Raging Nations

As the twenty-first century advances, the nations are back. And they are angry. On one influential account, an imperious, cosmopolitan liberal political and economic order has been progressively suppressing the particular ethnic, cultural, and national identities essential to our sense of personal dignity, social belonging, and political agency. Against this new hegemony, the nations are rising up with a vengeance, resisting globalist ambitions and “taking back control.”

A long-standing liberal assumption had been that nationalism was an idea whose time had gone. It had been dealt a death blow in the mid-twentieth century, having dragged the world into two catastrophic wars and unleashed a fascist barbarism that discredited the doctrine forever. A new world order of international law and global and regional institutions would contain nationalist impulses and secure increasing international comity and cooperation.

In the decades since 1989, however, multiple sources of resistance to this supposed new order of tranquility have emerged. Such an order may have delivered greater prosperity for many, encouraged decolonization and democratization, but at the expense of deepening economic inequality, the marginalization of “left-behind” post-industrial communities, widespread cultural alienation, and growing political disempowerment.

This powerful narrative creates fertile soil for the reception of a work like Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism. Hazony’s primary concern is not so much to explain the resurgence of an assertive nationalism but to offer a philosophical justification of it, and to commend a regime of “independent national states” as the best political order for the world.

The book has won high praise, eliciting from Yuval Levin, for example, the commendation that it “offers a uniquely insightful guide to the forces transforming the politics of the West.” It has also been enthusiastically endorsed by prominent Christian voices. Patrick Deneen, author of Why Liberalism Failed, praises the “depth and persuasiveness of its defense of the virtue of nations,” and predicts it will be “one of the most-discussed books of the dawning new age of the nation.” The Intercollegiate Studies Institute selected it as the 2019 “Conservative Book of the Year.”

I cannot join this chorus of approbation. The Virtue of Nationalism is a deeply problematic book: it is theoretically incoherent, relies on flawed history, and gives ammunition to dangerous forces.

Hazony on Nations

The kind of nationalism Hazony defends is, however, at first sight eminently benign. Nationalism “is a principled standpoint that regards the world as best governed when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference.” Among its characteristic “virtues” are “disdain for imperial conquest,” the provision of “collective freedom,” “competitive political order” (the balance of power between nations), and “individual liberties” secured by “free institutions.” Variants of each of these ideas find support in Christian political thought.

The malign alternative to nationalism is “imperialism,” which “seeks to bring peace and prosperity to the world by uniting mankind, as much as possible, under a single political regime.” And between these two stark options we are forced to choose: “Either you support, in principle, the ideal of an international government or regime that imposes its will on subject nations when its officials regard this as necessary; or you believe that nations should be free to set their own course in the absence of such an international government or regime.”

When it comes to envisaging desirable world orders, then, there is a straightforward choice: imperial domination or national freedom.

On this stupendous oversimplification Hazony constructs his entire argument; and it never recovers from it. Only by means of an extremely distorting process of abstraction can the myriad variations in actual nations, forms of government, and models of the possible relations between nations be forced into one or other of these confining categories.

Hazony is wrong about both empires and nations. Under the former he includes regimes as utterly divergent as the Roman Empire, the Soviet Union, and the European Union (EU). While the first two were obviously barbarous hegemons, what possible light is shed by lumping the EU in with them?

The EU is certainly a flawed institution, suffers from a serious democratic deficit, and has occasionally acted oppressively toward weaker members—Greece during the Eurozone crisis after 2010, for example. (It is important to note, however, that Greece was guilty of serious financial folly, and it was Greece as much as the EU that wanted to remain in the Eurozone, to its own cost.) But the EU was founded on and is sustained today only by the consent of its members; and others are still lining up to join it. Hazony refers to the UK’s departure from the EU as its regaining of “independence.” Certainly the EU’s democratic deficit contributed to the British desire to leave. But the UK never lost its independence—as its very ability to depart demonstrates.

Hazony’s account of the United States is no less problematic. He asserts that, apart from a short-lived imperialist fling in the late nineteenth century of which it quickly repented, it has not normally acted as an empire. But after the fall of Communism it fell victim to the temptation to create a “new world order” in which nations breaking international law would be coerced into line by American military power—a pax Americana. Under the nationalist revival under President Trump, however, it began to relinquish that imperial ambition and recover its original vision of itself as an independent nation content to manage its own affairs.

This is a mind-bogglingly simplistic account of American history. And it trades on a very narrow definition of imperialism as the assertion of direct coercive control over other nations, ignoring the facts of how US economic and military power is deployed. Even while undergoing relative global decline, the US still massively shapes the economic forces that constrain the economic freedom of many “independent” nations, even while enhancing the wealth of some. This occurs, for example, by virtue of the continuing role of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and the power this creates to shape global financial systems to its own advantage. The fact that the US is still the largest global generator of consumer demand also affords it disproportionate power in framing the norms of global trade. Militarily, the US has a long history of supporting authoritarian regimes (in Latin America and the Middle East, for instance) until its interests dictate otherwise (and its more recent attempts to unseat such regimes, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan, have hardly proved successful). The US also maintains hundreds of military installations across the world, but would never tolerate one on its own soil. Sometimes this is at the request of vulnerable host nations (such as South Korea or Japan), but it is also invariably to protect its strategic geopolitical interests, sometimes in ways that undermine the legitimate interests of other nations. But however one assesses specific examples of American global economic and military power, it is clear that its enormous scale belies any notion of a straightforwardly virtuous “balance of power” among nations today.

Such oversimplifications and blind spots seriously mar the book’s persuasiveness, and it is replete with them. That is a shame, since elements of Hazony’s critique of imperialism are very much on target when applied to genuine examples. He is right, for example, that the territorial boundaries imposed by European imperial powers across Africa or the Middle East were often arbitrary outcomes of imperial power plays rather than attempts to reflect existing cohesive tribal or national identities—the devastating consequences of which are still painfully visible today in states like Syria, Iraq, and Sudan.

Hazony’s account of nations is more central to his larger thesis but no less problematic. He argues that the model of the independent nation, free from imperial control, was first birthed in ancient Israel. The nation of Israel emerged when its various “tribes” came together as one cultural community united under a single national government. But on Hazony’s telling this is the trajectory of all genuine nations: in biblical Israel we find the exemplar of all subsequent valid cases. Nations arise when contending tribes come to see the compelling need for a larger agency that can offer security and justice for all. Only a community at the scale of a nation, one capable of rising above tribal rivalries, can secure this. The first virtue of the national state, then, is that “violence is banished to the periphery.”

Much of world history has, Hazony asserts, been dominated either by an anarchical order of tribes or by imperialism (another huge oversimplification). But the biblical vision of nationhood was powerfully revived in the Protestant Reformation, indebted as it was to the political theology of the Hebrew Scriptures. It is this vision that has predominantly framed the modern (Westphalian) order of nation-states, however imperfectly—an order exemplified paradigmatically in the “Anglo-American conservative tradition,” which is evidently Hazony’s primary audience.

It is essential to note here that Hazony also writes as a passionate Zionist (and former aide to Benjamin Netanyahu), as is visible especially in part 3 (titled “Anti-nationalism and Hate”). Many of his other writings are devoted to defending Zionism, notably The Jewish State: The Struggle for the Soul of Israel (2000). But what becomes increasingly clear as his argument unfolds is that his general theory of nationhood is refracted through the highly distorting lens of that idiosyncratic instance. The result is not a credible theory of nations as such but radical Zionism clothed in Burkean garb.

A “nation,” Hazony tells us, is “a number of tribes with a shared heritage, usually including a common language or religious traditions, and a past history of joining together against common enemies—characteristics that permit tribes so united to understand themselves as a community distinct from other such communities that are their neighbors.” “Tribes” are themselves composed of “clans” that emerge out of families. Nations, then, are constructed out of kinship groupings: they are families writ large. This explains the deep sense of personal affection and loyalty that genuine nations exhibit and which is the deepest source of their identity and cohesion. When we defend our nations, we feel as if we are defending our very selves. And just as we are justified in defending ourselves when attacked, so we are justified in defending our nations when they are.

But here we meet a notable ambiguity. To root nationhood finally in kinship suggests a defence of what has been termed an “integral” nationalism, which narrows membership of the political community to those sharing the same ethnicity. This is inherently discriminatory and is liable to lead to the marginalization of ethnic minorities or, at the extreme, to degenerate into fascism. Much of the time, however, Hazony speaks of an apparently more benign cultural nationalism—as in the line just quoted. But his account of that is also problematic. On the one hand, culturally (and ethnically) foreign “tribes” can become incorporated into a national state, as, Hazony tells us, the Druze or Bedouin have become part of Israel. But to do so they must accept the essential cultural identity of the majority nation, which can only be secured by the cultural majority:

Minority rights, then, are in the gift of the majority. But that implies that cultural minorities can never be fully equal partners in the state—as is most painfully visible in the Israeli state’s treatment of its Palestinian Arab citizens who also live, raise families, work, and pay taxes in the territory of Israel but who in many respects are fundamentally second-class citizens. While they formally possess many equal rights with Jews, they face de jure discrimination in areas such as immigration (all Jews in the world have a right to live in Israel, but Palestinians refugees, descended from those expelled in 1948, have no such right); land and property ownership; public service funding; and cultural symbols. The latter includes official denial of the very existence of former Palestinian villages, permitting the legal destruction of Palestinian homes built there (part of a larger Zionist project that Palestinians term the “memoricide” of their people). In addition they face extensive de facto discrimination in, for example, restricted access to jobs, brutal suppression of rights to freedom of expression and protest, and cultural hostility. (In a 2016 Pew Research Centre report, 48 percent of Israeli Jews agreed that Arabs should be expelled or transferred from Israel.) How can Israel be counted as a successful national state when a fifth of its own citizens are systematically excluded from full membership? And that is not to mention the millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, for whom Israel bears legal responsibility, who suffer vastly worse oppression.

Tribes, however, are not the only examples of sub-national collectives that constitute society apart from the state. This is where Hazony invokes the Burkean image of society as an organic coherence of diverse kinds and levels of community and institution (“little platoons”) that shape our personal identities and are the primary objects of our loyalty.

Now this organic vision may be preferable to the contractual fictions by which modern individualistic liberalism attempts to account for human sociality, and which Hazony rightly critiques; it has powerful iterations in Catholic and Reformed thought. But one can affirm an institutionally pluralist vision of society without claiming that “nations” emerge out of “tribes.”

And the claim that “nations emerge out of tribes” is empirically false with respect to most modern cases. Biblical scholars may or may not conclude it was true of biblical Israel. But it is certainly not true of, notably, modern Israel. By the nineteenth century, kinship-based biblical “tribes” had long ceased to be meaningful Jewish identities, at least within Zionism. As a general account of modern nations, Hazony’s thesis confronts too many counterexamples to stand. It is also false when applied to his three favoured “Protestant” examples of genuine nations: the US, the Netherlands, and the UK.

The US did not emerge out “tribes” but from an alliance of colonial governments that by then were much more like what Hazony terms “national states” than tribes. The Dutch Republic may have fought a Protestant war of independence against imperial Catholic Spain but did not arise out of anything resembling Hazony’s tribes, which had long disappeared by the seventeenth century.

Nor did the UK emerge out of any such process. It was the outcome of centuries of English domination, absorption, or coercion of its culturally distinct Celtic neighbours. The Union with Scotland in 1707 was achieved in league with cash-strapped local aristocratic elites set to benefit handsomely from the new arrangements, but provoking popular outrage (poet Robert Burns described them as “bought and sold for English gold”). The formation of the Union was also achieved at the cost of the suppression of three great Celtic languages, and later at the cost of Irish Partition in 1921 with its decades-long bloody consequences (which, after Brexit, the EU has been working to mitigate by defending the terms of the 1998 Belfast Agreement). If the UK is now in danger of unravelling, this is not because of a revolt against liberal globalism (the Scottish National Party is firmly pro-EU) but because of years of disrespect by English-dominated governments, compounded by the centrifugal impact of Brexit.

The fact is that “nation-building” in the modern world has been as much top-down (state-led) as bottom-up (tribe-led), and was as often violently coercive as it was consensual. Indeed, sometimes the top-down initiative has come from imperial powers seeking to create a new nation-state for their own interests. Indeed, were it not for the sponsorship of the British Empire after World War I—Britain was awarded the “Palestine Mandate” in 1920—modern Israel itself would probably not exist, or not in anything like its post-1948 form. The undoubted political and military success of the bottom-up movement of Zionism depended crucially on such imperial sponsorship (however duplicitously executed by Britain, toward both Jews and Arabs).

It is particularly telling that a vital feature of Hazony’s ideal nation is a “past history of joining together against common enemies.” He will claim that this was true of the Israel created by early twentieth-century Zionism. But the “enemies” of Zionism in Palestine were largely created by Zionism itself. They were the result of European Zionists’ settling in Palestine through large-scale land purchase (from absentee Arab landlords) and rapid mass immigration from 1900 to 1948, rather than any inherent Palestinian Arab hostility to Jews. Indeed, Arab residents of Palestine had long accepted the presence of ancient Jewish communities and lived more or less peaceably alongside them up until the “settler colonialism” of early twentieth-century Zionism radically disturbed that peace.

Just Nations, Not Nationalist Justice

In itself, the claim that nations can be identified, and experience themselves as constituted, by a common language, religion, history, collective memory, or other such features is plausible, even though no one of those features is present in all cases (and we should note that Hazony rightly excludes race as one such feature; Zionism itself is internally multiracial). These are among the objective bases for the more important subjective sense of belonging to a distinct community sharing common cultural traits, however that sense has been acquired.

Nations in this sense are indeed real phenomena, and political orders must do them justice. In Christian political theology, nations thus understood can be seen as emerging from historically extended, collective human efforts to unlock the potentialities implanted in creation by God—potentialities for social order, work, language, technology, art, and so forth. Nations are not given in the original creation order but arise as humans seek to fulfill the commission given in Genesis 1 and 2 to develop and nurture the possibilities inherent in creation. The legitimate diversity of “national” traditions, and divine judgment on imperial, “Babel-like” attempts to thwart it, are already depicted in Genesis 10 and 11. But the Bible nowhere suggests that nations, not even Israel, have an eternal right to exist or claim any piece of earth as their everlasting possession. Unjust nations risk exile.

It is also important to note that nations in this sense are not agents in the sense that families, governments, or other institutions are, but environments in which those institutions subsist. As David Koyzis puts it, a nation is “a non-purposive network of interrelated individuals, institutions and associations bound together by a common culture, however . . . defined.” Nations lack “legal personality” and cannot themselves wield rights (in distinction to the organizations that might emerge to represent them, such as the World Zionist Organization formed in 1897; or, no less, the Palestine Liberation Organization formed in 1964). To attribute agency and rights to inchoate, porous, and contested entities such as cultural nations risks putting in the hands of the majority group in a nation the power to define the identity of the whole, thus placing in jeopardy the rights of minorities not sharing that identity.

Hazony pays lip service to the protection of cultural minorities by national states but will not allow any outside norm or authority to hold such states to account for their discharge of that task. He claims, problematically, that nations are generally more tolerant than empires (though through the millet system, which granted a degree of autonomy to minority religious or ethnic communities, the Muslim Ottoman Empire was arguably more tolerant of Jews than modern Israel is of Arabs). But it is up to national states alone to determine the boundaries of that tolerance. Decades of jurisprudence on the protection of minority rights under UN covenants (to which the vast majority of modern nation-states have formally consented) or the European Convention on Human Rights are simply set aside.

Contra Hazony, we must assert strongly that once a state arises from a nation, even when the primary motivation for its formation has been to defend that nation’s interests, it must acknowledge a universal obligation to protect minorities within its territory. This is why “sojourners” (foreigners) were among the vulnerable classes of residents biblical Israel was mandated especially to protect. This Hebraic idea was radically extended in the Christian doctrine of the equality of all human beings irrespective of any particular identity markers they may possess. This is why Christian political thought urges that states must submit themselves to transnational rules of conduct in this area. Otherwise, the fate of egregiously persecuted minorities—such as Muslim Uighurs in China—is left to the discretion of the state.

The just claims of nations can certainly be protected by states, but such claims are only one among many among which they must justly adjudicate. States must be guided by larger moral horizons than those of any cultural nation, even one that gave it birth. It is the characteristic vocation of states to uphold wider and higher norms of justice, even in the face of overwhelming demands from the cultural majority.

Hazony rejects this line of argument. He asserts that states cannot be impartial toward the majority cultural tradition that gave them birth. Indeed they are obliged to favour that cultural tradition and, where necessary, insist that those who do not share it conform to its basic requirements. This is because such a tradition is the sole wellspring of the political loyalty essential for the maintenance of the state itself. There can, therefore, be no culturally “neutral” or merely “civic” states.

Hazony in effect denies the possibility that citizens can, over time, acquire a higher loyalty to their states as institutions charged to pursue impartial public justice than to their own, inevitably partial national identities. But such a possibility is exemplified to some degree in many states today. It is also represented in the “civic nationalism” espoused by, for example, the Scottish National Party, which seeks to be ethnically and culturally inclusive even while defending distinctive Scottish traditions (in law, education, welfare, language).

The fundamental defect in Hazony’s account is its denial of binding universal norms rising above the horizon of the nation itself. At one point he seems to allow that government is subordinate to such a standard. It is charged with fulfilling a “moral minimum,” summed up in the Decalogue, and including universal mandates such as protection of life, family, property, justice, the Sabbath, and so forth, at least within its own national territory. Government also has the additional duty to protect and promote the unique interests of the particular nation over which it presides, and these can and will legitimately diverge from those of others, as expressed in different forms of government, national religions, laws, ideals, and the like. Both claims find qualified support in Christian political thought.

But, fatally, Hazony goes on to assert that every nation has the right to interpret the “moral minimum” through the lens of its own distinctive ideals. At a stroke, this rules out the possibility of a binding international law that might be interpreted, still less enforced, by any higher authority. No International Criminal Court, then, meddling in the internal affairs of Rwanda, the actions of the US military abroad, or those of the Israeli Defence Force at home.

And here another glaring inconsistency hoves into view: the legal validity of the modern state of Israel itself rests on a 1947 UN resolution—part of international law—which Zionists strove tirelessly to secure. But the claims of those who accuse the Israeli state of breaching international law by building illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territories are effectively deemed invalid. (Hazony describes this, with unconvincing innocence, as “constructing housing complexes in eastern Jerusalem.”)

Hazony at one point asserts that nations cannot do as they please but are “subject to judgment by God.” But nowhere does he specify how such judgment might be reflected in human action. Indeed it is not at all clear that God plays any role at all in his account, except as one component in a nation’s cultural memory. “The sacred,” he asserts, “comes into existence only in the customs of the family, clan, tribe, and nation.” This is the instrumentalization of religion for political ends.

Hazony’s account of the birth of biblical Israel is itself flawed. “Moses,” he writes, “sets boundaries for Israel, instructing his people to keep their hands off the lands of neighboring kingdoms like Moab, Edom, and Ammon.” But this spectacularly elides the fact that Israel’s original possession of its land involved the military conquest of another existing “nation” (or group of tribes), the Canaanites. The establishment of a new “national state” called “Israel” in the ancient Near East necessarily involved the defeat and dispossession of the peoples who already lived there. That is true even if we believe it was divinely ordained (that it was, perhaps, a “judgment of God”).

Hazony’s silence is no less deafening on the fate of the 750,000 Palestinian Arabs who were displaced from the land they had inhabited for hundreds of years and thought of as their own, when Zionist armies, on the back of a rushed and flawed UN partition resolution, moved to take possession of most of it in 1948. On that grotesquely immoral act of forced mass expulsion, and its egregious ongoing consequences for Palestinians across the Middle East today, Hazony has nothing to say. He simply takes for granted that Zionists were entitled to reclaim a land their Jewish forebears had lost two millennia ago and that such a claim overrode the claims of the Palestinian Arabs who had for centuries been resident there and for whom it was their homeland.

This is not to deny the compelling case that, in the light of centuries of persecution culminating in the unfathomable evil of the Holocaust, Jews were entitled to a secure “homeland,” whatever form that might have taken. In 1948, it might, for example, have been an autonomous region within a single Palestinian state guaranteed by the UN; today it might imply a “one-state solution” in which Jews and Arabs would share power in a non-ethnic and non-religious state. But it is to deny that such a case entitled Zionists to conquer and dispossess the people already living in the territory they claimed. Not even a procedurally valid UN resolution could morally justify that.

Hazony thus has no explanation of how to adjudicate morally or legally between rival national claims to the same territory. That is a fatal flaw. In its absence, we are left with mere realpolitik or, worse, military power: might is right. Indeed he concedes that his “order of national states” will grant independence to nations that are “strong and cohesive enough to secure it”—as Israel proved it was in 1948, and again in 1967. But the justice of those acts of military power is nowhere interrogated. And the Israeli state has, moreover, palpably failed to embody even the “first virtue” of nations: violence has not been “banished to the periphery” but is deep inside even Israel’s 1948 borders. And violence—both Israeli and Palestinian—is rampant in the territories Israel has occupied or policed since 1967, and is inevitable so long as a just solution to legitimate Palestinian aspirations for some form of statehood is deferred.

Ultimately, nations for Hazony are morally self-validating and self-judging. He is unable to entertain any supra-national moral or legal principles by which outside authorities may critically assess the traditions or deeds of nations, call them to account, or curtail their freedoms in order to prevent nationalist injustice.

Nations may be valid expressions of humanity’s differentiated culture-forming aspirations. But identifying their nature, emergence, moral ambiguities, and pathologies, and indeed “virtues,” is vastly more complicated than Hazony’s idealized, reductionist, and partisan categories allow us to see. Those who prefer a vision of nations as polyphonic servants of global justice—and in that company is a chorus of both Jewish and Christian thinkers—have their work cut out in coming up with a better alternative.