Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [93]
During a brief grace period (in the French Revolution and its aftermath) when patriotism meant love of fellow citizens no less than love of country (Rousseau), and la patrie referred to the democratic republic no less than to the nation, this splendid amalgam of individualist ideals and communitarian identity politics—a synthesis of the religion of humanity and the secular story of nations—appeared to make it possible for reason to set down roots and thereby secure legal personhood in a grounded identity of nationalist flesh and cultural blood. Particularism and cosmopolitanism were joined in a French ideology of progress and revolution, and the true cosmopolitan was, as Paul Hazard recognized, “someone who thought à la française.”9 This understanding of the nation made possible the creation of a constitutional state under the sovereignty of a “people” (Volk, gens, peuple, or nation)—the nation-state—which in turn offered the legal groundwork for democracy. To the extent our modern democratic institutions are tied to the idea of the nation-state, it has been a legacy of precisely this alliance between nationalism and liberalism.
The marriage was, however, a peculiar one, a partnership defined from the outset by disequilibrium. And if, initially, history played along and the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the stabilization of aspiring liberal nation-states in Canada and America (and in a certain manner France) as well as their rise in Italy and Prussia, by the end of the century liberalism and nationalism were becoming unstuck. Although the marriage was premised on the essential compatibility of freedom and parochial identity, in the cases of America, France, and Canada, pluralism was built into national identity, providing the indispensable glue. But in Italy, Germany, Greece, and the Balkans, it was not, and in time the marriage failed with particularly disastrous consequences. In Eric Hobsbawm’s description, toward the end of the nineteenth century, nationalism had “mutated from a concept associated with liberalism and the left, into a chauvinist, imperialist and xenophobic movement of the right… the radical right.”10
The passing of liberal nationalism as a historical experiment was not the end of its career as social theory, however. The argument for the inclusionist liberal ideal of nationalism is made to this day by idealists who find in legal personhood too thin and abstract a basis for identity yet regard the actual record of historicist nationalism as too bloody and exclusionist to be made a basis for equal citizenship. Ortega y Gasset pointed out in the 1920s during a period of empire busting and “nationalist” aspirations that preceded the balkanization of the East—a period not unlike our own—that nationalism, having won its integrating national victories, was bound to change its strategy: “In periods of consolidation,” Ortega observed, “nationalism has a positive value, and is a lofty standard. But in Europe everything is more than consolidated, and nationalism is nothing but a mania.”11 In our own well-consolidated era, while the new nationalism does seem to have become a kind of toxic mania for deconstructing states, there are still voices urging the inclusionist model. Yael Tamir thus believes that “the liberal tradition, with its respect for personal autonomy, reflection and choice, and the national tradition, with its emphasis on belonging, loyalty and solidarity, although generally seen as mutually exclusive, can indeed accommodate one another;” for, she is sure, history notwithstanding, “embeddedness and choice are not necessarily