The 1880s were a time of tremendous change in world politics. The American experiment in a self-governing nation with a republican form amazed Europe. Americans knew it, too. It was during this time that the American civic “religion” took shape in books, fairs, music, holidays, museums, and popular stories about the founding. Confidence in this country’s future was never higher.
The rest of the world was in upheaval with the aristocracies of old fading from the scene, displaced by a new meritocracy. The Holy Roman Empire was shattered while the Habsburgs were under pressure. The czar in Russia was riding high but on an unstable foundation. The Portuguese and Spanish empires were gone while the British monarchy, too, faced pressure from liberal and republican forces.
The nation as a self-governing unit was replacing the multinational monarchy. Everyone assumed this to be true and there was high optimism about the future. All factions were struggling to seize control of what these new nations would do, and hence long-suppressed ideological fanaticisms were unleashed in every direction, terrifying ancestral elites.
This speech retains its power. Renan formulated five possible foundations for what constitutes a nation. They were: unity of religion, unity of language, unity of race/ethnicity, common heritage/lineage, and geography. He had no judgment on which, if any, was the single choice but warned that any one of them could constitute emancipation for people or despotism.
I had read this essay some years ago when the rise of nationalism in our own times began to replace the brief experiment in what was called globalism, which lasted from the mid-1980s until the 2010s, so for perhaps 30 years. Everyone wanted to be a “citizen of the world.” There were few stresses about fluid international trade. Even wars were multinational endeavors with U.N. codification. For a brief period, borders didn’t seem to matter much anymore.
The revolt against this model emerged following the refugee crisis in Europe, the rise of China as a hegemonic manufacturing power, the Russophobia emerging from the American left, and the far-reaching resentment against global governance that put regime control far outside the reach of any plebiscite.
For my own part, my intellectual formation took place in the hothouse years of globalism, drinking deeply from the well of “end-of-history” literature. Nationalism struck me as inherently problematic, statist, warlike, and maybe racist and protectionist: all the bad things.
It took me time to warm up to the new ethos, but one argument swept me away. It had to do with the relationship between the regime and the citizen. Globalism severs it completely. There is no global election. There are only national elections. If we believe that there ought to be some feedback mechanism between the people and the government, some method by which the people can affect the laws and rules under which they live, nationalism is the one and only option.
The COVID-19 pandemic period sealed the deal. The highest controlling force was the World Health Organization, for which no one voted and that no citizen can control. It is literally unaccountable to anyone. It shares that in common with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the International Criminal Court, and so many other institutions formed after World War II. You cannot have these huge forces running the world and believe in democracy at the same time.
That is a compelling point, but what about this idea of the nation itself? Who is willing to answer the riddle Renan posed? What is and should be the foundation of the nation?
Why is this intriguing? Because for a century or more, one or another of these traits has been exalted above the rest and led to abuse. For example, the idea that a nation is merely a geographical boundary and that anyone and everyone can come in with no faltering of order and stability. That is obviously false. The vote is power. No one wants to be a stranger in a strange land in which one shares no values at all with one’s fellows in the citizen mix. That is a prescription for civil war.
Borders are not merely arbitrary lines on a map, like an opening and closing parenthesis with no content. They mark the edges of civic sovereignty, restraining states but also containing real people with unique experiences, memories, belief systems, aspirations, and norms that are not replicated in other places on the map.
The language criterion is fine but makes less sense in exclusion from other marks of nationhood. It would mean that the UK, Australia, and the United States all constitute one nation, which is intuitively untrue. At the same time, language is a huge point of unity in any country, and nothing creates conflict more than a single government ruling a polyglot territory. Not even the schools can function.
The problems of race have a notoriously noxious impact on national politics, but it’s not as if a country can dismiss them entirely. Japan is for the Japanese, Ireland for the Irish, and so on. Taking that away and mixing the population up in ways that do not respect that is very dangerous business. That’s not to say that multiracial states are always untenable: The United States is a great example and Brazil even more so. But we would be foolish to dismiss the issue entirely.
It’s the same with religion. No orderly functioning nation in history has been without the primacy of one religious tradition, even if others can exist within it. This is simply undeniable. The United States has a long history of Protestant Christianity, but many other religions and sects have thrived therein. To say that is not to deny religious liberty and rights, but simply to observe that a national ethos will typically raise one tradition above the rest. It is futile to think otherwise.
The same can be said of lineage and heritage. There are incumbent populations that form the basis of cultural memory and tradition across generations. That’s where we get national traditions such as Independence Day and Thanksgiving, and micro-societies of heritage organizations are typically charged with maintaining the memories of the past. That is all very healthy but need not be exclusionary.
All that said, we need to appreciate the very meaning of nationhood as a bulwark of liberty and the good life. It’s not enough for a political or intellectual movement that hopes to affect the life of a nation in a conservative direction only to speak in abstractions such as “free enterprise” and “limited government.” It must also speak to building up the cultural and political reality of nationhood itself.
In that sense, there is nothing threatening about nationalism and much in the idea that is truly emancipating. A strong culture and social order, rooted in values connected to history and experience, is an indispensable protection from arbitrary government and social collapse.
Nations can work as long as we are conscious of the virtues, norms, traditions, and ideals that form them. The project to reframe and understand the meaning of both nationalism and citizenship in the American experience is one of the more compelling philosophical and political challenges of our time.
