The Virtue of Independence Day
Granted that the writing of the American Declaration of Independence, the voting for colonial independence, the adopting of the Declaration, and its signing were spread out over time; nevertheless, as of the official date of July 4, 2019 it will have been twelve score and three years since the birth of the U.S.A. According to the Declaration, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of a people’s unalienable rights, then it is the right of that people to alter or abolish that government, i.e., to practice national self-determination.
By August 14, 1941 the interests of the United States and the United Kingdom had converged to the point that an Atlantic Charter could be declared, in which Roosevelt and Churchill stipulated that their policies were to “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” (national self-determination). After World War II, however, there was an increasing emphasis on international institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union. Thus, the resurgent nationalism expressed by the British electorate in the Brexit vote of June 23, 2016, as well as by the American electorate in the Presidential vote of November 8, 2016, represented a break with post WW II internationalism and a return to the aspirations of the Atlantic Charter.
Finding this change in the public acceptance of internationalism to be highly significant, Yoram Hazony wrote the excellent book The Virtue of Nationalism (2018) to proclaim the value of free national states. Such independent nations stand in stark opposition to what Hazony calls the “liberal empire,” administered by the United Nations, the European Union, and the United States; and widely accepted as the best type of political state. In contrast, however, Hazony supports free national states by distinguishing nationalism from the national socialism that led to the Holocaust; disputing the charge that nationalism creates more hate than does imperialism; focusing on liberal empire’s problematic promotion of peace and prosperity based on a sacrifice of collective self-determination; and pointing out that a national state encourages loyalties to natural or adopted family, tribe, nation, tradition, religion, and language.
Hazony finds that, just after the Reformation, there were two principles in European politics: First, a government had to be strong enough to defend itself from external threats, to adjudicate disputes among its citizens, to police itself, and officially to recognize one God. Second, nations that were strong in the foregoing sense had the right of self-determination of their national and church governments. (The reviewer notes parenthetically that these principles rendered it self-evident at that time that any newly discovered lands and peoples that did not have strong government in this sense were ipso facto ripe for colonial take-over.) It would have been incomprehensible in that era to suggest that all nations could, would, or should become one.
Subsequently, John Locke offered his social contract theory of politics: There is only one underlying political principle, and it is individual freedom and consent to obligations. Other, Burkean, loyalties to family, tribe, nation, tradition, religion, and language are extraneous and are to be jettisoned; and even the existence of national borders is said to be an unjustifiable artifact of primitive politics. Hazony traces this stream of thought from Rousseau through Kant, Rand, and Rawls.
Here, the reviewer registers a minor disagreement with Hazony: It is true that Kant did sometimes write in favor of the idea of a cosmopolitan, utopian empire or, alternately, a world republic. However, he also recognized the existence and strength of what he viewed as a “national identity politics” that would prevent the attainment of any of his ideal polities. For that reason he insisted that a league of nations should be formed as a federation of free states. (See the May 1, 2019 blog posting in this series.) Thus, Kant did allow for national borders but could not foresee the future futility of such leagues.
Hazony’s overall thesis remains unaffected: Today, the ongoing liberal reconstruction of Western politics unrealistically neglects Burkean loyalties and is a form of imperialism in the proud tradition of the Pharaohs, Babylonian kings, Roman emperors, Papal statesmen, Marxists, and any others who are “quick to express disgust, contempt, and anger when their vision of peace and prosperity meets with opposition” from the ostensible beneficiaries. Moreover, any resistance to liberal doctrine is today “afflicted by public shaming campaigns and heresy hunts,” which are unwittingly modeled on medieval infallibility, inquisition, and index; and which are turning the Western democracies into one very large university campus. For example, liberal imperialists view the consolidation of the European Union as the only political opinion that may be upheld by decent people in the face of opposition from Brexiteers.
There never has been a Hobbesian or Lockean state of nature in which individuals were only loyal to themselves; instead, Hazony writes, there have been anarchical states of nature characterized by the lack of permanent, centralized governments. Centralized governments come into being either as free states, in which individuals’ Burkean loyalties are transferred to the state, as when the loyalty to a father is transferred to the fatherland; or as despotic states, established by conquest.
Hazony lists five virtues of the national state in his Chapter XIV. First, the desire for collective freedom shifts from family units to the national state itself. This shift strikes the reviewer as the attitude, “Why should individuals’ petty preferences interfere with the flourishing of the state?” Comparing domestic slumber to martial vigor and national honor, Shakespeare has King Henry V say before the Battle of Agincourt that “Gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.”
The second virtue of the national state is a disinclination of contented national states to acquire empires. Third, the freedom of the national state allows individuals to focus on material prosperity and cultural inheritance. Fourth, nationalism is based on an empirical standpoint, a moderate skepticism regarding human reason, and a plurality of political paths. Fifth, the national state offers the best environment for free institutions that evolve over long periods of time by trial and error and that support individual liberties.
Hazony proposes that the best political order is one of independent national states. Yet although such independence is an evident good that should be established wherever feasible, political independence is not a right, because there are too many potential independent states and too few physical resources and moral rationales. Even if India had a right of self-determination to assert against the British Empire in 1947, it does not follow that the speakers of each of India’s 1700 distinct languages should be awarded their own national states today. Even if the thirteen British colonies in North America had a right of self-determination to assert against the British Empire in 1776, it does not follow that the Confederate states had a moral rationale for succession in 1861.
Beyond the attractive virtues of independent national states and the moral rationale for independence set forth in the Declaration’s listing of the “repeated injuries and usurpations” by the British king, the reviewer notes that the decisive factor in the American Revolutionary War may well have been the “geographical virtue” of a great physical separation between North America and the British Isles. On July 4, 2019 it is time to celebrate not only the virtue of nationalism but also the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean and the slowness of sailing ships nearly a quarter millennium ago!