Virtue of Nationalism

The Virtue of Nationalism by Yoram Hazony, 234 pages

In the early twentieth century, all right-thinking people were nationalists - at least two of the great moral touchstones of the era, Wilson's Twelve Points and Gandhi's Indian independence movement, were founded on the principle of national self-determination.  This changed after the Second World War, both due to the rise and fall of fascism and the perceived need for supranational mediating institutions during the Cold War's nuclear-armed superpower standoff and the growth of international commerce, with the result that by the end of the century all right-thinking people were globalists.  In The Virtue of Nationalism Yoram Hazony makes the provocative contention that this shift endangers both international peace and individual liberties.

Central to Hazony's argument is an act of rhetorical sleight of hand in which he defines nationalism and imperialism as antithetical philosophies of government, attributing every positive development to the former and every misstep to the latter.  This is, of course, both philosophical and historical nonsense, requiring him to cast medieval localist feudalism as somehow more imperialist than the European nations at the height of colonialism.  This, in turn, involves a bizarre misconception of the Holy Roman Empire as an entity from which the nations of Europe "won their independence" at the beginning of the modern age, while even in his description the early modern European states appear less as consciously limited entities respecting each others' sovereignty than as competing empires.  Turning his attention to the contemporary world, he insists (plausibly) that international institutions, when given the power to interfere in the affairs of nations, will always seek to expand that power despite actual prohibitions, but then pretends (implausibly) that nations, which must of necessity sometimes interfere in the affairs of their neighbors, will self-consciously limit themselves in obedience to abstract principles.

Hazony makes a compelling case against globalist institutions as necessarily technocratic and therefore anti-democratic.  Even more significant is his observation that, left to itself, rational calculation can never instill the kind of loyalty that is necessary for the self-sacrifice that alone can sustain community.  Unfortunately, the book overreaches in its central argument and is then undone by its own inconsistencies.