The Case for Nations

By Roger Scruton,

The ‘we’ of the nation-state binds people together, builds an important legacy of social trust and blunts the sharp edges of globalization.

There is a respectable opinion among educated people that nations are no longer relevant. Their reasoning runs roughly as follows:

We live in an interconnected world. Globalization and the internet have created new networks of belonging and new forms of social trust, by which borders are erased and old attachments vaporized. Yes, we have seen the growth of nationalism in Europe, the Brexit vote in the U.K. and the election of the populist Donald Trump, but these are signs of reactionary sentiments that we should all have outgrown. The nation-state was useful while it lasted and gave us a handle on our social and political obligations. But it was dangerous too, when inflamed against real or imaginary enemies.

In any case, the nation-state belongs in the past, to a society in which family, job, religion and way of life stay put in a single place and are insulated against global developments. Our world is no longer like that, and we must change in step with it if we wish to belong.

The argument is a powerful one and was highly influential among those who voted in the U.K. referendum to remain in the European Union. But it overlooks the most important fact, which is that democratic politics requires a demos. Democracy means rule by the people and requires us to know who the people are, what unites them and how they can form a government.

Government in turn requires a “we,” a prepolitical loyalty that causes neighbors who voted in opposing ways to treat each other as fellow citizens, for whom the government is not “mine” or “yours” but “ours,” whether or not we approve of it. This first person plural varies in strength, from fierce attachment in wartime to casual acceptance on a Monday morning at work, but at some level, it must be assumed if we are to adopt a shared rule of law.

A country’s stability is enhanced by economic growth, but it depends far more upon this sense that we belong together and that we will stand by each other in the real emergencies. In short, it depends on a legacy of social trust. Trust of this kind depends on a common territory, resolution in the face of external threat and institutions that foster collective decisions in response to the problems of the day. It is the sine qua non of enduring peace and the greatest asset of any people that possesses it, as the Americans and the British have possessed it throughout the enormous changes that gave rise to the modern world.

Liberals warn repeatedly against populism and nationalism, suggesting that even to raise the question of national identity is to take a step away from civilization. And it is true that there are dangers here. However, we in the Anglosphere have a language with which to discuss nationality that is not tainted by the bellicose rhetoric of the 19th- and 20th-century nationalists. When we wish to summon the “we” of political identity, we do not use grand and ideologically tainted idioms, like la patrie or das Vaterland. We refer simply to the country, this spot of earth, which belongs to us because we belong to it, have loved it, lived in it, defended it and established peace and prosperity within its borders.

Patriotism involves a love of home and a preparedness to defend it; nationalism, by contrast, is an ideology, which uses national symbols to conscript the people to war. When the Abbé Sieyès declared the aims of the French Revolution, it was in the language of nationalism: “The nation is prior to everything. It is the source of everything. Its will is always legal…. The manner in which a nation exercises its will does not matter; the point is that it does exercise it; any procedure is adequate, and its will is always the supreme law.” Those inflammatory words launched France on the path to the Reign of Terror, as the “enemies of the nation” were discovered hiding behind every chair.

But those who dismiss the national idea simply because people have threatened their neighbors in its name are victims of the very narrow-mindedness that they condemn.

All of this was expressed by the French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan in a celebrated 1882 essay, “What Is a Nation?” For Renan, a nation is not constituted by racial or religious conformity but by a “daily plebiscite,” expressing the collective memory of its members and their present consent to live together. It is precisely for these reasons that national sentiments open the way to democratic politics.

It would be the height of folly to reject the “we” of nationality in favor of some global alternative or some fluctuating community in cyberspace. The task is not to surrender to globalization but to manage it, to soften its sharp edges, so that our attachments and loyalties can still guide us in exercising the thing that defines us, which is the sovereignty of the people, in a place of their own.

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