Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism
MODERN patriotism must contend with two alternatives that were largely unknown or at least marginal to the ancient world: nationalism and cosmopolitanism. To understand patriotism rightly, we must first understand what it is not—which means we must distinguish it from these two competing sensibilities. It may be best to consider patriotism in Aristotelian terms along a continuum of excess and deficiency. Aristotle argued that every virtue—every excellence of heart and mind—could be understood as a mean between two contending vices. I want to consider nationalism and cosmopolitanism as the two extremes—the pathologies, as it were—to which patriotism is prone.
Nationalism is an excess of patriotism that holds an absolute attachment to one’s own way of life—one’s country, one’s cause, one’s state—as unconditionally good and superior to others. This is the kind of loyalty expressed in such simple and often brutal sentiments as “my country, right or wrong” or, as appeared on bumper stickers in the 1960s, “America, love it or leave it.” Nationalism may begin as a simple and uncontroversial demand to have one’s culture or way of life be strong and respected, but it almost inevitably turns into an ideology of resentment that feeds on anger and grievance. Even though nationalism is often confused with patriotism, the two are quite different. There is nothing inherently exclusionary or triumphalist about patriotism. It expresses a human need to belong, for service, and for love of one’s own.
At the other end of the spectrum, cosmopolitanism exhibits a deficiency of patriotism. Contemporary cosmopolitanism is a feature of the age of globalization, which is turning us all into “citizens of the world” living in open societies with increasingly porous borders. While this trend is in large part driven by commerce and international trade, it resonates with humanitarian sentiment. Modern humanitarianism, a legacy of the Enlightenment, holds that each person, regardless of race, ethnicity, or national origin, is entitled to equal moral respect. This idea, based on a core value of universal human dignity, is in many respects a noble ideal. The belief in the priority of human dignity receives official recognition in documents like the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and is the intuition that underscores much of the recent literature on international justice.1 The European Union has been, at least until recently, the model of this new post-national form of political organization. What form the European Union aims to embody is not altogether clear. It is not exactly a republic but neither is it an empire. It might better be called post-constitutional.
These are the two dispositions with which patriotism must contend.
“Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century,” reads the deliberately provocative opening sentence of Elie Kedourie’s Nationalism.2 Kedourie had an insider’s knowledge of what can happen when nationalism takes hold: as an Iraqi Jew from Baghdad, he had been forced out of the country where his ancestors had lived for generations by the rising tide of Arab nationalism after World War II. Contradicting other historians, who claimed to trace the roots of nationalism back to Roman, Greek, and even Hebrew sources, Kedourie claimed that it was no older than the final years of the decaying Holy Roman Empire. Far from being a permanent feature of normal politics, Kedourie claimed, it was a new development and one of the most disruptive in modern history.
Nationalism was a product of the modern “historical consciousness” that grew as a reaction to the universalizing project of the Enlightenment and French Revolution. In opposition to the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which tended to view human nature as uniform across time and space, the Historical School emphasized the uniqueness of individual nations and peoples, arguing that culture, not nature, shaped human behavior. Rather than positing natural rights that all human beings held in common, members of the Historical School considered norms of justice to be specific to their own time and place. According to this view, it might be possible to speak of the rights of the English, but not the rights of humankind. The appeal to universal principles, it was argued, prevented men and women from fully identifying with the social order to which they were attached. Nationalism was created specifically to counter the destabilizing effects of the Enlightenment by finding a way to make us feel “at home” in the world.
One of the most astute students of the nationalist mentality, Isaiah Berlin, has divided it into three distinct stages or moments.3 The first phase, associated with the philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder in the late eighteenth century, maintained that human beings naturally form stable groups, that each group’s way of life differs from that of others, and that the characteristics of the individuals who compose each group will be shaped by the history, customs, traditions, and especially language of the groups to which they belong. Herder was fascinated with the problem of cultural identity and especially how language shapes a people’s character. The thesis that language is not simply instrumental or strategic but actually constitutive of how people see the world was and remains crucial to the nationalist mentality.4
According to Herder’s organic theory of nationalism, each culture represents a unique expression of human potentialities in its own time and place. Herder studied Hebrew, Persian, and Indian poetry and mythology, either in the original or in translation, in an effort to discover what it is like to think and feel as a Hebrew, a Persian, or an Indian. He was equally enchanted by the poetry of Ossian and the Teutonic myths of his German ancestors. He was a kind of “Orientalist” before that term was coined. On his account, a German will resemble another German in thought, feeling, and behavior more closely than an Italian or a Greek. Of course, there will be exceptions to the national stereotype, but the differences between peoples remain obvious and deep-rooted.
This was nationalism in its most benign form. There is surely nothing insidious in the recognition of distinct national characters, and as Berlin argued, Herder was one of the early proponents of cultural pluralism, the view that there are many valid ways of expressing our common humanity.5 As Leopold von Ranke, another member of the German Historical School, put it, each nation is equally close to God (unmittelbar zu Gott), meaning that there is no one measure for being human and no nation can claim inherent superiority over any other. The danger came only later, when philosophers of history began to regard the Geist or spirit of each people as a phase in the progressive development of a “world spirit.” It was a natural consequence of this idea that at any given time, one nation represented the age’s highest expression of culture or civilization. From this distinction between higher and lower civilizations, nationalism takes a more menacing turn. The language of Manifest Destiny, the White Man’s Burden, and la mission civilisatrice—all of which have been offered as justifications for colonial or other interventions to expand a national interest—are merely the expressions of this transformation. When civilizations begin to be ranked, cultural pluralism morphs into cultural nationalism.
The second phase of nationalism occurred when cultural pluralism led to the demand for a state. This development seems almost inevitable. Nationalism is ultimately a theory of self-expression or self-determination, the belief that each people has a right to live in self-governing communities that follow their own laws and unique patterns of life. This conjunction of the nation and state—creating that characteristically modern hybrid, the “nation-state”—was one of the most fateful developments of modern history. The nation-state is an arrangement in which the dominant ethnic group gets to set the terms of communal self-government. The nation ceased to be seen as a body of persons who over time acquired certain common manners and habits, and instead became the sole source of sovereignty and authority from which everything else derives. Nationalism grew to be associated with the project of replacing our diverse human characteristics with a single overriding national identity that has been purged of all other natural and cultural differences. Despite efforts to imagine forms of “liberal nationalism” that could accommodate diverse inheritances, the consistent thread has been to create a single national identity as the unwavering locus of our loyalties and obligations.6
The demand for a nation-state was given its most vivid expression in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation.7 At the time he delivered these lectures, in Berlin in 1807 and 1808, there was no organized German state. His lectures were an exercise in nation-building. “I speak just for Germans, just about Germans,” he told the audience in his inaugural lecture.8 His task was the “Germanization” of the German people, the creation of a Volk with its own national identity. Fichte began with the relatively benign view that each people represents a unique Volksgeist consisting of its cultural, linguistic, and geographic character—but he combined this with the revolutionary demand that each nation must take on its own political identity in the form of a state. He passionately called for all Germans to unite under one political banner. To be without a state was to be without rights, since rights were conferred by membership in a state. By uniting the nation with the idea of the state as the supreme locus of sovereignty, Fichte can truly be said to have invented nationalism.
Three passages illustrate how German intellectuals of the early nineteenth century considered a unified nation-state a precondition for German self-respect. In an early work, The German Constitution (1802), Hegel compared Germany’s condition to that of the divided Italian city-states so deplored by Machiavelli and called for a modern-day Theseus—the legendary founder of Athens—to put the German house in order. “This Theseus,” Hegel wrote, “would have to have the magnanimity to grant the people he would have had to fashion out of dispersed units a share in matters that affected everyone.”9 Some seventy years later, Bismarck would grant Hegel’s wish.
Heinrich Heine referred to the German misère—revealingly using a French term to describe a German condition—in comparing its feudal backwardness to the relatively advanced states of England and France. In the introduction to his poem Germany, A Winter Tale (1844), Heine—the most cosmopolitan German of his generation—tells of his hope that all of Europe (and more) would one day be united under a single German state:
The people of Alsace and Lorraine will join Germany again if we complete what the French have begun, if we surpass them in deed as we have already done in thought; if we rise to the occasion and follow that thought to its ultimate conclusions . . . if we become God’s redeemers; if we restore dignity to the impoverished people who have been disinherited of their happiness. . . . Yes, and then not only Alsace and Lorraine but the whole of France, the whole of Europe, the whole world will pass to us—the whole world will become German! It is of this mission and of this universal dominion on the part of Germany that I often dream when I wander beneath the oak trees. This is my patriotism.10
Even Karl Marx, who excoriated nationalism as an ideology for “beer-quaffing philistines,” still lamented the lack of a German state, if only because he considered it a precondition for a proletarian revolution. “We have shared in the restorations of modern nations,” he complained, “without ever having shared in their revolutions.”11
Yet the demand for a nation-state was not nationalism’s final stage of development. This occurred when the demand for a state was accompanied, as it inevitably was, by the belief that the goals and purposes of one state necessarily conflict with those of others. Each nation hails the goodness of its own values, if only because they are its own, and there is no higher court of appeal than national identity. Hegel, who encouraged a profound respect for history as the one true teacher of good and evil, saw building up the strength of one’s nation as preparation for the “great game” of politics. If each nation is the absolute judge and arbiter of its own destiny, it follows that politics between nations is inescapable conflict in which power alone determines the winners and losers. Power politics will in turn require a warrior ethics guided exclusively by national self-interest. Nationalism is Machiavellianism come of age.
The third and final characteristic of nationalism, then, is a built-in aggression: a belief that nations and states are not only unique and different from one another, but also locked in a permanent state of mistrust and animosity. This is a reworking of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s principle of omnis determinatio est negatio, or what Hegel called “the labor of the negative.”12 We are what we are or become what we are only through negation or rejection of alternatives. Every assertion is based on a rejection or repudiation. As a principle of logic, this makes perfect sense. It is a reminder of the law of formal identity, that each thing is what it is and not something else. As a political rule, however, it is a recipe for conflict and endless war. It leads each people to view itself not only as different from all others, but also as standing in a relation of existential opposition to and animosity toward others.
The most potent expression of this nationalist attitude was given by the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt, in a short and incendiary book called The Concept of the Political written in 1932.13 Schmitt based his views on Thomas Hobbes’s conception that the natural state of mankind is “a war of all against all,” in which the overriding fact of life is the threat of violent death. Schmitt saw war, and the constant preparation for it, as the inescapable condition of political life. Where Hobbes failed, according to Schmitt, was in believing that a social pact or covenant could create a sovereign that could end war and establish the condition for civil society. For Schmitt, Hobbes’s solution could not paper over the inescapable fact that the fundamental political distinction is that between friend and enemy, between those who are with us and those who are against us. Rather than end war, the social contract merely intensifies it. Friend and enemy are the inescapable categories through which we experience what Schmitt calls das Politische. “The political,” he writes, “is the most intense and extreme antagonism that becomes much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.”14
Although a man of the extreme right, Schmitt brought an almost Marxian sensibility to his use of terms like “rights,” “humanity,” and “democracy” as ideological placeholders in the struggle for power. “All political concepts, images, and terms,” he writes, “have a polemical meaning.”15 Words are weapons, and discourse is war by other means. Schmitt taught his readers to think of even the most inclusive political terms as creating distinctions of inclusion and exclusion, us and them. The attempt to abolish distinctions, he argued, would simply create new hierarchies of power: “Above all the polemical character determines the use of the word.”16 All humanitarian appeals to concepts of free trade or international law are attempts to evade the fundamental fact of conflict and the need for a politics of group solidarity, to stand with others on our side. Writing shortly after World War I, he regarded the League of Nations and Woodrow Wilson’s vision of a “war to end all wars” as simply an invitation to continual warfare. For Schmitt, only partisanship and war are real; consensus and peace are phony. The politics of the future will be determined by those who have the courage to recognize this fact and act on it.
Schmitt’s view is, to be sure, rooted in an important truth: the world is a dangerous place. But like Machiavelli and Hobbes, he takes the extreme situation—war and the mobilization for war—and accepts it as normal. An extreme situation is one where a society’s independence, perhaps its very survival, is at stake. For Schmitt, every situation poses an existential threat that forces one to choose between friends and enemies. The politics of extreme nationalism turns the assertion of national identity into an unremitting struggle for dominance.
Politics, on this account, is an endless power struggle guided exclusively by national interest. And yet a politics of unremitting war and preparation for war would be self-defeating even on Schmitt’s own terms. Why would the struggle between friend and enemy remain exclusively between states? Would not competition and group conflict become a feature of domestic politics? Why should the logic of bitter rivalry and partisanship not cut all the way down into our domestic affairs as fellow citizens—ethnic and cultural minorities of all kinds—become stigmatized as traitors and enemies? Schmitt’s argument points not only to wars between states, but also to endless civil wars and violent conflicts between rival groups on all scales; and in fact ethno-nationalism, often with a distinct anti-Semitic and racist tone, has reemerged throughout the West. The result of such a logic of conflict would ironically be the negation of politics: the destruction of the regime as the locus of national identity.
NATIONALISM AND PATRIOTISM
The pugnacious tone of Schmitt’s nationalism differs markedly from the patriotic spirit. Nationalism is exclusionary. It does not just celebrate uniqueness but turns it into a principle of difference and opposition. Patriotism draws on an entirely different emotional register. “Patriotism,” French president Emmanuel Macron said on the hundredth anniversary of Armistice Day, “is exactly the opposite of nationalism,” a point repeated by Harvard historian Jill Lepore.17 The historian should know better. Nationalism is not patriotism’s exact opposite but a deformation of the patriotic spirit. Patriotism is closer to civic piety—a form of civic bonding over a life in common—than nationalist self-assertion. Piety is, to be sure, a term that is often misunderstood. It implies an acceptance—by no means an uncritical or complacent one—of the form of life into which one has been born. It once meant a kind of natural reverence for the sources of one’s being. Consider Wordsworth’s famous couplet, “And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety.”18
This distinction between nationalism and patriotism was captured brilliantly in a series of essays by George Orwell. Writing at the outset of World War II, Orwell’s patriotism was being vividly driven home by extraordinary events. “As I write,” he said in the opening sentence of his essay “The Lion and the Unicorn,” “highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”19 The struggle between England and Germany forced him to confront a simple question: which side was he on? For the first time in a career that had included a stint as a member of the British imperial police in Burma, working as a casual laborer in Paris, and fighting on the loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell had to confront the fact that he was at heart an English patriot. But what did patriotism mean, and how did it differ from the nationalism then dominating Germany?
For Orwell, nationalism means “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” Patriotism, however, is “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.”20 Nationalism cannot be separated from the desire for power, especially the desire to acquire power and prestige for one’s own nation at the expense of others. It is at bottom an ideology of grievance and resentment. “A nationalist,” Orwell wrote, “is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige . . . his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations.”21
Patriotism, by contrast, is a peculiarly conservative disposition—though Orwell did not use that term—devoted to the enjoyment of what one has rather than an aspiration to what one hopes to get or regret over what one doesn’t have. There is an insular, even defensive tone to patriotism that is opposed to all ideologies of power and conquest. Not surprisingly, Orwell associated nationalism with certain “Big Ideas”—Communism, Zionism, Pacifism, Nazism, “Americanism”—anything beginning with an upper-case letter and ending with an “ism,” all of which strive to erase the diverse particularities of everyday life. Patriotism is identified by lower-case qualities and virtues. It is associated with the love of liberty, where this means “the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above.”22 Among the qualities Orwell admired were the essential gentleness and “decency” of English life, its manners and habits, its indifference to the arts, its pub culture, bad food, and the quintessential English love of gardening (“we are a nation of flower lovers”).23
No current work displays the difference between nationalism and patriotism more vividly than Yoram Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism.24 Hazony traces the nationalist impulse back to the Hebrew Bible, which, he argues, put forward an argument for free and independent peoples against the dreams of universal empire and empire builders. The biblical story of the Tower of Babel was only the most vivid warning against the hubris of attempting to create a single state with a common language (Genesis 11:1–9). “The confusion of tongues” was God’s way of telling us that we were meant not to live as part of a vast herd but in independent communities united around a shared history, language, and religion. So far so good. In Hazony’s telling, the Bible presents the idea of a free nation-state as an alternative to the despotically ruled empires of Egypt and Babylonia, which promised peace and civilization under the rule of a universal monarch. Later monarchs, from Alexander to Augustus to the Holy Roman Empire, to Napoleon, all aspired to the same thing.
The modern nation-states, by contrast, were the outcome of the “Protestant Construction” of the new international order created by the Peace of Westphalia treaties (1648). These treaties formally put an end to the wars of religion set off by the Protestant Reformation and announced that henceforth each state would be responsible for the protection of its own people and its right to the religion of its choice. This Protestant ideal institutionalized the principle of cuius regio, eius religio—whose land, his religion—which gave the sovereign of each state the right to determine the religion of the state. While in no ways intending to endorse a policy of religious toleration, this principle for the first time gave legal recognition to the fact of religious pluralism, if not within states, at least between them. It is this construction that has flourished, with occasional hiccups, until quite recently.
Hazony sees the deepest challenge to the nation-state arising from the liberal impulse, which he traces to John Locke, and the belief that there is a single right political order, liberal democracy, that must be enforced even against the wishes of national populations. Liberal democracy grew up within the national state, but its doctrine of human rights tends to recognize no national boundaries. The League of Nations, the United Nations, the European Union, even the United States—which began as an attempt to create “a more perfect union” out of a diverse collection of independent states—are simply the successors of the universal empires of the past, and they rule with the same arrogance and high-handedness. The post–World War II liberal consensus, according to Hazony, is a vast left-wing conspiracy to stigmatize nationalism as the source of racism and genocide, and to denounce as “politically incorrect” all those who would resist the hegemony of Western liberalism. Hazony defends the new nationalisms in Hungary, Poland, Israel, Brazil, post-Brexit Britain, and Trump’s America as a return to the older Westphalian (and biblical) vision of different peoples living according to their own laws and manners. “We will not be enamored with what every nation does with this freedom,” he cheerfully concludes. “But in tolerating the ways of other nations, we will be released from the old imperialist hatred of the different and diverse.”25
Hazony’s division of the world into nation-states and empires is seductive but highly misleading. Today’s nation-states are generally congeries of religious, ethnic, and racial minorities. Territories are rarely divided along strict ethnic or cultural lines, and pluralism is an inescapable fact of modern political life. What, then, to do with people who don’t (or won’t) fit into the dominant national idea? The idea that Germany is for Germans, Israel for Jews, and America for Americans is based on a deliberate exclusion of peoples—often ethnic and religious minorities—who do not conform to the national prototype. This tendency came to a head after World War I with the breakup of the Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires. Millions of people suddenly found themselves dispossessed and excluded from the states and empires of which they had formerly been members, simply because they did not share the approved ethnic, religious, or linguistic identities. This especially affected minority communities—Jews, Muslims, Roma—that found themselves stateless under new regimes, each of which declared a right to “national self-determination,” but only for its ethnic majority.26
Modern nation-states are not the homogenous units of ethnic and cultural purity envisaged by nationalists. They are the result of long processes of immigration, expulsion, and migration generally created by war and conquest. The borders between states are subject to continual struggle and negotiation. What to do with the stateless, the dispossessed, the migrant, those without passports who find themselves quarantined in detention centers and refugee camps, often for years or even decades at a time? The nationalist answer seems to be “try somewhere else.” If you are a Tutsi in Rwanda, a Muslim in Kosovo, a Rohingya in Myanmar, a Uighur in China, or a Palestinian in Israel, you are just out of luck. A doctrine of strict nationalism is intended to render us mute in the face of often deliberately imposed cruelties.
Hazony’s rosy picture of nationalism as liberating us from the tyranny of liberal internationalism is at best a half-truth. Because nationalism is a doctrine of inclusion and exclusion, it is only a matter of time before considerations meant to apply to foreign nationals are used to stigmatize domestic “others” deemed to be subversive or undesirable. U.S. representative Steve King from Iowa, a self-described “American nationalist,” gave pitch-perfect expression to this view when he asked disingenuously, “When did the language of white supremacy become offensive?” America, on his account, is a national community in which the whites—no longer a majority—should set the terms for all the others. To be sure, some nationalists, including some of those attending the National Conservatism Conference, have denounced this kind of racist rhetoric, but ethnic and racial tribalism are so baked into the nationalist DNA that they cannot be magically expunged by wishing them away. Nationalists like King, Hazony, and others newly converted to the cause may truly think they are innocently celebrating national traditions, but their views are invariably based on a logic of exclusion, of dividing the world into the irreconcilable alternatives of “us” and “them.” Theirs is a world grown small and ugly.
THE COSMOPOLITAN IDEAL
At the other end of the continuum, the deficiency of patriotism involves a kind of transpolitical cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan idea runs deep in the Western tradition. It was very much present in Plato’s Apology of Socrates, where the first political philosopher was accused of treason for not believing in the city’s gods and for corrupting the young. The philosophical tradition as a whole stands counter to the spirit of particularism. It claims that the principles of justice must be conceived as impartial, atemporal, and universal, standing at a remove from the local conditions of which they are a part. Plato may have doubted whether the ideal city (kallipolis) described in the Republic could ever be realized in practice, but this did not dampen his belief that without universal standards or criteria of justice, philosophy could only rationalize existing institutions and practices.
Ancient cosmopolitanism, as we have seen, was given its canonical expression by the Stoics in the first and second centuries of the Common Era. Their doctrine of “world citizenship” came of age at a time when Rome exerted world hegemony and its universal empire was seen as having replaced smaller, more parochial political units like the free city-state. According to the Stoic doctrine of oikeiosis, human societies are structured in concentric circles, beginning with the family, extending to one’s community and country, and finally including the whole of humanity. Among the Stoics, a debate arose about the locus of one’s moral obligations, whether to those closest to us or to humanity as a whole. Cicero, a primary source of this debate, argued that “the fellowship among mankind . . . was established by the gods” and when this is denied, “kindness, liberality, goodness, and justice are utterly destroyed.”27 The Stoics were a small philosophical sect who never dreamed that their austere teachings about moral autonomy and independence could become a recipe for humanity as a whole, much less that they could create a new kind of political identity. For this to take place, Stoicism needed to be augmented by another, far more powerful force for cosmopolitanism.
Stoic universalism received a massive boost from Christianity, which sought to replace duty to family, tribe, and city with a message of universal brotherhood. Christianity marked the end of the res publica that had previously been supported by the gods of the communal hearth. The early Christians were not Rome’s most patriotic citizens, precisely because they put faith in the heavenly City of God above loyalty to the earthly city of Rome. Saint Augustine, the most effective propagandist for early Christianity, wrote the City of God precisely to absolve Christianity from the charge of complicity with the sack of Rome in 410. No one has ever described this transformation better than the French classicist and anthropologist Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges in his seminal study The Ancient City, from 1864. “Christianity introduced other new ideas,” Fustel wrote. “It was not the domestic religion of any family, the national religion of any city or of any race. It belonged neither to a caste nor to a corporation. From its first appearance, it called to itself the whole human race. Christ said to his disciples, ‘Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.’ . . . The spirit of propagandism replaced the law of exclusion.”28
No period of history has done more to establish the idea of world citizenship than the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.29 The Enlightenment was an attempt to bring the heavenly city down to earth, to establish in the here-and-now a new world order brought about by international trade and perpetual peace. In France especially, the cosmopolitan idea took on fantastic proportions. In 1713, the Abbé de Saint-Pierre began publishing a plan for perpetual peace titled Projet pour render la paix perpetuelle en Europe (A project for settling an everlasting peace in Europe), and Fougeret de Monbron popularized the word “cosmopolite” with his book Le Cosmopolite ou le citoyen du monde (The cosmopolitan, or The citizen of the world; 1750). The Abbé Fenelon—author of Les aventures de Télémaque, fils d’Ulysse (The adventures of Telemachus, son of Ulysses; 1699) —expressed his hope for a universal Christian republic when he wrote, “I love my family more than myself; I love my country more than my family; but I love the universe more than my country.”30
The most powerful advocate of this new world order, however, was another German philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Kant stressed that our moral duties and obligations respect neither national boundaries nor parochial attachments such as race, class, or ethnicity. In this view, we owe no greater moral obligations to fellow citizens than to any other humans on the planet. “Nothing,” he wrote in the opening sentence of the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), “can possibly be conceived in the world, or even out of it, as good without qualification except a good will.”31 The Kantian moral law—what he calls a Categorical Imperative—is not a divine command but a law that wells up from within ourselves, obedience to which makes us free. The formula for the moral law demands only one thing: treat humanity, whether yourself or others, always as an end and never as a means. The Kantian emphasis on universality—that a moral law is one that can hold for all human beings, however situated—stressed that we are all members of a “kingdom of ends” where every individual, however humble, odd, or eccentric, is due equal moral value and respect simply by virtue of having reason and humanity. Humanity as such is worthy of virtually limitless esteem and respect, or what Kant calls dignity.
It is not immediately obvious that Kant’s theory of moral duty would bring forth political fruit. He presents morality as something binding on individuals, not on collective bodies like states. Yet he could not entirely separate his theory of morality from politics. It is not sufficient for a government to provide peace, property, and security—the whole domain of civil rights—for its own citizens. Kant had an unprecedented awareness that what goes on within the domestic politics of one state is crucially tied to the domestic affairs of its neighbors. It followed that an enlightened government would both want and need to keep a vigilant watch over human rights not only within its borders but in all quarters of the globe. Since rights at home are continually threatened by war or the potential for it, the first order of government must be to secure the conditions for peaceful cooperation between states, which means ensuring that human rights are respected all over the world. In Kant one finds, perhaps for the first time in history, that international politics are given priority over domestic politics.
How then is this new cosmopolitan dimension of rights to be secured? Kant believed that facilitating trade and commerce among states was the best way of securing peaceful relations. He followed the path forged by Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and David Hume in advocating commerce as the key to peace. The pacifying effects of commerce—doux commerce, it was called—would dampen the nationalist, religious, and other vainglorious enthusiasms that had once led to war. But Kant was not willing to rely solely on the “hidden hand” of self-interest and economics to secure this goal. He lived—or believed he lived—in an age of Enlightenment, when at last mankind was becoming better disposed to the teachings of philosophy and the rights of man.
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” Kant wrote in “What Is Enlightenment?” “The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding.”32 Henceforth, we would hasten the progress of enlightenment by direct appeal to reason. The watchword of this new age was “critique”—his three major treatises all had this word in the title—suggesting that all ideas, institutions, and traditions would be submitted to the power of rational criticism. What cannot stand up to critique does not deserve to exist. In the future, we will achieve by means of criticism and rational planning what in the past had been accomplished only piecemeal and haphazardly, always with the danger of moral backsliding. Kant is the original source of what would later be called progressivism.
Achieving his dream of an enlightened age, Kant believed, required not just a republican form of government that respects its own citizens’ rights and liberties, but also an international league of republics designed to secure international peace. The idea for a cosmopolitan ethic of humanity, Kant hoped, would eventually be realized in a confederation of republics overseen by international law. Early modern philosophers like Hobbes and Locke were wrong in attributing sovereignty to the nation-state; for Kant, the state is a mere developmental stage along the historical path to a world republic of states organized around the idea of peace. Only in a league of republics would Isaiah’s dream of peace among the nations finally be realized and would individuals treat one another as ends and not as means. Kant’s plans for an international league of states came to fruition over a century later in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, a statement on achieving world peace elaborated after World War I, and then the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was unveiled at the 1948 inauguration of the United Nations.33
Kant’s belief in the peaceful nature of republican government was based on a combination of blindness and optimism. It was blind to the historical record of republics that were anything but peaceful. “Have republics in practice been less addicted to war than monarchies?” Alexander Hamilton asked. “Has commerce hitherto done anything more than change the objects of war?”34 No doubt, Kant was thinking of the modern commercial republic, where trade serves as a surrogate for war. “The spirit of commerce,” he wrote, “sooner or later takes hold of every people and it cannot exist side by side with war.”35 Kant believed that all past wars were due to autocratic governments that put their own interests before those of their subjects, but that increased commerce and communication among peoples would lead to peace. This was the hope behind the “democratic peace literature” in vogue a generation ago, whose proponents argued that democracies do not go to war against each other because their interests are better served by peace and security.36
But in fact, the record has been spotty at best. Closer acquaintance between peoples has not necessarily increased their affection for one another. Most of the military conflicts of the twentieth century would have been impossible had not the populations on all sides enthusiastically supported going to war. This became especially clear during World War I, when the socialist workers sided with their own countries at the expense of proletarian internationalism. Kant and those who followed him dramatically underestimated the pull of nationalism as a vital force in every nation’s politics.
THE GOOD EUROPEAN
Neither of the two dispositions described earlier—the nationalist or the cosmopolitan—captures the specificity of patriotism or its sense of piety, duty, love, and reverence. If the nationalist’s distinction between friend and enemy tends to reduce politics to war, Kantian cosmopolitanism tends to confuse politics with morality. Kant and his present-day followers like John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas would transcend the sovereign state and replace it with international rules of justice and courts of law. The Kantian approach is a textbook case of what Bernard Williams has called “political moralism”: the view that politics is simply applied moral theory.37 This approach to politics takes the ethicist’s question—what is the right thing for me to do?—and assumes that it can be applied to nations and states. The clearest example of such reasoning appears in the appendix to Kant’s Perpetual Peace: “A true system of politics,” he wrote, “cannot therefore take a single step without first paying tribute to morality. The rights of man must be held sacred, however great a sacrifice the ruling power may have to make. There can be no half measures here. . . . For all politics must bend the knee before right, although politics may hope in return to arrive, however slowly, at a stage of lasting brilliance.”38
Kant’s desire to transcend the state with an international forum of jurists is naïve and anti-political. If, as Hobbes wrote, “covenants without the sword are but words,” who will enforce these norms of international justice? The cosmopolitan idea of global justice envisions a world without states and without national boundaries—a world, in short, without politics. Yet the national state remains the best guarantor of international justice. It was the United States, not the European Union, that ended the slaughter in Kosovo in the 1990s. International bodies like the United Nations have been notoriously ineffective at curbing or restraining aggressive behavior. International courts like that at The Hague are often quick to condemn but slow to act in bringing criminals to justice, and they may do so in selective and self-serving ways. Cosmopolitans may feel themselves attached to such global causes as Greenpeace, Amnesty International, or Doctors Without Borders, but never to anything as parochial as one’s own country. When the United States or any other nation fails to live up to the impossibly high moral standards that such groups set for themselves, the result is an often morbidly self-hating disillusionment that can lead to nihilistic fits of rage and contempt.39
The question is to what degree cosmopolitanism is compatible with any form of patriotism. Does it require the abolition of the state or the creation of a world government? Even Kant admitted that a world state would be a “soulless despotism.”40 To speak of world citizenship seems to imply, even require, a state. How can there be a citizen, even in the most metaphorical sense, without one? It is worth remembering that during the twentieth century—perhaps the most violent in world history—we experienced the passing away of another kind of cosmopolitanism that promised the “withering away of the state.”41 Marxian communism similarly regarded classes, ethnicities, nationalism, and the like as destined to be replaced by a universal classless society. That experiment in cosmopolitanism, needless to say, did not create a brotherhood of all mankind but some of the worst instances of totalitarianism and genocide of that or any other century. To the objection that the excesses of Stalin and his successors do not disprove the Marxian ideal of justice (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”), I would reply that it goes against the principles of Marxism to seek the ideal apart from the historical reality. History is the final arbiter for Marx, and it is un-Marxian to separate its idealism of ends from its Machiavellian means.
Too often, of course, the new cosmopolitanism is not cosmopolitan at all but a specifically culture-bound idea expressing the values of one part—maybe a very small part—of Westernized humanity. There is nothing more parochial than a European (or an American) singing the praises of cosmopolitanism. It seems to run counter to the virtually universal experience of humankind that regards human identity as shaped by families, religious affiliations, communities, and other groupings. The supposed citizen of the world is far too often aloof and detached, staring down on human affairs as if from a star. From this elevated perspective, how could the passions that excite our loyalties not seem petty? Our feelings for global humanity, however sincere, are based on an abstraction and thus are difficult to translate into meaningful action. Although its defenders often present it as something heroic, cosmopolitanism lacks passion and intensity. It is a joyless disposition.
The ethic of the cosmopolitan citizen—someone who attempts to embody the common features of humanity and not any individual nation, tribe, or state—can be summarized by the term cool. Cool is above all an aesthetic pose, expressed in dress, cuisine, language, and shopping. It is a stance of detached irony, a withholding of emotional commitment. While cool originally grew out of the African American experience—think of Miles Davis’s album Birth of the Cool—it has increasingly become mainstream. According to Joel Dinerstein, the most comprehensive historian of American cool, the term became synonymous with a set of post–World War II codes, characterized by “nonchalant attitudes instead of eager obedience, subversive slang instead of polished eloquence, sly symbolic gestures (suggesting unstated beliefs) instead of blind patriotism, emotional detachment instead of phony affability.”42 Unlike the “hot” ideologies of communism and fascism that valued total commitments, cool was distinctly non-ideological. “ ‘Playing it cool,’ ” Dinerstein writes, “was a vernacular phrase picked up from jazz slang that came to represent a new emotional mode and style: the aestheticizing of detachment.”43
The epitome of American cool is Rick Blaine, Humphrey Bogart’s character in Casablanca, directed by Michael Curtiz. At the beginning of the film we learn that Rick was once a committed partisan; he ran guns to Ethiopia and fought for the loyalists in Spain, but has since dropped out and now runs the most popular gin joint in the cosmopolitan city of Casablanca (Rick’s Café Americain). Here Louis Renault, the corrupt prefect of police, warns him not to interfere with the efforts of the Germans to detain Victor Laszlo, a famous anti-Nazi agitator. To recoup losses from his roulette wheel, Rick bets Louis ten thousand francs that Laszlo will escape. Rick’s coolness is expressed in his response to interrogation by a Nazi officer, Major Strasser:
Strasser: Do you mind if I ask you a few questions, unofficially of course.
Rick: Make it official if you like.
Strasser: What is your nationality?
Rick: I’m a drunkard.
Renault: And that makes Rick a citizen of the world.44
By the film’s end, of course, we discover that Rick has always been a romantic and idealist at heart. His coolness has been a pose to disguise the pain he has suffered because he believes he was jilted by Ilsa. It is only when he learns that Ilsa had been secretly married to Laszlo—whose unflinching moral rectitude is the very embodiment of nerdy uncool—that he discovers his old self and helps the couple escape. Rick reveals himself to be the patriot we have always known him to be. After Laszlo and Ilsa are safely on board a plane headed for Lisbon, Renault says, “Well, Rick, you’re not only a sentimentalist, but you’ve become a patriot.”45
Cool, to be clear, is not a term of moral approval. It does not describe a morally good person, although this is not excluded, either. Coolness is, in a sense, “beyond good and evil.” It pertains to a style of studied carelessness and nonchalance that conceals excellence and skill, what the Italians call sprezzatura.46 Cool has an unmistakably urban vibe, designating hipness and an indifference to conventional norms, with a slightly outlaw flavor. This was epitomized by the character of Ice in West Side Story, who tells his fellow Jets, “Just play it cool, boy, real cool.” It is difficult to be cool in the countryside or the suburbs. The Beats were cool; the Southern Agrarians were not. Cool has become a pervasive category affecting our judgments on music, dress, manners, and, increasingly, politics. The cool politician—if that is not an oxymoron—must express caring and compassion, but must not seem too caring and compassionate. The Dalai Lama might be considered cool, but not Mother Teresa. Cool must appear natural, authentic, growing out of “lived experience.”
Let me suggest the following chart as a way of gauging the coolness of some of our public figures:
Cool |
Uncool |
Alexander Hamilton |
George Washington |
Thomas Jefferson |
John Adams |
John Quincy Adams |
Andrew Jackson |
Frederick Douglass |
Abraham Lincoln |
Theodore Roosevelt |
Woodrow Wilson |
Franklin Roosevelt |
Herbert Hoover |
John F. Kennedy |
Richard Nixon |
Ronald Reagan |
Michael Dukakis |
Bill Clinton |
George H. W. Bush |
John McCain |
Mitt Romney |
Barack Obama |
Donald Trump |
In our era, cool has increasingly become a bourgeois ideal for fashion and other upscale consumer goods. A new term, coolhunting, was invented by marketing agencies to denote the search for people who spot trends and fashions before others do. “The executives of a coolhunting agency,” one analyst has written, “gain their power by brokering this transaction between the glistening language of cool and the mundane language of the befuddled and uncool client.”47 Coolhunting is explicitly connected to a late capitalist world of consumerism, shopping, and entertainment that remains ruthlessly divided between the cool and the rest. “Coolhunters,” the same analyst continues, “are explicit about the inability of the uncool to function in the elevated and exclusive realms of the cool.”48 It is perhaps no coincidence that the coolest television show of the early 2000s, Sex and the City, helped popularize a cocktail named—you guessed it—the cosmopolitan.
The model of the cosmopolitan citizen is often drawn from the contemporary European experiment, where the European Union is taken to have created a new type of “transnational” citizenship.49 But the nature of the European Union remains systematically ambiguous. It is not exactly a democracy because democracy, as we know it, has taken form only in the modern nation-state, nor is it an empire that aspires to submit all nations to a single sovereign. What form this transnational or “post-modern” state will take is anybody’s guess. At the core of the European experiment is a desire to transcend the national state as the basic unit of political legitimacy. The ideal seems to be a state without borders, citizens, or passports, consisting only of individuals possessed of rights and organized around a common currency. National sovereignty, it is alleged, belongs to a benighted past even if people continue to root ferociously for their national sports teams and debate arcane topics in their national languages. The model for the new Europe is not yet a super-state, more a loose confederation of states, something like the United States under the Articles of Confederation—which is to say a headless body.
This development was brilliantly predicted by Friedrich Nietzsche, who near the end of the nineteenth century described the emergence of a new phenomenon, the “good European,” as someone beyond nationality or even politics:
The Europeans are becoming more similar to each other; they become more and more detached from the conditions in which races originate that are tied to some climate or class; they become increasingly independent of any determinate milieu that would like to inscribe itself for centuries in body and soul with the same demands. Thus an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of man is gradually coming up, a type that possesses, physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as its typical distinction.50
Nietzsche’s description of a restless individualism, adaptive to changing environments with no ties to place, has certainly come to pass in the contemporary European world, with its common currency, open borders, and increasingly stateless existence. Though fiercely critical of the rising tide of nationalism among his fellow Germans, Nietzsche remained equally skeptical of modern cosmopolitanism, which he associated with the decay of spirit and taste. Cosmopolitanism in his day meant mass society ruled by a mass culture, that is to say, a world of citizens who gain their culture entirely from mass circulation newspapers and magazines. Today, of course, Nietzsche’s fears about the degradation of culture would readily apply to other media, like television, the internet, Facebook, and the like, which have given the illusion of choice but have simply walled people into self-reinforcing silos of opinion. Nietz-sche associated true cosmopolitanism with the individual’s powers of judgment and discernment. Only individuals, not nations, can engage in the search for truth, and this search unites individuals of goodwill belonging to different nations.
Nietzsche’s vision for Europe was closer to an older, more aristocratic cosmopolitanism characterized by political diversity but rooted in particular nation-states with their distinct and healthily competing traditions. This perspective of l’Europe des patries, a Europe of the fatherlands, articulated by Charles De Gaulle, was apt to look askance on a union of states made possible only by certain economic, scientific, and technological developments. The new cosmopolitanism, with its indifference to all traditions, especially religion, not only represents a soft version of the Marxian dream of a world in which politics has withered away, but also recalls Max Weber’s fear of a world governed by narrow-minded technocrats, a world of “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”51
De Gaulle was the last European statesman of note to grasp the cultural and historical significance of a European Union as something other than a trading partnership. He was completely uninterested in the Coal and Steel Community, an organization created after World War II to regulate the coal and steel production of six European countries: instead he invoked a common literary heritage as the basis for a future European civilization. In his book Heroes, Paul Johnson tells a story that is deeply revealing of De Gaulle’s vision of a Europe of fatherlands. “For me,” De Gaulle reflected at a press conference, “the materialism of Brussels is uninteresting. ‘Pour moi, l’Europe c’est l’Europe de Dante, de Goethe, et de Chateaubriand.’ I interjected: ‘Et de Shakespeare, mon générale.’ He darted at me a look of intense hatred, then paused, reflected, and gave a classic demonstration of his monumental shoulder shrug, adding: ‘Oui, Shakespeare aussi.’ ”52
De Gaulle was the quintessential French patriot. He understood his country, its virtues and its foibles, as no one else did. He was the last great embodiment of his nation, even if he took a less than charitable attitude toward his fellow citizens. When asked after his retirement what the French would do without him, he cited Proverbs: “They will return to their vomit.”53 He was a constitutional patriot who understood the importance of national sovereignty even if this meant committing acts of almost unpardonable ingratitude toward the English, who had not only saved his life but also given him a platform from which to save his country. De Gaulle in 1940, Pierre Manent has written, “was the scrupulous and intransigent trustee of all the marks of French sovereignty because these marks were all that remained of France’s treasure. His intransigency necessarily flowed from his, and France’s, powerlessness.”54 Most important of all, he understood the importance of shared symbols of nationhood as essential for France’s survival. He was almost a perfect example of the conservative patriot in power, someone who reveled in the politics of grandeur while never abandoning his acceptance of the modern constitutional order. He embodied the contradictions of being both deeply conservative and a practicing Catholic on the one hand and, on the other hand, remaining devoted to the republic and the principles of 1789.
“THE OPIUM OF THE INTELLECTUALS”
Nationalism and cosmopolitanism both tend to obscure the virtue of patriotism. Each contains at best a part of the truth. The nationalist is correct to see that politics involves the particular: particular states, particular nations, particular peoples and traditions. For the nationalist, the particular—this people, this culture, this state—stands for something higher, more noble, than the cosmopolitan idea. We enter the world as members of a family, in a neighborhood, in a state, in some part of the country. These attachments are not extraneous to our identities; we are composites of these particularities. Everything great derives from something rooted and particular. The demand that we give up these identities and assume a new cosmopolitan identity would be the same as asking us to stop speaking our native language and embrace Esperanto. As Robert Pinsky once asked, who is the Shakespeare of Esperanto?55
There is truth also on the cosmopolitan side. Are we condemned by the accident of birth to live by the traditions of the nation in which we happen to be born? Doesn’t this deny what is highest in us: our capacity to determine for ourselves how we will live and who we will be? Choice is at the core of human dignity. We experience our moral worth through our ability to choose how we will speak and act, how we will live, with whom, and under what conditions. The cosmopolitan ethic allows us to stand imaginatively outside our particular situation and see ourselves from the standpoint of a disinterested spectator. Only through such critical distance can we judge ourselves and our society. To gain any moral purchase, we must view our own self and culture as we would view anyone else—neutrally, objectively, disinterestedly. This is the morality of cosmopolitanism.
Yet even at its best, cosmopolitanism is indifferent to the actual ties of loyalty and affection that bind people to home and country. Today’s cosmopolitan elite seem to care little for their fellow citizens, especially if they come from such culturally benighted areas of the country as Appalachia or the Deep South. It is precisely this cultural elite, nestled in the fashionable neighborhoods of Brooklyn, San Francisco, and Cambridge, who have taken it on themselves to set the cultural rules for everyone else. This has in turn created a backlash of populist resentment that has brought us not a more democratic politics, but demagogues and strongmen promising to restore order by reversing the ship of state. This possibility was presciently depicted in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America—turned into a Netflix miniseries—based on a counterfactual history in which Charles Lindbergh becomes president in 1940 on a platform of “America First” and develops close relations with Nazi Germany.
Richard Rorty imagined a similar scenario when he worried about the future of progressive politics in an age of economic retrenchment. In Achieving Our Country, published in 1998, Rorty suggested that policies of free trade, favored by the right, and open borders, favored by the left, can only hurt the American working class. The danger comes when unionized workers and the marginally employed come to believe that the established political parties have been the agents of their jobs’ disappearance. “At that point, something will crack,” Rorty wrote. “The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”56 The rise of nationalist strongmen in countries from Hungary, Brazil, and Israel to Russia and the United States shows just how prescient Rorty’s observations were.
Indeed, what Rorty predicted over twenty years ago has largely come to pass today. In The Once and Future Liberal, Mark Lilla explains how the fracturing of American society has been caused by the abdication of the elites.57 The business elites have bought into a ruthless libertarianism that denies any responsibilities to the less well off. The academic and intellectual elites—who bear the brunt of Lilla’s analysis—growing out of the social protest movements of the 1960s have fostered the new identity politics that valorizes the triad of race, class, and gender over any sense of a collective “we.” New academic fields focusing on ethnic and gender studies expressed an admirable attempt to give voice to previously under-represented minority groups but ended up hollowing out the mainstream of American studies. Our older consensual narrative, with its efforts to create “a more perfect union,” ended up as a cacophony of different voices each vying for legitimacy. The irony, as Lilla points out, is that the Reagan right and the multicultural left have become mirror images of one another, leaving the American working class—the backbone of traditional New Deal liberalism—out in the cold. It only took a populist strongman like Donald Trump with his own brand of nationalist politics to fill the void left by these two alternatives.
Two kinds of explanations have been offered for the rise of the new nationalism. One has focused on the economic consequences of global trade and open markets, which have left the middle and working classes financially insecure and helped to fan the flames of nativist resentment. A generation of neo-liberal policies bent on shredding the social safety net and privatizing all aspects of civil society has created the fertile soil out of which the nationalist backlash has emerged. The other explanation is political and has shown how the rise of the administrative state has left ordinary citizens feeling voiceless and estranged from their governing institutions and national traditions.
Neither of these captures the power of culture and resentment as key factors in the reaction to cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is not so much a set of institutions—although it is embodied in transnational organizations like the European Union, World Trade Organization, North American Free Trade Agreement, and Kyoto Climate Accord—as it is a mind-set, a posture, that breeds attitudes of entitlement and resentment. Not surprisingly, this sensibility is embodied in the new meritocratic class found mainly in urban coastal centers and among the college-educated elites, especially those with advanced degrees. Unlike previous elites whose titles to rule were based on the accident of birth, the meritocracy claims that their privileges are due entirely to their superior talents and abilities. The meritocracy, like every ruling class, has created new hierarchies of winners and losers, rewarding those with skills, degrees, and credentials at the expense of fellow citizens who have been shamefully left behind.58
Is this new meritocracy solely responsible for the resurgence of nationalism? Things are not so simple, but the answer is at least partly yes. What we see today is a backlash of resentment against global elites, the mobile classes, who seem bent on telling others what to think, what to eat, and how to live. Cosmopolitanism and nationalism are in fact doppelgängers, mirror images of one another that tend to magnify each other’s worst aspects. Nationalism fosters a fierce insularity that denies universal values of any sort. Cosmopolitanism uproots people from the local arrangements that most find worthy of reverence, and that give life meaning and wholeness. It lacks a sense of attachment to the particular. It forgets that we only learn to care about others by first learning to care for those who are closest to us. Attachment to one’s family, language, country, traditions, and way of life is a natural and a very human moral sentiment and not something to run away from. The cosmopolitan ideal seems to leave little room for a sense of awe or for the sacred. This has led, paradoxically, not to a widening and enhancing but a narrowing of our expectations. It has stimulated interests and curiosities—for tourism, shopping, and fun—without a thoughtful consideration of what makes life coherent and whole. Cosmopolitanism has become the new civil religion of the intelligentsia—in Raymond Aron’s words, “the opium of the intellectuals.”59