Unsurprisingly, I’ve seen a uptick in complaints about nationalism lately. I’d like to take a bit to defend it here, which you might not expect given my liberal-to-liberaltarian leanings. (The following is mostly not original thought, but it’s not clear to me that many people have actually read Ernst Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Mill v. Acton, etc.)
I think people make a mistake when they conflate “nationalism” with “blood-and-soil ethnic chauvinism”. If you take a minimal functional definition of nationalism (in the way that a state can do many things, but the definition of what it is is just the monopoly on the legitimate use of force), nationalism is just the principle that “political boundaries should coincide with national ones,” whether the later be ethnic, cultural, or civic in nature. In this sense (putting aside anarchism), your only two choices are to be a nationalist or an imperialist, since not accepting the nationalist principle implies belief that a central state can have legitimate political authority over peripheral territories that don’t constitute the same nation as the center.
I don’t mean to say here that I think the choice of nationalism over imperialism is the obvious one; only that these should be the terms of the actual debate over what is at stake: is the freedom of the citizenry/the utility of the population inside and outside of one’s own national boundaries maximized by drawing the political lines in the same place as the national ones, or not?
What the defining characteristics of the nation should be is a separate, arguably subordinate debate. As a liberal, civic nationalist, it pains me to see my center-left fellows ceding the theoretical ground to the uglier elements of the right, allowing the latter to define nations in ethnic terms, and embracing imperialism, if only by default and by accident. This is how you end up with liberal internationalists who become difficult to distinguish from neoconservatives.
The issue here applies within nations as well. Nations will do things that affect other nations, and as long as that’s the case, there’s going to be some way of settling disputes between them.
And, I mean, this sort of thing is meant to basically be federalism, and I’m not sure how your framework interprets, say, the role of California in the United States and then maybe the role of San Fransisco in California. Is it imperialist to have California governed by the United States? This seems to reduce to calling any government at all imperialist, which makes it not really distinguishable from nationalism apart from what arbitrary level you assume governance should happen in.
In this sense (putting aside anarchism), your only two choices are to be a nationalist or an imperialist, since not accepting the nationalist principle implies belief that a central state can have legitimate political authority over peripheral territories that don’t constitute the same nation as the center.
Is it imperialist to have California governed by the United States? This seems to reduce to calling any government at all imperialist, which makes it not really distinguishable from nationalism apart from what arbitrary level you assume governance should happen in.
And then there are us who consider this a feature, not a bug; the most vulnerable minority being the individual and all that. It doesn’t stop being external imposition by aliens with a foreign culture and foreign values just because they are spatially and genetically closer than other aliens. Recognizing that all government is inherently imperialism in this sense goes a long way in the harm-reduction department. And thus nationalism is evil because it privileges a certain level of imperialism as pure and good and commendable.
6 days ago · tagged #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #this is a nationalism hateblog · 20 notes · source: invertedporcupine · .permalink
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urpriest reblogged this from invertedporcupine and added:I see what you’re going for, but it gets fuzzy once you let your “nations” overlap. When you let “cosmopolitan ruling...
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from collapsedsquid and added:And then there are us who consider this a feature, not a bug; the most vulnerable minority being the individual and all...
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invertedporcupine reblogged this from urpriest and added:This response makes me think I may have failed to convey the original point effectively. To the extent that you can talk...
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alexanderrm reblogged this from argumate and added:I like the general point about anti-nationalism people needing to define what alternative we’re proposing, but it seems...
collapsedsquid reblogged this from invertedporcupine and added:The issue here applies within nations as well. Nations will do things that affect other nations, and as long as that’s...
- argumate reblogged this from invertedporcupine and added:
yes, the tricky thing is that ethnoracial nationalism appears to be a more stable ground state than other memetic...
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