What is Nationalism?
In my last two posts, I looked at what Yoram Hazony means when he talks about a “nation” and what he argues are the bonds that form nations and hold them together. With this established, we can finally move on to discussing what he means when he speaks of nationalism.
Nationalism is the idea that political life should be arranged at the level of the nation (as previously defined) and conducted by means of a national state. National states should operate freely and independently of each other. The national state and its legitimacy come down to two overarching principles.
The first is a moral minimum required for a government to be considered legitimate. To meet this moral minimum, the leaders of a nation (whether kings or elected officials) must serve in the interests of the people of the nation. Leaders should operate as servants rather than rulers of the people - even if that leader is a king. Any “government incapable of maintaining this moral minimum was one that had failed in its most basic obligations to the well-being of its people.”
The second is recognizing a right of national self-determination - the right of the people of a nation to direct their internal affairs free from the interference of other nations. From this, the nationalist argues for an order of independent national states, where the differing peoples of different nations operate with the “right to govern themselves under their own national constitutions and churches without interference from foreign powers.” This means “permitting each nation to determine for itself what constitutes a legitimate ruler, a legitimate church, and appropriate laws and liberties.”
This second principle also serves as a sort of modulator to the first. While meeting the moral minimum is needed for a national state to be legitimate, the content of that minimum and the means by which it is met will naturally have a diversity of interpretations across different nations. Thus in the nationalist tradition, Hazony says, “while it was accepted that there exist natural minimum requirements for maintaining a civilized society, and that, in line with the first principle, these were binding upon all governments, it was not expected that all nations would become as one in their thoughts, laws, or way of life.”
Hazony is aware these principles can often come to cross-purposes:
Yet these two principles also stand in tension with each other. On the one hand, the idea that there are natural standards of legitimacy higher than the dictates of any particular government means that nations cannot rightly do whatever they please…On the other hand, the principle of national freedom strengthens and protects the unique institutions, traditions, laws, and ideals of a given nation against the claim that they must be overturned in the name of doctrines being promoted by the advocates of a universal church or empire. While the existence of a moral minimum is recognized, interpreting how this minimum will be expressed is taken to be a right of every independent nation, each approaching the issue from a perspective rooted in its own historical circumstances, experience, and insight.
This tension at the heart of the nationalist worldview illustrates a larger theme in Hazony’s brand of conservatism. Hazony’s conservatism is not dedicated to maintaining perfect internal consistency. Lest I overstate things, it’s worth parsing out two different ideas. One is the concept of ideas that are contradictory in principle. Orwell famously articulated a contradictory political principle in Animal Farm with the phrase “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The other is the the idea that although certain principles are not logically incompatible, they nonetheless can conflict with each other in practice. Hazony’s worldview draws heavily from the idea that many things that are good and desirable independently of each other can still come into conflict when applied to the real world. Thus, there is a constant tension in our choices due to these conflicts, and inevitably trade-offs need to be made where one good thing must yield for the sake of another. This balancing of tensions between competing goods is more of an art carried out through wisdom and accumulated experience than a science dictated by mathematical equations or pure logic.
Hazony argues that these conflicts in applying values make it necessary to carefully consider and weigh important factors against each other - and the very act of doing so imparts wisdom and sparks innovation. The conflicts and tensions in nationalist principles are not flaws to be eliminated, but a source of strength to be embraced. As Hazony puts it, the “tension inherent in maintaining both principles,” far from destabilizing the order of independent nations, actually “imparted a unique dynamism to the nations of Europe, releasing a storm of dormant energies and fostering a stunning degree of experiment and innovation in government and theology, economics, and science.” An order of independent, self-governing nations results in “a diversity of constitutional and religious arrangements within different countries,” and as a result nationalism created “national laboratories for developing and testing the institutions and freedoms we now associate with the Western world.”
This diversity of arrangements and dynamism exists not only between nations but within each nation as well. Recall that Hazony’s social ordering works with four fundamental layers - family, clan, tribe, and nation. Just as a diversity of institutions among different nations creates the conditions for testing and experimenting with different ways of life, the diversity of families, clans, and tribes within each nation also creates different opportunities for social and political innovation. These different layers also serve an important role as buffers, letting good ideas grow and mature while also allowing bad ideas and failed experiments to be contained at a more local level, rather than having those ideas implemented universally and thus bringing about widespread disaster:
Inside [each nation], what is original and different is given a space of its own where it can be tried and tested over the course of generations. Inside, the things that are said and done only in this family, clan, or tribe, and nowhere else, are given time to grow and mature, becoming solid and strong as they strike roots in the character of the collective’s various members—until they are ready to make their way outward from the family to the clan, from the clan to the tribe and the nation, and thence to all the families of the earth. Every innovation that has brought about an improvement in understanding or industry, in law or morals or piety, has been the result of a development of this kind, beginning as the independent inheritance of a small human collective and then radiating outward. At the same time, these fortress walls of tribal language and culture can be seen as preventing novelties from spreading too quickly, giving time for what is misguided and destructive to be tried and found wanting, to run its course and die out, before all humanity is overtaken.
This helps highlight an important misunderstanding of nationalism. Many people take it for granted that nationalism promotes intolerance towards different ways of life, as well as the belief that the people of one’s own nation are intrinsically superior and those of other nations are lesser in some fundamental way. But, Hazony says, this is the opposite of the truth. The fact that different countries have different ways of life, governed by the different ideas, traditions, and histories, and character of each nation, is one of the key benefits of nationalism that nationalists seek to preserve. The different ways of life embodied in other national traditions are opportunities to learn and benefit from a wide range of differing experiences. Rather than seeing other nations and their ways of life as intrinsically inferior to your own, you become keenly aware that other nations and their differing ways of life are opportunities for learning, from which you can benefit and improve your own nation. And the same ideas behind an order of independent nations lead to tolerance of diverse ways of life within a nation:
This principle, had, after all, mandated a diversity of constitutional and religious standpoints within the order of national states, which entailed a toleration of profoundly divergent views: Catholics had to tolerate the existence of Protestant regimes, monarchists had to tolerate republican regimes, and rulers concerned with tightly regulating their subjects’ affairs had to tolerate regimes affording more extensive liberties—and in each case, the reverse was true as well. This formal grant of legitimacy to political and religious diversity among the nations then became the basis for the toleration of dissenting communities within the state as well.
By contrast, a “universal political order” that rejects a system of independent, self-governing nations is an order “in which a single standard of right is held to be in force everywhere,” and in such an order “tolerance for diverse political and religious standpoints must necessarily decline.” Those who have abandoned the idea of nationalism and the system of independent national states are “finding it increasingly difficult to recognize a need for the kind of toleration of divergent standpoints that the principle of national self-determination had once rendered axiomatic. Tolerance, like nationalism, is becoming a relic of a bygone age.”
But this tolerance for differing ways of life does not commit the nationalist to moral relativism, or the belief that all ways of life are equally good in their own way. Hazony does believe there are ultimately correct answers to questions of politics and morality. His issue with a universalist approach is not, strictly speaking, ontological. Hazony’s objection is epistemic. Put another way, the problem isn’t whether or not correct answers exist - the question here is how we can go about discovering those answers. In contrast to rationalist theories, Hazony takes an empirical approach, arguing we need trial-and error structured by a competitive political order where time and experience ultimately allow such answers to emerge. Mere armchair reasoning guided by the human intellect is too feeble a tool to achieve this goal. Hazony puts it this way:
As John Selden emphasized, human reason is capable of arriving at virtually any conclusion, and has never in history been able to arrive at a single political truth that all can agree upon. Thus the importance of national freedom, which permits each nation to develop its own unique purposes, traditions, and institutions that may be tested through painstaking trial and error over centuries. This conception of the need for a diversity of nations, each pursuing the truth according to its own understanding, is not intended to deny that there are principles of government and morals that are best. What is denied is that these principles are known to anyone who will but exercise reason to try and get to them. The great English philosopher and statesman insisted on the legitimacy of diverse national traditions because of his empiricism: It is only through the many national experiments that we can learn, over historical time, what is in fact best…
Nationalism…has tended to be based on an empirical standpoint, exercising a moderate skepticism with regard to the products of human reason, and mindful of the calamities that men have brought upon us in the political realm time and again by their over-confidence in their own reason. And being skeptical, it recognizes the wisdom of permitting many attempts to attain the truth, each different from the others. In this way, some experiments will be successful, while others will fail. And those that succeed will do so in different ways, so that the unique experience of each nation will teach us different things that we had not understood before. We may say, in other words, that a nationalist politics invites a great debate among the nations, and a world of experiments and learning.
Hazony makes an analogy from economics. Here, nationalists are like capitalists, and those arguing for a universal political order are like socialists. As Hazony describes the economic argument,
The socialist has always believed that the necessary knowledge is at hand, so there is no need for competition in the marketplace. The economy needs only to be directed by a rational planner who will dictate the transactions that are to proceed for everyone’s benefit. The capitalist, on the other hand, has understood this proposal to be nothing but a conceit, a product of human arrogance and folly—because in reality there is no human being, and no group of human beings, that possesses the necessary powers of reason and the necessary knowledge to correctly dictate how an entire economy should proceed for everyone’s benefit. Instead, the capitalist argues, from a skeptical and empirical point of view, that we should permit many independent economic actors and allow them freely to compete in developing and providing economic products and services. It is understood that because each of these competing business enterprises pursues a different set of aims, and is organized in a manner that is different from the others, some will succeed and some will fail. But those that succeed will do so in ways that no rational planner could have predicted in advance, and their discoveries will then be available for the imitation and refinement of others. In this way, the economy as a whole flourishes from this competition.
The same argument applies for an order in independent national states, each free to try different ways of life and creating experience and knowledge that can ultimately benefit the people of all nations:
The political order is in this respect much like the economic order. The reality is that no human being, and no group of human beings, possesses the necessary powers of reason and the necessary knowledge to dictate the political constitution that is appropriate for all mankind. Anyone tending to a skeptical and empirical point of view will thus recognize the advantages of a nationalist order, which permits many independent national states and allows them freely to compete. Each national state pursues a different set of aims, and is organized in a manner that is different from the others. And yet despite this diversity, the rulers of these independent national states, in constant competition with other members of the order of similar states, are also forever glancing sideways at their competitors to see what is bringing them success, imitating that which they regard as wise and useful and beautiful in the institutions of other nations in order to improve their own. In this way, the rulers of each nation, while concerned principally for the strength and standing of their own nation among its competitors, nevertheless end up sharing with all humanity from their own unique store of experiment and experience.
The above is all a high level, broad-strokes description of what nationalism is and what its benefits would be. But what are the alternatives to the nationalist order, and why does Hazony consider them inferior to nationalism? That will be reviewed in the next post.