation of nationalism into the liberal language of individual rights and voluntary association may end up enflaming the passions it was designed to tame. For it not only misrepresents the threat that nationalism poses to liberal ideals and institutions; it deepens that threat by encouraging the members of national communities to assert themselves in the liberal language of fundamental rights.¹⁷

Moral Shabbiness and Moral Complexity

If, however, we make room for partial, inherited loyalties in our vision of liberal politics, are we not, as John Dunn suggests, indulging in a kind of moral shabbiness?¹⁸ It is hard to see things any other way as long as we cling to a Kantian or neo-Kantian view of morality, a view that locates the sole source of morality in the will of the good and rational individual. From this point of view, our reliance on national loyalties confronts us with a question about our moral flexibility: how far should we be willing to compromise our moral principles in the face of recalcitrant social conditions, or, in other words, how much moral shabbiness should we tolerate? But if we reject, as I believe we should, this overly monistic understanding of morality and treat mutual loyalty and concern as one of a number of sources of moral behavior, then it is our moral complexity that the prominence of national communities in liberal politics compels us to confront, rather than our moral shabbiness. We need to ask ourselves how to check and balance the different and competing sources of moral behavior available to us in our world, rather than how much we should be willing to bend our moral principles to make them effective in the world.

Insofar as the contingencies of birth and history shape the extent and character of the sentiments of mutual concern, friendship, and loyalty that people express toward each other, they contribute significantly to the moral resources we draw on when we ask people to behave in other-regarding ways. A world in which our connections to friends, family, and compatriots were the only source of moral behavior upon which to draw would indeed be an especially dangerous and violent world. But then so would a world in which moral principle were the only basis for judging what to do for each other, as even the most casual glance at history confirms. For reckless confidence in our moral righteousness has inspired no less violence than mindless solidarity with our own. That is why every society, including our own, has mined the moral resources in loyalty as well as obligation, in friendship as well as justice, and in contingency as well as choice.

In seeking some kind of accommodation with national loyalties, we must be prepared then to seek a balance between competing sources of morality rather than a compromise between moral principle and a recalcitrant world. Some ways of balancing these two aspects of our moral life will undoubtedly deserve our strongest condemnation. But the goal, from this perspective, is to find the best balance of competing moral concerns—remembering that even the best balance will include things to regret and fear—rather than to agonize about how far and fast we should relax our strict moral standards in order to be effective in an imperfect world.

Certainly, any commitments that lead us to ignore—let alone participate in—the wholesale murder and persecution of members of other ethnic and cultural communities deserve to be described as morally shabby and worse. But for many contemporary liberals it is the very idea of acknowledging contingencies of birth and cultural inheritance in our political arrangements, not just the violence that may be encouraged by doing so, that is perceived as morally shabby. As a result, they are sympathetic to arguments that any political accommodation with contingencies of birth, such as the privileges of birthright citizenship accorded to children of citizens or to individuals born within a particular state’s territory, is morally indefensible, a violation of liberalism’s commitment to a radical critique of all ascriptive privileges.¹⁹ Citizenship in Western liberal democracies, according to these arguments, is the modern equivalent of feudal privilege—an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances.²⁰ From this point of view, liberals can make no accommodation with national community without betraying their most fundamental moral principles. The majority of contemporary liberals do not go this far, but most tend to share Dunn’s sense that such arrangements are morally questionable, if often unavoidable.

There is, however, something odd about their moral rigor in this matter. Even Plato, whose name is synonymous with excessive rationalism for most contemporary liberals, recognized that we cannot undo the contingencies of birth and cultural inheritance that ground communal boundaries, however nobly we may lie about them. Accordingly, Plato acknowledged that even the most rational understanding of justice must find a place for the principle of doing good to friends and harm to enemies, even though our enemies often include as many virtuous individuals as our friends.²¹ Why then do so many contemporary liberals seem so willing to go beyond even Plato’s faith in reason’s ability to transform the underlying conditions of political life?

The reason, it seems, is that accommodation with the contingencies of birth and inherited loyalties appears to threaten a principle that liberals, unlike Plato, hold dear: that human beings are all born free and equal. If, as Figaro eloquently put it, no one should have the power to control another’s fate simply because he or she took the trouble to be born the son of a duke or the daughter of a slave-owner, why should anyone deserve our special concern and attention, not to mention unequal privileges and resources, simply because he or she was lucky enough to be born to a member of our relatively wealthy and fortunate political community? Liberals have always prided themselves on their resistance to ascription, from eighteenth-century assaults on royal patriarchy and aristocratic privilege to twentieth-century attacks on gender and racial discrimination. As a result, many liberals condemn any accommodation with the contingencies of birth that ground national loyalties as a moral lapse, a shameful admission of failure or cowardice in the face of the resistance of the world to our moral ideals.

We are born free and yet we are also born helpless and dependent on others in ways that make the contingencies of birth and cultural inheritance extremely important in our lives. How can we put these two descriptions of the human condition together? Kantians do so by erecting a wall between these two characterizations of human life: they portray the first as a normative claim and the second as an empirical description whose details can do nothing to prove or disprove the existence of our freedom. They then proceed to ground moral and political judgments on the rational faith in our freedom that this wall protects from empirical challenge. Contemporary neo-Kantians, such as Rawls and Habermas, no longer accept the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon that Kant used to erect this wall. But they continue to derive moral and political principles from the special moral point of view that we gain when we abstract from the contingencies that divide human beings up into different and competing communities.

But this general abstraction from contingency to a distinctive moral point of view was not part of the meaning behind early liberal claims that we are born free and equal. For early liberals, like Locke and many English and French revolutionaries, being born free meant being born free of anything that might naturally subordinate us to the political authority of others, in the way that we are naturally subordinated to the domestic authority of our parents or whoever it is that takes care of us at birth.²² Pre-Kantian liberals were concerned about the use of the contingencies of birth to establish special rights and privileges within political communities. Their attack on the celebration of these contingencies was part of a battle against caste and patriarchy. It is clear that they assumed that the shape and boundaries of these communities would continue to be informed by the contingencies that had always shaped them in the past.

Their failure to explore this assumption—as well as their overly optimistic expectations about the relatively peaceful quality of commercial societies—has left a large gap in most liberal theories. Neo-Kantian liberals urge us to fill this gap by generalizing the early liberals’ resistance to contingency. In doing so, I shall argue, they fail to understand the special requirements and difficulties of liberal politics. Pre-Kantian liberals did not feel compelled to choose between contingency and choice in forming their view of political morality and neither should we.²³ But we need to understand the special problems created for us by the reliance of liberal practice on a balance between these two sources of political morality.

Facing Up to Contingency

As should be clear by now, my arguments in this book reflect two recent trends in liberal political thought: its increased awareness of nations and nationalism as moral phenomena;²⁴ and its growing attachment to moral pluralism as a way of understanding and justifying our practical judgments.²⁵ Where my approach to these issues is most distinctive is in its focus on the concept of contingency, in particular, those contingencies that surround the conditions of our birth and help sustain intergenerational communities. Yael Tamir is certainly right to insist that any satisfactory theory of nationalism must try to structure itself independently of all contingencies.²⁶ But any satisfactory theory of nationalism will also have to be, among other things, a theory about contingency and its role in our lives. If such a theory draws its conceptual vocabulary and conclusions from the contingencies of a particular national history or ethnic struggle, it will severely limit its value. But if it fails to examine the role of contingency in our moral and political life, it will have missed its target entirely. For all nations, even those that sustain liberal practices and ideals, rely on the contingencies of birth and history that sustain intergenerational loyalties. Without a good understanding of the concept of contingency and its role in our lives, there will be a great hole in the center of even a relatively liberal account of nations and nationalism.

Contingency is one of those concepts that derives its meaning from the way in which it is contrasted with other concepts and phenomena. The two concepts with which it is most commonly contrasted are necessity, in one direction, and choice or purpose, in the other. When we are thinking about necessity, we tend to associate the contingent with the accidental, with whatever could easily have been otherwise, a category broad enough to include both random events and voluntary acts. From this point of view, our choices seem contingent unless they can be treated as inevitable consequences of a preceding set of causes. When we are thinking about choice and purpose, however, we tend to associate the contingent with the purposeless, a category broad enough to include mindless necessity, as well as random events. From this point of view, natural necessities seem contingent, unless we believe that nature itself was constructed to serve the aims of some superior being.

I shall, accordingly, use the term contingency to refer to things that are neither chosen nor necessary. Contingencies lack the regularity and purposiveness that come from either causal necessity or conscious design. They are things that impose themselves on us, but could easily be otherwise.