A meandering review of  Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism 

by William Hagerup

 

For years I used to cleave to the simplistic formula that patriotism is good, nationalism is bad.

Growing up in Norway, with the history of German occupation within living memory, it was thought that patriotism is the love of your own country, whereas nationalism is the belief that your own country is better than others. The German occupation was thus seen as a manifestation of rampant nationalism on steroids; what happens when simple patriotism is allowed to become aggressive nationalism, unchecked by the sort of international cooperation represented by the birth of the UN in 1945 and the European Coal and Steel Community in 1956.

This narrative meant that most Norwegians grew up with a dichotomy that seemed perfectly reasonable: love of your own country and its independence on the one hand (as seen in the way our Constitution Day is celebrated every year on the 17th May), and a commitment to international organisations such the WTO, the WHO, the UN and NATO, to maintain a safe world for small nations such as ours to exist and thrive, on the other.

Things I have read recently have made me think again about the terms “nationalism” and “patriotism”, and what these signifiers, as Saussure called words, actually signify. Most recently the book The Virtue of Nationalism by the Israeli philosopher and Bible scholar (and father of nine!) Yoram Hazony.

Hazony’s strongest line of argument in this book, at least in terms of what I found convincing, is the contrasting of nationalism, not to internationalism, but to imperialism. What nationalism is not, Hazony says, is the belief that your nation is better than everybody else’s and has a right to trample on other nation’s rights. Instead, nationalism is a world order where nation states are left in peace to order their own affairs, unmolested by empires or regimes that transgress national boundaries.

So, what about National Socialism and the nationalistic currents powering various fascist ideologies past and present? Hazony does not discuss this in quite the depth the topic in my view deserves, but he does offer a viable explanation of why the German Third Reich was not so much about nationalism in the sense he uses the term, but about an attempt at empire building that had the domination of other peoples in a German-controlled empire as its end game. It is therefore, Hazony argues, wrong to call National Socialism nationalistic in the proper sense of the term – just like left-wingers claim it is wrong to call it “socialist” in the proper sense of that term. It is truer to think of it as a continuation of past imperialist ambitions.

“For the sake of this universal doctrine, armies were sent out into the world to swallow one nation after another, with the aim of overturning the established order of life in every nation conquered. This was the case in the Thirty Years War […] It was true as well of the Napoleonic Wars […] And it was no less true of the Second World War, in which a German-Nazi Empire aimed at establishing a new order according to its own perverse theory of how mankind’s salvation was to be brought about.”

If anything, National Socialism was anti-nationalistic. In this he seems to be in agreement with Hannah Arendt, who, in her seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism, writes,

“The Nazis had a genuine and never revoked contempt for the narrowness of nationalism, the provincialism of the nation state, and they repeated time and again that their ‘movement’, international in scope like the Bolshevik movement, was more important to them than any state, which would necessarily be bound to a specific territory.“

Hazony’s argument is that all forms of imperialism, including international federalism, become authoritarian because of the need to impose one central will. And perhaps surprisingly for a conservative thinker, he also includes USA’s international policeman tendencies in this criticism.

Hazony’s presentation of Nationalism as a potentially sound basis for a world order as opposed to the dangers of overreaching imperial projects, is convincing and worth reviving in a current debate where the usage of the expression “white nationalism” to signify racism, continues to tarnish the term “nationalism” and make it more difficult to embrace by the mainstream.

The book has surprisingly little to say about Brexit and Trump and all that, which is perhaps just as well – too much hot air is directed at that double-headed juggernaut at the moment. For a better treatment of those issues I recommend Roger Scruton’s “Where We Are”, reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

Where the book has its most serious weakness in my view, is when Hazony deals with liberalism and his attempts at uncovering the origins of nation states – not once pausing to consider the dangers of the so-called Generation Identity (Discussed in the blog post mentioned above).

He devotes a chapter to criticism of John Locke (1632–1704) and his iconic work The Second Treatise of Government from 1667, which laid out the basic principles that all modern democracies follow, and which was so crucial to the constitution of the USA that Thomas Jefferson was accused of having copied the Declaration of Independence from it.

A central principle for Locke is that the Commonwealth (a 17th century word for the state), should be limited in its scope and power. In order to set those limits one must agree on the state’s purpose. Locke argues that if in a stateless state of nature we are totally free, why would we want to give up that freedom? Because, he says, it is so unsafe that it is better to give up some absolute liberty to protect our “lives, liberties and estates” which Locke together calls property.

He says in chapter IX, “So the great and chief purpose of men’s uniting into commonwealths and putting themselves under government is the preservation of their property.” The important concept that Locke promoted was that of “consent”: we give up some of our absolute liberty (such as the right to revenge ourselves, respecting instead the judgement of an impartial judge) and in return the Commonwealth secures our individual liberty under the guiding principle that the purpose of government is the protection of the individual’s natural right to life, liberty and property.

Hazony writes, “In speaking of “consent”, Locke means that the individual becomes a member of a human collective only because he has agreed to it, and has obligations toward such collectives only if he has accepted them.”

He goes on to say that one does not choose to be born into certain families or circumstances and as such does not give consent to the various ties that such relationships entail.

This is of course true, but Hazony misses the point by a country mile. Locke is attempting to explain how a state – the organisation with the monopoly to use force against, including killing, its citizens – gets its legitimate authority. Locke says it is not from God who authorised Adam and who then passed it down the paternal line to the present King or ruler (which was seriously the argument put forward by Robert Filmer in Patriarcha, and refuted by Locke in his First Treatise of Government), but rather it comes from below, from the people, who give their consent for the reasons stated above. And although it is true that we do not choose the society we are born into, Locke deals with this argument too in chapter VIII:

“But no-one can by any compact whatever bind his children or posterity; for when his son becomes an adult he is altogether as free as the father, so an act of the father can no more give away the liberty of the son than it can give away anyone else‘s liberty.” 

Locke then explains that as each person comes into his majority, he gives – usually tacitly and implicitly – his consent by accepting the rules of society, such as the terms of an inheritance or similar. Locke’s main point as I see it, was not so much to say that this is how a state is created (although this is discussed as well), but to say this is how a state is justified.

This point is important because Hazony criticises what he claims is Locke’s views that the nation state comes about by consent; by individuals entering in a compact and agreeing what has later been known as a social contract. He contrasts this view to his own: the emergence of a nation state as an institution happens when the tribes and clans (who in turn consist of families) join together in a larger unity that ends the anarchic wars between these competing clans and tribes, yet remaining small enough to retain “[…] ties of mutual loyalty that have been established among members of a nation […]”.

He compares the “liberal” principle of consent to that of business partners and investors in a company. A nation, on the other hand, is more like a family, he says: you do not choose your family, and the obligations placed upon you do not go away as easily as those of a business partner selling up his shares or quitting a company for a better offer.

George Orwell made a similar comparison in England Your England: “A family with the wrong members in control – that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”

Hazony claims that the danger of Lockean liberalism’s contractual view of the relationship between citizen and government, is that it can give legitimacy to global, imperial forms of governance. Such an empire does not need to be like a family, as long as it fulfills its contract to protect life, liberty and property.

The problem with this argument is of course that, if an empire indeed did protect life, liberty and property, and so secured our individual freedom against nanny-statism or other abuses of power, that empire would not be such a dreadful thing at all.

But empires are never born out of a genuinely liberal approach: the closest thing to what some may call a liberal empire at the moment, the EU, is in many ways a statist, centralising, even protectionist organisation with top-heavy bureaucratic regulations, very little true democratic accountability and little regard for the freedom of the individual (banning vacuum cleaners of a certain wattage, imposing metric measurements on small business owners, imposing GDPR without proper public debate, protecting farmers against the free market, erecting toll barriers against cheaper imports from outside the EU, destroying employment in the PIGS-countries by undemocratically centralising money policy; for an interesting book on this subject, see here). Yet where the EU does give us genuine liberty: the ability to travel for work, free trade, no internal toll barriers, a more liberal alcohol policy in my native Norway & cetera, it is a wonderful thing that I certainly support.

But I suspect there is another motivation behind Hazony’s criticism of liberalism and of his rejection of the protection of life and liberty as a foundation of a consensual nation state.

As he says in the introduction, “Each of us in fact wants and needs something else in addition, which I suggest we call collective self-determination: the freedom of the family, tribe, or nation.” The use of “tribe” here is significant. Scruton, in the above mentioned book, states “It is in contrast with the tribal and religious forms of membership that the nation should be understood.” (Where We Are, p. 61).

Hazony on the other hand seems to see the nation state chiefly as a collection of tribes. “By nation I mean a number of tribes with a shared heritage, usually including a common language or religious traditions […]”.

He further underlines this view by drawing on his knowledge of Jewish scriptures with references to the Tribes of Israel and various quotes from these scriptures.

Not that these are not interesting to some extent. He makes an intriguing point that the imperial mindset is related to Roman Catholicism and the nationalist mindset is related to Protestantism. “For more than a thousand years, Christianity thus aligned itself […] with […] the aspiration of establishing a universal empire of peace and prosperity.“

Against this he puts the nations, such as France, the Netherlands, England and Sweden, who resisted the universal rule of a Holy Empire, and says that the 30 years war was really about nationalism versus imperialism. “It was in the Thirty Years’ War that the concept of a universal Christian empire, which had held sway over the West’s political imagination for thirteen centuries, was decisively defeated.” 

But the frequent references to biblical scriptures become a little distracting, or possibly revealing: is the virulent opposition to liberalism actually motivated by the wish for the nation state to be able to enforce on the citizenry religious laws or lifestyle choices?

He claims that under the “Protestant construction” one of the two principles of political life is “The Moral Minimum Required for Legitimate Government“. This includes “public recognition of the one God–roughly, the biblical Ten Precepts given at Sinai […] regarded as a natural law that could be recognized by all men.”As a claim that this was historically a view held, that may be reasonable enough. But later he talks about uncertainty created in the post WWII world due to the “…progressive abandonment of the view that family, sabbath, and public recognition of God are institutions upheld by legitimate government and minimum requirements of a just society (i.e. the first principle).“

Now, I do not entirely disagree with him that a nation needs a degree of cohesiveness to work. We need to share some values, and there can be no doubt that a common language, literary history, even religious traditions, as well as a history of struggles and triumphs do help. But where Scruton is careful to point out the difference between the tribe and the nation, “The first-person plural of nationhood, unlike those of tribe or religion, is intrinsically tolerant of difference” (p. 69, Where We Are), Hazony seems to think the nation is really only important as a place to uphold and enforce the traditions and religious practices of the various tribes within that nation state: “When the tribes of a nation unite to establish a nation state, they bring to this state the familiar and distinctive character of the nation, its language, laws and religious traditions […]”.

He then goes on to talk about national freedom, and after referencing the legend of the Hebrews’ escape from bondage in Egypt via the Red Sea, he goes on to say, “Today, however, because nearly all political thought focuses on the freedom of the individual, the very idea of national freedom has come to seem doubtful.”

Where did Hazony get the impression that the freedom of the individual is particularly important today? Perhaps in the fact that our societies today are more licentious and liberal in matters of lifestyle choices and religious practices? This is of course not a good thing for someone who is religious and socially conservative. And I do think this is where I and Mr. Hazony will have to part company.

If he wants to maintain the “freedom of the nation” in order for the government to impose laws to ban Sunday trading or limit alcohol sales or other religiously motivated lifestyle-laws (in addition to the neo-puritanical bans on smoking in pubs or drug-use we already have), then I will oppose such national freedom. This is where I profoundly believe we need Locke to guide us in terms of what is the point and purpose of government: namely to protect our liberty, not to take it away from us in the interest of “public health” or any other collectivist notion.

In fairness, I should also point out that Hazony does express some admiration for the traditions of liberty in England and America. As he says,

“[…] we see that the freedoms of the individual guaranteed in England and America are not something that the individual simply has “by nature”, but are, on the contrary, the result of an intricate machinery developed through many centuries of trial and error.”

I do agree with this point, but then again, Edmund Burke already made it 230 years ago. It is right to balance theoretical liberalism with the more practical and pragmatic approach of conservatism, but that does not take away the value of the sort of ideas Locke put forward, unless you are afraid what securing individual liberty means for your desire to impose religious laws.

A serious lack in the book is Hazony’s failure to deal with the phenomenon of Generation Identity. This movement says many things that on the surface seems plausible enough, but that, when you investigate it further, appears to be collectivist, tribal identity politics, only from a quasi right-wing perspective. On their website they state among many other things, “We believe in true diversity in which all peoples have a right to preserve and promote their group identity in their homelands.” 

So what they believe in is the rights of “peoples” and “group identity”, not in the rights of the people or individual people, but peoples. To me that is deeply problematic, and it can seem that some of Hazony’s arguments about the “freedom of the nation” would support this line of thinking. That to me would be worrying, and I think Hazony should have at least mentioned this phenomenon in his book and explained his take on it.

On balance the book is certainly worth a read. It is well-written, often in the style of an essay, although perhaps not as well-argued as it could have been. The points Hazony raises are nevertheless important ones for the time we live in, and a useful counterweight to the lazy assumptions that nationalism is always bad and internationalism is always good.

Open and good-natured cooperation between safe and strong independent nations, where the rights of the individual are upheld, is perhaps an ideal worth pursuing. This book is not the final word in the striving towards that, but it is certainly a contribution.

I bought my copy at Red Lion Bookstore, Colchester’s independent bookstore.