The Volokh Conspiracy

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently signed a law banning the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans:

President Vladimir V. Putin signed a bill on Friday that bans the adoption of Russian children by American citizens, dealing a serious blow to an already strained diplomatic relationship. But for hundreds of Americans enmeshed in the costly, complicated adoption process, the impact was deeply personal....

The law calls for the ban to be put in force on Tuesday, and it stands to upend the plans of many American families in the final stages of adopting in Russia. Already, it has added wrenching emotional tumult to a process that can cost $50,000 or more, requires repeated trips overseas, and typically entails lengthy and maddening encounters with bureaucracy....

The bill that includes the adoption ban was drafted in response to the Magnitsky Act, a law signed by President Obama this month that will bar Russian citizens accused of violating human rights from traveling to the United States and from owning real estate or other assets there. The Obama administration had opposed the Magnitsky legislation, fearing diplomatic retaliation, but members of Congress were eager to press Russia over human rights abuses and tied the bill to another measure granting Russia new status as a full trading partner.

As the New York Times article quoted above points out, the new Russian law is a traumatic blow to American parents currently in the process of adopting Russian orphans, including some who have already formed relationships with particular children. It also probably violates a recent US-Russian agreement on adoptions, that requires a year’s notice prior to any termination by either side. Worst of all, the law consigns thousands of children who might have been adopted by Americans to life in Russia’s horrendous system of orphanages, which is among the worst in the world.

A few cases where Russian children were abused by American adoptive parents previously caused outrage in Russia. But, overall, such abuse is rare. And there is no doubt that on average, Russian children adopted in the US have vastly better lives than they would likely have had in Russia.

In any event, the current Russian adoption ban was adopted in retaliation for the human rights sanctions embedded in the US Magnitsky bill. One can argue about whether the latter law was wise or not. But there is no doubt that Russia’s human rights record under Putin has been atrocious. The fact that the nation is led by a former KGB colonel is itself an indication that human rights is hardly a high priority. And sanctions narrowly targeted at individual human rights violators are among the most defensible international efforts to deter abuses. Unlike generalized trade sanctions, they don’t harm the population of the target country as a whole.

It would be easy to blame Putin’s increasingly authoritarian regime for the adoption ban, and Putin does indeed deserve a share of the blame. However, a recent poll shows that the ban is supported by 56% of Russians, so it is possible that the law would have been adopted even if the Russian government were fully democratic. On this issue, as on many others, public opinion is influenced by ignorance and irrational nationalism.

The Russian government has argued that US sanctions against Russia are hypocritical, because the US itself has a flawed human rights record. I have myself criticized unjust US policies on issues such as the War on Drugs and immigration, and others. But America’s record, flawed as it is, is not nearly as bad as that of Putin-era Russia. And even if the US sanctions were indeed hypocritical or otherwise reprehensible, victimizing innocent children and prospective parents is hardly a proper response.

UPDATE: I have made a few minor wording changes in this post.

Co-blogger David Bernstein links to a New York Times column by Thomas Chatterton Williams which argues that “[m]ixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black — and interracial couples share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed-race children, regardless of how they look.” He justifies this by the moral imperative of overcoming the legacy of anti-black racial oppression, claiming that “the black community can and does benefit directly from the contributions and continued allegiance of its mixed-race members, and it benefits in ways that far outweigh the private joys of freer self-expression.”

Such claims are not unusual. We often hear arguments that blacks, Jews, and members of other racial and ethnic groups have special obligations to their fellow group members. But there is no good justification for such claims. No one has a special moral obligation to another person merely because they happen to share the same race or ethnicity. Do I have a special moral duty to other whites or other Russian Jews that does not extend to nonwhites or gentiles? For reasons well articulated by Randall Kennedy, I reject any such notion.

Williams’ argument in regards to blacks has superficial plausibility because blacks have been victims of major historic injustices in this country. But it is not clear why other blacks – or mixed-race individuals – have a special obligation to combat those injustices that is greater than that of other people. If anything, the duty to combat an injustice falls most heavily on those who inflicted it – who, in this case, were mostly white.

Even if we accept Williams’ notion that interracial parents should consider the benefits to the “black community” from the contributions of “mixed-race parents,” how does he know that those benefits really do “outweigh the private joys of freer self-expression?” For many people, living their lives unburdened by a sense of tribal loyalty is a very important good.

Furthermore, it is not clear why mixed-race people should necessarily choose to “contribute” to one racial “community” rather than another. It is true that the black community has a history of great injustice. But other communities can make similar claims. Asian-Americans, for example, also have a history of victimization in this country. Under Williams’ criteria, it is far from clear that the children of a black-Asian couple have a duty to identify as black rather than Asian.

Or consider my own situation. I am a Russian Jew married to a gentile. When it comes to comparative victimology, Russian Jews are formidable contenders. There is the history of severe discrimination and pogroms under the czars, official anti-Semitism under the Soviets, and of course the Holocaust. Do I therefore have an obligation to raise my future children to identify as Russian Jews? Maybe. But on the other hand, my wife is half-Ukrainian (her grandfather fled Ukraine in 1919). Ukrainians have their own history of oppression, including a massive terror famine inflicted by the Soviet government in the 1930s, and years of repression under both the czars and the communists. Does the Ukrainian claim to my children’s “contributions” outweigh that of the Jews? What criteria should my wife and I apply in judging the question?

Finally, we should recall that many of the historic injustices noted above occurred precisely because people thought they had special moral obligations to their racial and ethnic compatriots and therefore felt justified in oppressing other groups for the supposed benefit of their own. This is what makes nationalism so pernicious, and racial and ethnic loyalty often creates similar dangers. Perhaps we can all make a greater contribution to society if we teach the next generation not to define their moral obligations in terms of race or ethnicity.

That is not to say that we have to ignore racial and ethnic injustices. But addressing them does not require us to define our own moral duties in racial and ethnic terms. As Randall Kennedy puts it:

[I]f one looks at the most admirable efforts by activists to overcome racial oppression in the United States, one finds people who yearn for justice, not merely for the advancement of a particular racial group. One finds people who do not replicate the racial alienations of the larger society but instead welcome interracial intimacy of the most profound sorts. One finds people who are not content to accept the categories of communal affiliation they have inherited but instead insist upon bringing into being new and better forms of communal affiliation, ones in which love and loyalty are unbounded by race.

In order to compete in the Olympics, a horse has to be more than just a horse [HT: Tyler Cowen]. It also has to have the right “nationality”:

Their bond was a gold-medal partnership years in the making — and practically impossible for Canadian equestrian Eric Lamaze to duplicate.

When Lamaze’s horse Hickstead collapsed and died at a competition in Italy on Sunday, it left the world’s No. 1 show jumper mourning his longtime teammate. He also could be without an Olympic-calibre mount less than nine months before the London Games....

“It’s fair to say there certainly isn’t another Hickstead in the world, and that will be a misfortune for Eric,” said Akaash Maharaj, CEO of Equine Canada.

Much like a human athlete who must be a citizen of a country for a required period of time before representing that country in the Olympics, a similar rule applies to horses.

“A horse can only represent a country at the Olympics if he has been owned by his country or a citizen of his country for the requisite amount of time,” said Maharaj.

That deadline is January.

Although I’m no fan of nationalism, it is fun to watch national rivalries play out at the Olympics. And it makes at least some sense to attribute national loyalties to people. When it comes to horses, it seems silly. Olympic equestrian competitors should be able to ride whatever otherwise eligible horses they want, regardless of their “nationality.”

The Current Controversies series has recently published a volume on Patriotism, which includes contributions by Eugene Volokh and myself. Mine is an expansion of this post, which argues that patriotism goes wrong when it leads us to value the nation for its own sake, as opposed to a means to the end of promoting the freedom and happiness of its people. Eugene’s chapter argues that patriotism doesn’t justify imposing a legal ban on flag burning.

The other contributors include well-known scholars like Michael Kazin, George Kateb, and Thomas Sowell. A complete table of contents is available here.

This month, as two years ago, we have an interesting coincidence of a Celtics-Lakers NBA finals and a major international soccer tournament. In 2008, I wrote a post on the subject that I think is still relevant today:

The conjunction of the Celtics-Lakers NBA Finals and the European Soccer Championship [this year, the World Cup] led me to reflect on two important advantage of US pro sports over international soccer: soccer often promotes nationalist and ethnic violence and provides propaganda fodder for repressive or corrupt governments, while US pro sports (with extremely rare exceptions) do not.

European and Latin American soccer rivalries are commonly linked to nationalistic and ethnic antagonisms (e.g. – England vs. Germany, England vs. Ireland, Germany vs. Poland, etc.). Even the fan bases of teams in internal national soccer leagues often break down along ethnic lines. This conjunction of sports rivalries and nationalistic/ethnic rivalries often leads to violence. The most notorious example is the 1969 “Soccer War” between El Salvador and Honduras – a conflict which might have been funny except for the fact that 2000 people were killed and tens of thousands displaced from their homes. And there are many lesser cases of riots and other violence resulting from soccer games.

Many European and especially Latin American soccer teams are also closely associated with governments. This often allows repressive and corrupt regimes to obtain propaganda benefits from the teams’ victories. For example, the repressive Brazilian and Argentinian military governments of the 1970s increased their public support as a result of their national teams’ World Cup victories in 1970 and 1978. In Europe, Mussolini, Franco, and the communist government of the Soviet Union derived similar benefits from their teams’ successes. On a lesser scale, incompetent or corrupt local governments in Europe sometimes benefit from the victories of local clubs.

In the United States, by contrast, pro sports rivalries are based on geographic divisions that have little or no connection to deeper social antagonisms over race, religion, or political ideology. As a result, even the most heated US sports rivalries, such as the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, rarely result in violence between fans of opposing teams – and never in the form of the large-scale soccer riots that we sometimes see in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.... The key difference is that there is no broader Boston-New York conflict that goes beyond the sports rivalry.....

And because US sports teams have relatively few associations with government (with the important exception of indefensible government subsidies for sports stadiums), politicians don’t benefit from their victories....

I’m not saying that there is anything intrinsically wrong with soccer as a sport. I enjoy baseball and basketball much more than soccer, but that is purely a matter of personal preference. Nor am I saying that Europeans and Latin Americans shouldn’t root for their soccer teams. The problem is not soccer as such, but the social and political organization of the sport in much of the world.

US pro sports leagues are sometimes criticized for failing to engage the deeper loyalties of fans as much as soccer does in other countries. On balance, it’s actually a good thing that they don’t.

Simon Kuper’s book Soccer Against the Enemy: How the World’s Most Popular Sport Starts and Fuels Revolutions and Keeps Dictators in Power is a good discussion of the interconnections between soccer, repressive regimes, and harmful nationalism. Kuper could have made his case even stronger had he given greater consideration to the propagandistic exploitation of international sports by communist regimes, which was on an even larger scale than that by right-wing dictators.

I don’t object to soccer fans wanting to enjoy the World Cup. I might even watch a game or two myself. But I’m going to spend the lion’s share of my sports-watching time this month chanting “Beat LA.” It’s less likely to be taken literally than some of the soccer slogans are.

Jonah Goldberg of National Review has written a response to my post criticizing nationalism. Here is his main point:

Somin admits that he’s being more than a bit unfair to me in his post since, I was praising a “little mystic nationalism is a good and healthy thing because it provides the emotional sinew that helps us hold onto our patriotism.” From this entirely defensible and (in my view) completely correct yet utterly banal observation Somin goes off on a tear about how nationalism has killed lots of people and has led to very bad economic policies and, therefore, nationalism is bad.....

Here’s the point: Taking nationalism and setting it apart from other concepts as uniquely bad because, in its most extreme form, it does terrible things is sort of a debater’s trick. Pretty much all things, including perhaps even love (depending how you define it), can be taken too far if it means losing control over our faculties and reason.

I fully acknowledge (as I did in the original post) that Goldberg is only advocating a small “dose” of “mystic nationalism.” However, Goldberg ignores a crucial point I made that anticipates his response: “doses” of nationalism are hard to calibrate. A government that promotes a little bit of nationalism can easily end up with a lot more than it bargained for. Moreover, few governments are willing to confine themselves to promoting just that little bit in the first place. The relatively moderate nationalism of late 19th century Germany and Italy readily morphed into Nazism and Fascism. The same thing has happened in many other countries, even if not to the same extent. This is true in part because, as Goldberg notes, nationalism is a form of “irrational affection.” Irrational sentiments are difficult to restrict to small doses, and easily taken too far.

It is true, of course, that mass murder is “the extreme form” of nationalism. But that extreme form isn’t all that rare. In the last century alone, at least a dozen or so governments have committed mass murder in large part because of nationalistic motives (Germany, Japan, Rwanda, Uganda, Iraq, and Turkey are among the most important examples). Nationalism doesn’t inevitably lead to mass murder. But it greatly increases the risk.

Furthermore, as noted in my original post even less extreme forms of nationalism still promote repression, discrimination, protectionism, and other evils. It is true, as Goldberg notes, that almost any principle can cause harm if taken too far. But few are taken to an extreme as readily as nationalism is, and few have such devastating consequences when they are.

Goldberg’s other key point is that we need nationalism to motivate our troops and people to defend our freedom. I am not convinced that this is true. Many people have sacrificed for freedom even absent nationalistic motives. Americans made great sacrifices in the Revolutionary War, despite the fact that there was no nationalistic objective involved (18th century white Americans overwhelmingly came from the same ethnic and cultural background as the British they were revolting against). Even if nationalism does help motivate Americans to protect freedom, it also motivates many of our enemies to want to take that freedom away. On net, both sides might be better off if there were no nationalism, or at least if there was less of it.

Goldberg also tries to defend nationalism by arguing that “irrational affection” isn’t always bad, noting, for example, that love is a good thing. I agree that some forms of irrational affection are good. But that doesn’t mean that all are, or that nationalism is in particular. Whether irrational affection is good or not depends on its effects. In the case of nationalism, the good consequences are greatly outweighed by the bad ones.

Finally, Goldberg points out that nationalism was not the only factor motivating Nazi mass murders. I certainly agree that other motives were involved as well. However, nationalism was absolutely central. Hitler and the Nazis clearly believed that their wars and mass murders – including the extermination of the Jews – were needed to promote the nationalistic interests of the German/Aryan people. If 1930s Germans were not nationalistic (or even if their nationalism were greatly diminished, as it was post-WWII), it is inconceivable that they would have supported the Nazis. In trying to diminish the role of nationalism in Nazism, Goldberg claims that “The uniting vision of the National Socialists, the Bolsheviks, the Jacobins, the Maoists, the Khmer Rouge et al was that they invoked nationalistic sentiment in order to wipe the slate clean, to start over at Year Zero.” That may be true of the various other movements that Goldberg lists (though all of them were in fact based on explicitly internationalist ideologies, except perhaps the Khmer Rouge), but it was not true of the Nazis, who constantly claimed to be merely continuing the thousand year tradition of German nationalism, and adapting it to modern circumstances. In any event, our disagreement on this point is relatively minor, since Goldberg concedes that “nationalism was a big part of the equation.”

The bottom line, as I see it, is that nationalism is extremely dangerous. As I put it in my original post, “playing with nationalism is like playing with fire. It’s not inevitable that you will get burned, but the risk is high.” I would add that a small nationalistic flame can often turn into a conflagration that burns down the whole neighborhood.

Some commenters and others reacting to my post on nationalism raise the issue of its relationship to patriotism. Even if nationalism is an evil, perhaps patriotism can still be good. Patriotism is certainly distinguishable from nationalism, as I defined that term in my previous post: “loyalty to one’s own nation-state based on ties of language, culture, or ethnicity.” It is also differs from nationalism defined as a sense of moral obligation to members of one’s ethnic or racial group across national boundaries. In common usage, patriotism generally means loyalty to one’s government and/or its ideals regardless of ethnic or racial identity. For example, one can be a patriotic American even if you are a member of an ethnic minority, English is not your native language, you dislike mainstream American popular culture, and so on.

To the extent that patriotism simply means supporting your country when its government promotes good ideals and policies, I’m all in favor of it. Indeed, I place high value on the American political system because, despite serious flaws, it provides a great deal of freedom and happiness to large numbers of people. I also admire it because, unlike most other nations, it is not primarily based on ties of race, language, or ethnicity.

At the same time, I am opposed to patriotism in the sense of valuing a nation or government for its own sake. Unlike senior conspirator Eugene Volokh, I don’t believe that we should “love” our country in the same unconditional way that we love a spouse or family member. That kind of patriotism too readily leads people to support governments that are oppressive and unjust. More fundamentally, it loses sight of the principle that governments and nations are means, not ends in and of themselves. The Founding Fathers, I think, got it right when they wrote in the Preamble to the Constitution that they were creating a new government in order to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” The Constitution and the United States generally are not ends in themselves, but means to the objectives laid out in the Preamble. The corollary is that the government deserves patriotic loyalty only in so far as it promotes those objectives better than the available alternatives. If I thought that freedom, happiness and other important values could be better achieved by replacing the United States with some other political entity or by breaking it up through secession, I would not support maintaining the status quo out of patriotism. To do so would be to exalt a mere means above the ends it is supposed to serve.

Some, like Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds in his response to my earlier post, argue that we need “irrational affection” for government in order for it to work well. I am skeptical. A population that values its government for purely instrumental reasons can still give it the necessary support and defend it against external enemies. At the same time, it is less likely to tolerate abuses of government power on the grounds that we have a patriotic duty to support the state for its own sake. But even if some degree of “irrational affection” for government is necessary, it should still be regarded as a means to an end, not a value in itself.

Ultimately, I think the right attitude towards patriotism was best captured by Milton Friedman in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom:

In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country....” Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic “what your country can do for you” implies that the government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, “what you can do for your country” implies that the government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them... [H]e regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served.

The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather “What can I and my compatriots do through government” to . . . advance our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany this question with another: How can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom we establish it to protect?

UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds (AKA Instapundit) responds to this post here:

I BELIEVE THAT ILYA SOMIN MISTAKES MY POINT: “Some, like Glenn ‘Instapundit’ Reynolds in his response to my earlier post, argue that we need ‘irrational affection’ for government in order for it to work well. I am skeptical. A population that values its government for purely instrumental reasons can still give it the necessary support and defend it against external enemies.”

I don’t think this quite responds to my point. I was suggesting that, in an evolutionary sense, a state whose populace feels irrational loyalty is more likely to prevail against states whose populaces are purely rational. This doesn’t strike me as much of a leap. A parent who values a child for purely instrumental reasons can still give it the necessary support, but I suspect that evolution has favored those who feel irrational loyalty to their kinfolks, too.

Furthermore, a state whose populace feels irrational loyalty probably has greater threat-value when dealing with states whose populace is only rationally loyal. This is not a defense of nationalism on any sort of moral grounds, of course — merely a suggestion that efforts to get rid of it will be difficult. This is particularly true if, as seems likely to me, evolution has favored irrational group-loyalty (for basically the same reasons) over periods extending long before the development of the state, so that such traits are largely hardwired.

I thank Glenn for the clarification. There is, I think, less disagreement between us than I at first thought. I certainly agree that “irrational loyalty” can give a state an advantage in some conflicts, and that nationalism will be difficult to root out. At the same time, I’m not convinced that that advantage is necessarily decisive in a conflict. Indeed, it could be outweighed by the disadvantages created by that very same irrationality. For example, German and Japanese troops fought very hard in World War II, in part because of attachment to irrational nationalistic ideology. But that same ideology also led their leaders to grossly underestimate their enemies and ultimately caused their defeat. Also, relatively non-nationalistic states that limit the power of their governments as a result are likely to be more economically productive and therefore have more resources to commit to any conflict. This factor underlies a large part of America’s geopolitical success over the last century.

It’s certainly possible that evolution favored “irrational group loyalty.” But such loyalties need not be directed at a state or a nation. I think it is less dangerous if they are directed towards smaller groups, such as friends and family, or towards adherents of universal principles of freedom and justice. Granted, some universalistic ideologies, such as communism, are even worse than nationalism. But others are vastly better. In any event, there is nothing hardwired or inevitable about nationalistic commitments as such, as indicated by the fact that most people were not nationalistic for the vast majority of human history. I’m not sure how much of what I say in the update Glenn would disagree with. It’s possible that the difference between our views is actually very minor.

Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg recently expressed the common view that “A little mystic nationalism is a good and healthy thing because it provides the emotional sinew that helps us hold onto our patriotism.” Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry expounds on this defense of nationalism in more detail here. My own view of nationalism is far more negative than theirs. Indeed, I believe that nationalism is second only to communism as the greatest evil of modern politics. There are many different meanings of nationalism. Here, I refer to loyalty to one’s own nation-state based on ties of language, culture, or ethnicity, which I think is roughly what Goldberg and Gobry are referring to as well.

I. Nationalism as a Cause of Mass Murder and Repression.

One big problem with nationalism is that it is a leading cause of mass murder. Fascism and Nazism were, of course, extreme forms of nationalism and the mass murders Nazi and fascist regimes committed were justified on the grounds that they were necessary to advance the interests of racially or ethnically defined peoples. Obviously, most nationalist governments do not commit mass murder on that scale. This is one reason why nationalism is not quite as pernicious as socialism Nearly all full-blown socialist regimes that have lasted for any length of time have engaged in mass murder; “only” a substantial minority of nationalist regimes have done the same.

But many non-mass murdering nationalist regimes still use nationalism as a justification for protectionism, discrimination against minority groups, suppression of dissent, and the like. Nor are these abuses simply the result of misinterpretations of nationalism by unscrupulous rulers. To the contrary, if you genuinely believe that we have special obligations to members of your ethnic or national group that sometimes trump universal principles, consistency requires that you be willing to sacrifice the rights of other groups to benefit your own, at least sometimes. This is particularly so, if you believe as many nationalists do, that international politics and economics is often a zero-sum game between different nations and ethnic groups. This kind of zero-sum thinking was, in fact, at the heart of Nazi and Fascist ideology (see here and here); given its nationalistic and zero-sum premises, the Nazi/Fascist program of conquest actually made a certain amount of sense. In theory, one can be nationalistic without also endorsing a zero-sum game view of the world; but, empirically, the two tend to be highly correlated.

II. Some Other Dangers of Nationalism.

Nationalism sometimes makes xenophobes even of generally tolerant liberals. For example, Senator Charles Schumer recently denounced the NBA for buying uniforms manufactured in Thailand. Schumer would rather see poor Thai workers (who are far worse off than even the poorest American workers) lose their jobs than violate the supposed principle that an “American sport” should buy American. Only nationalistic prejudice can explain such reasoning. Certainly, Schumer would never think of denouncing the New York Knicks for buying uniforms manufactured in Texas. If he did, he would become an instant laughingstock. Yet protectionists on both the left and the right make claims similar to Schumer’s all the time.

Finally, nationalism often leads people to reject good ideas merely because of their foreign origin, a flaw effectively denounced by F.A. Hayek:

The growth of ideas is an international process, and only those who fully take part in the discussion will be able to exercise a significant influence. It is no real argument to say that an idea is un-American, or un-German, nor is a mistaken or vicious ideal better for having been conceived by one of our compatriots.

III. Do We Need Nationalism to Promote Good Causes?

Sometimes, of course, nationalistic prejudices can be enlisted in a good cause. For example, Polish nationalists opposed Soviet-imposed communist rule in their country. But this simply shows that people can sometimes support good causes for bad reasons. Communism in Poland was wrong because it created repression, poverty, and mass murder, not because it was established by ethnic Russians rather than ethnic Poles. By contrast, US-imposed governments in Germany, Italy, Japan, Grenada, Panama, and elsewhere turned out to be much better than those previously produced by indigenous nationalists in those countries. Nor is it the case that nationalism is the only force that can motivate people to sacrifice for a just cause. Many of the most prominent Eastern European dissidents – people like Vaclav Havel and Andrei Sakharov – were primarily motivated by universal principles, and were often critical of nationalism. Here in the United States, brave people risked their lives to abolish slavery and Jim Crow, even though neither was a nationalist cause (indeed, both causes were explicitly universalist in their rejection of the supposed moral importance of race and ethnicity).

The same response applies to Gobry’s argument that we need nationalism to prevent our liberties from being taken away by a “globalist glob” of rule by international elites. One can indeed oppose world government on nationalistic grounds. But the much more compelling argument against it is that it would create a dangerous concentration of power. For similar reasons, I can oppose domestic centralization of power in Washington without feeling any “mystical” or nationalistic loyalty to the state of Virginia.

I am not so naive as to think that we can do away with nationalism any time soon. But we should do what we can to diminish its influence. Contrary to conventional wisdom, nationalism is not an inevitable natural human instinct. Very few people were nationalistic until various European governments started indoctrinating their populations in nationalist ideology in the 19th century. Prior to that time, few objected to the existence of multinational polities such as the Holy Roman Empire (at least on nationalistic grounds) or believed that any important moral obligations could be based on common ethnicity.

IV. How Playing with Nationalism is like Playing with Fire.

Much of the above is to some degree unfair to Goldberg, Gobry and others like them. After all, they certainly don’t favor the extreme nationalism of the Nazis and Fascists. They probably don’t even support the much milder nationalistic prejudices underpinning Senator Schumer’s protectionism. Instead, they only advocate “a little mystic nationalism” – just enough to bind us together in a “common identity,” as Gobry puts it. Unfortunately, history shows that it is extremely difficult to limit nationalism in such a fine-grained way. Once established, it readily morphs into chauvinism, protectionism and often much worse. To some extent, this is the result of people’s general “rational irrationality” about politics, which prevents them from objectively examining their political views. But, as discussed above, it is also partly the result of the inner logic of nationalism itself, which insists that we have special moral obligations to based on nationality, ethnicity, or culture. Playing with nationalism is a lot like playing with fire. It’s not inevitable that you will get burned, but the risk is high.

Goldberg argues that one of the things that makes the United States “great” is “that it is ours.” By that standard, any state can be considered “great” from the standpoint of its own nationalists who claim it as “theirs.” In my view, the US – or any nation – is only great in so far as it effectively promotes universal principles such as the protection of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” To the extent that the United States is more admirable than most other nations, it is in part because it was founded on those ideals rather than nationalism.

UPDATE: Lawrence Auster attacks this post by claiming that I am “against every human community other than a single universal mankind consisting of nothing but right-bearing individuals.” I think it pretty obvious that I am only attacking nationalism, which I described in the post as “loyalty to one’s own nation-state based on ties of language, culture, or ethnicity.” There are all sorts of human communities based on other types of connections – religion, ideology, interest, profession, family, neighborhood, friendship, and so on. Auster also misinterprets my argument when he claims that I think that to “see oneself as part of a particular people and to care about that people and to want that people to continue existing is a horribly dangerous attitude that must be scorned and crushed.” I have no objection to seeing oneself as part of a people. That is a purely empirical claim, with no necessary moral implications. I also have no objection to wanting a particular people to “continue existing.” What I do object to is the idea that we have special moral obligations to those who are part of our “people” in the sense of having the same ethnicity, race, language, or culture – obligations that at least sometimes trump the universal human rights of members of “other” peoples. There is a legitimate debate to be had over the value of nationalism. But that debate is not advanced by falsely claiming that opposition to nationalism is the same as opposition to all forms of community or the mere existence of peoples with differing cultures.