c h a p t e r 2 9
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NATIONALISM
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david miller
1 Introduction
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Articles of this kind often begin with a short and snappy deWnition of the
concept to be discussed, but, desirable as this might seem, in the case of
nationalism any attempt at such a deWnition would inevitably exclude some
part of this large and complex idea. There are many forms of nationalism to
be found in political theory, just as there are many varieties of nationalism in
practical politics. In lieu of a precise deWnition, we can perhaps characterize
nationalism as having three core elements.
The Wrst of these is simply the idea that nations are real: that there is
something that diVerentiates people who belong to one nation from those
who belong to its neighbors. Poles are diVerent from Germans, Canadians
from Americans. There are diVerent views about what that something is—the
criteria we use to identify nations—but all nationalists believe that it is more
than just the fact of membership in a particular state. Germans are not simply
people who happen to be citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Nationalists need not deny that political boundaries have, over the course
of history, helped to form the nations that now exist, but the key point is that,
whatever story we tell about their historical origins, nations today are real,
and people who identify with them are not simply deluded.
The second element is that membership in a nation has practical implications:
it confers rights and imposes obligations. Nations are communities in
the sense that by virtue of belonging we recognize special ties to our compatriots,
and we owe them certain things that we do not owe to outsiders.
They are also valuable communities that we have a duty to preserve, which
may involve a greater or lesser personal sacriWce. The extent of these obligations
can be questioned, as we shall see shortly, but all nationalists recognize
that a person’s nationality is ethically signiWcant, even though in normal cases
it is unchosen.
The third element is that nationhood is politically signiWcant. Nationalists
argue for political institutions that will allow the nation to be self-determining—to
decide on its own future course, free from outside coercion. In most
cases this means political independence, the nation having a state of its own,
although for practical reasons nationalists will sometimes settle for more
limited forms of autonomy, such as devolved government. The key idea is
that because each nation has its own character, it cannot Xourish unless given
the political freedom to develop in its own way; it cannot be made subject to
laws designed for another people. So political boundaries must be drawn in a
way that respects the national identities of the peoples in question, whether
these are the harder boundaries between states, or the softer boundaries that
divide, for example, the members of a confederation.
Although these three elements are common ground among nationalists,
they can be interpreted in quite diVerent ways. Taking each in turn, national
identity can be understood objectively, in terms of physical or other characteristics
that fellow-nationals share, or subjectively, in terms of a common
belief in membership or will to belong (see, further, Gilbert 1998). Thus, some
nationalists have pointed to features such as language, religion, or even race
as a way of deWning ‘‘national character’’ and drawing lines between diVerent
nations, whereas others have argued that what makes a nation distinct are not
any objective features common to its members—which may in any case not
discriminate adequately between one nation and others who may share its
language or religion, say—but simply their wish to associate together. This was
the view expressed by Ernest Renan in a famous lecture when he described a
nation as ‘‘un ple´biscite de tous les jours’’ to underline the point that national
identity always depended upon members’ recognition of one another as
having memories, traditions, etc. in common (Renan 1882, 27).
Moving to the second element, the ethical signiWcance of nationality, we
have a spectrum of views running between those who see the nation as the
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highest form of ethical life—in other words, who see obligations to compatriots
as being the most demanding moral commitments that we have—and
those who deny that nationality has any signiWcance at the fundamental level.
On this second view, our basic duties are owed equally to human beings
everywhere, and we should only recognize special obligations to compatriots
insofar as this proves to be the most eVective way in practice to perform such
duties. In between are those who want to hold national and cosmopolitan
ethical demands in some kind of balance.
Coming Wnally to the political implications of nationalism, we again Wnd a
spectrum of views. At one extreme we Wnd cultural nationalists—nationalists
who believe that the cultural life of the nation must be allowed to Xourish and
develop, but whose only political demand is for an environment that provides
enough freedom for this to happen. At the other extreme stand nationalists
for whom political self-determination is central: a nation is a body with a
general will (often understood as an historic purpose) that must be allowed to
govern itself, to control the national homeland, and if necessary to assert its
rights against other nations. Nationalism of the Wrst kind is liberal and
paciWc; nationalism of the second kind may, depending on the circumstances,
be authoritarian and aggressive. Politically, therefore, much depends on how
national self-determination is understood, and why it is valued. I shall return
to these contrasts later in the chapter.
2 A Brief History
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Nationalism as I have identiWed it is a modern ideology. It appeared Wrst in
the late eighteenth century, and is associated in complex ways with other
features of modern society: industrialization and social mobility, democracy,
the sovereign state (for one inXuential interpretation, see Gellner 1983).
However, it borrows certain features from the much older idea of patriotism,
and it is important to be clear about how the two concepts diVer. To be a
patriot is Wrst of all to love one’s country, and then to be committed to
advancing its interests in various ways, by defending it against attack or
working to help it prosper. A country here means a physical place, but
it may also include a political system—thus a Roman patriot might be
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committed not only to the city of Rome, but also to the Roman Republic or
Empire (see Dietz 1989; Viroli 1995). Nationalism goes beyond patriotism in
two respects. First, culture plays a much larger part in deWning national
identity: A nation certainly has a territorial homeland, and its political system
may be one of its distinguishing features, but over and above that it has, or is
believed to have, distinctive cultural traits—a language, a religion, a national
style of art or literature, forms of music or dance, perhaps a national cuisine,
and so forth. And these are seen as forming an integral whole, so that a
particular type of injustice is perpetrated when one nation is forced to live
under laws or institutions designed for another nation. Second, nations are
understood as collective agents with their own distinctive aims and purposes,
which are therefore entitled to self-determination, often in the form of
political self-rule. Although not all nationalists have been democrats, there
is an implicit connection between the two ideas: Nations are the units within
which democratic institutions should operate, and since each member of the
nation has something to contribute to its cultural development, political
democracy becomes the natural vehicle for national self-determination. Patriotism
has no such speciWc political entailments.
These two elements are weighted diVerently in Herder and Rousseau, the
earliest political philosophers to put forward recognizably nationalist ideas.
In Herder the cultural element dominates. Reacting against the Enlightenment
idea of the uniformity of humankind, Herder emphasized the profound
diVerences between national communities. Nations, he thought, were like
plants: each needed diVerent conditions to blossom most abundantly. And
each had its own excellences and faults, so it was ludicrous to try to rank
nations on a single scale of achievement. In consequence, for one nation to be
made subject to the laws of another was profoundly wrong. Herder abhorred
empires and multinational states. ‘‘Nothing, therefore, is more manifestly
contrary to the purpose of political government than the unnatural enlargement
of states, the wild mixing of various races and nationalities under one
sceptre’’ (Herder 1969, 324). But his idea of rightful government was vague;
enlightened leaders should devise laws that reXected the traditions and
culture of each people.
Rousseau’s nationalism, by contrast, was driven by political considerations.
In his Social Contract he spoke of people forming a union that is ‘‘as perfect as
it can be’’ in which ‘‘each of us puts his person and his full power in common
under the supreme direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each
member as an indivisible part of the whole’’ (Rousseau 1997, 50), but he did
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not specify the conditions under which this might be achieved, except to say
that the state should be small and the society simple. Later, however, when
advising the Corsicans and the Poles on the best means to preserve their
independence against internal corruption and foreign oppression, he emphasized
the cultivation of distinct national cultures and the rejection of foreign
elements. ‘‘It is national institutions,’’ he wrote in The Government of Poland,
‘‘which form the genius, the character, the tastes, and the morals of a people,
which make it be itself and not another, which inspire in it that ardent love of
fatherland founded on habits impossible to uproot’’ (Rousseau 1997, 183).
Accordingly, he recommended that the Poles should stage ceremonies to
commemorate historical events, preserve their national dress, institute national
sports festivals, and adopt a system of public education that would give
every child a thorough knowledge of Polish history, law, economy, etc.
Although Rousseau cherished national diversity and lamented that ‘‘there
are no more Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, even Englishmen, nowadays
. . . there are only Europeans’’ (Rousseau 1997, 184), his nationalism was
ultimately instrumental. National unity was the only guarantee of political
freedom, especially for states like Poland with large and despotic neighbors.
Both streams of thought came together in the post-Enlightenment nationalism
of the early nineteenth century, when German philosophers especially—including
Fichte, Adam Mu¨ller, von Humboldt, and (with some
qualiWcations) Hegel—combined the idea that each nation formed a culturally
distinct community with the idea that such nations could only fulWll their
destiny when politically organized as independent states. (These thinkers at
Wrst envisaged Germany as a confederation of smaller states, but later nationalists
called for the creation of an encompassing German state.) Two
further ideas followed: the idea that each individual could only Wnd ethical
fulWllment through participating in the life of the nation state—Fichte spoke
of ‘‘the devouring Xame of higher patriotism, which embraces the nation as
the vesture of the eternal, for which the noble-minded man joyfully sacriWces
himself’’ (Fichte 1922, 141)—and that states, in their pursuit of national
destiny, might be justiWed in using force against other states. Indeed war
was positively valued: War, Mu¨ller wrote, ‘‘gives states their outlines, their
Wrmness, their individuality and personality’’ (cited in Meinecke 1970, 110).
For Hegel, war preserved ‘‘the ethical health of peoples,’’ bringing home to
them ‘‘the vanity of temporal goods and concerns’’ (Hegel 1952, 210). Nationalists
in this tradition could recognize social pluralism, and often
advocated that the internal constitution of the state should take a liberal
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form. Nevertheless, their views about the ethical subordination of the individual
to the nation, and their rejection of cosmopolitan constraints on the
external behaviour of states, opened a gulf between liberalism and nationalism
that, as we shall see, persists to this day.
The gulf was bridged in the mid-nineteenth century by liberal thinkers who
forged links between individual freedom, national independence, and representative
government in opposing the imperial powers of Europe. Typical
Wgures here were Mazzini, who argued passionately for Italian unity and
independence while defending individual rights and republican government
(Mazzini 1907), and J. S. Mill who supported the independence movements in
Poland, Hungary, and Italy, and argued in his Considerations on Representative
Government that free institutions could only be sustained within a
national community with a ‘‘united public opinion’’ that could keep government
in check (Mill 1972, 359–66). For these thinkers, national loyalties had to
be counterbalanced with duties to humanity; indeed these latter duties were
fundamental, according to Mazzini: ‘‘You are citizens, you have a country, in
order that in a limited sphere, with the concourse of people linked to you
already by speech, by tendencies, and by habits, you may labour for the
beneWt of all men whatever they are’’ (Mazzini 1907, 41). Mill likewise
distinguished his conception of nationality as a basis for political union
from vulgar meanings: ‘‘a senseless antipathy to foreigners,’’ ‘‘a cherishing
of absurd peculiarities because they are national,’’ etc. (Mill 1963, 138–9).
This early Xowering of liberal nationalism was, however, submerged during
most of the twentieth century by authoritarian doctrines that in many
respects mirrored the writings of the German philosophers a century before.
Charles Maurras, for example, argued that France could only preserve its
unity and Xourish as a nation by abandoning democracy in favor of a royalist
restoration; he called this ‘‘integral nationalism’’ (Maurras 1968). For Carl
Schmitt, states had to be internally homogenous and sharply separated from
the outside world. National diVerences served, therefore, to demarcate
‘‘friend’’ from ‘‘enemy,’’ whose antagonism deWned the political relationship
(Schmitt 1996). When the authoritarian nationalism of thinkers such as these
was combined with political activism, fascism was born. Liberal political
philosophers were either openly hostile to nationalism (see, for instance,
Hayek 1944 or Popper 1992), or at most embraced its mildest forms while
cautioning against the excesses to which it was seen to be prone (see Berlin
1991). Only in the last decades of the century did nationalist ideas again receive
a sympathetic treatment from political thinkers in the liberal tradition. How
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has the gulf between liberalism and nationalism been bridged, and with what
success?
3 Liberal Nationalism and its
Critics
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Liberal nationalists claim not only that national self-determination can be
pursued consistently with liberal principles, but also that liberal values
themselves can only be realized in a political community whose members
share a common national identity. For this reason nationalism, properly
understood, should be seen by liberals as an ally, not an enemy. How is this
claim defended? There are three main arguments.
The Wrst is an argument about the conditions for personal autonomy. At
the heart of liberalism stands the idea that each individual must choose his or
her own path in life after reXection on alternatives. But no one chooses in a
vacuum. The alternatives themselves are contained within the culture that the
person in question belongs to, and only national cultures are comprehensive
enough to provide the full range of choice (see Kymlicka 1995, ch. 5; Margalit
and Raz 1994). So it is important for autonomy that the national culture
should be sustained, and that those who participate in it should be respected
rather than disparaged. This requires, in practice, that the community in
question should enjoy political self-determination. In theory one might
imagine a multinational state or empire in which each national culture
enjoyed adequate protection and respect, but in reality, liberal nationalists
claim, such states always privilege one particular culture at the expense of the
others. To be free you must live in a society whose culture you share and
where the choices you make within that culture are recognized as valuable.
The second argument connects democracy and nationality, and builds on
J. S. Mill’s claim that ‘‘free institutions are next to impossible in a country
made up of diVerent nationalities’’ (Mill 1972, 361). To work successfully,
democratic institutions require a body of citizens imbued with a certain level
of civic spirit. For example, elections must be conducted fairly, and the results
accepted by the losing side; governments must be scrutinized to ensure that
they are keeping their electoral promises; and minorities’ rights to free speech
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and political association must be respected. This, in turn, requires citizens to
trust one another to behave in accordance with democratic norms: Why
accept electoral defeat unless I know that the winning party and its supporters
will relinquish oYce when they are defeated in turn? Trust springs
from what Mill called the ‘‘common sympathies’’ that shared nationality
creates. In multinational states, each group considers its own interests Wrst,
distrusts the other groups, and tends to regard politics as a zero-sum game. In
these conditions civic spirit disappears and democracy is diYcult if not
impossible to maintain.
The third argument presents nationhood as a precondition for social
justice (see Miller 1995, ch. 4; Canovan 1996, ch. 4). The welfare state and
the other institutions of social justice represent an agreement to pool resources
to provide every citizen with a certain level of protection against the
contingencies of life. If you fall ill, you have access to medical care; if you are
thrown out of work, you receive income support. Built into the system is
some degree of redistribution from the talented and the resilient to the more
vulnerable members of society. We agree to share our fate in this way because
of a sense of solidarity with fellow-citizens, but this again stems from a
common identity, and a resulting conWdence in our compatriots that they
will reciprocate when it is our turn to need protection. Thus contemporary
liberals such as John Rawls, without overtly defending nationalist ideas,
nevertheless present their principles of justice as holding within a self-contained
political community whose ‘‘members enter it only by birth and leave
it only by death’’ (Rawls 1971, 90)—in practice, a nation state.
Many liberals, however, reject these arguments, and argue that liberal
principles can be divorced completely from nationality. The ethical issues
will be addressed in the next section: Here I focus on three political arguments
against liberal nationalism.
The Wrst of these challenges the claim that autonomy requires the secure
cultural background that nationality provides. Observing that most contemporary
societies are multicultural, liberals in this camp argue that autonomy
is often a matter of picking and choosing elements from diVerent cultures—
the more cultures one has access to, the greater one’s independence from the
traditions of any culture in particular. Thus Jeremy Waldron has celebrated
what he calls cultural ‘‘me´lange’’—‘‘the chaotic coexistence of projects, pursuits,
ideas, images, and snatches of culture within an individual’’—as a way
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of life that is at least as autonomous as a life lived within the framework of a
single community (Waldron 1995).
The second anti-nationalist argument again begins from the premise that
contemporary societies are multicultural, and that as a result individuals
typically have multiple identities—they see themselves as members of families,
local communities, ethnic groups, religious congregations, work or
professional associations, and so forth, with no single identity overriding
the others. A liberal state ought, as far as possible, to treat such
identities even-handedly, creating institutions that give equal recognition
to each of them (see Buchanan 1998). Nationalism, however, involves the
arbitrary privileging of one identity in particular: National culture is given
public recognition and state support, often to the detriment of minority
cultures. Some citizens, therefore, Wnd their main identity aYrmed by the
state while others do not, and this violates the liberal principle of equal
citizenship.
Finally, the claim that democracy and social justice presuppose a shared
sense of nationality can be challenged. All that is necessary, liberal critics have
argued, is that citizens should identify with and feel loyal towards their
political community, and this can be a strictly political identiWcation without
the cultural baggage that comes with nationhood (see Mason 1999; Abizadeh
2002). And this makes it easier for minority groups—for instance immigrant
groups who may not share the language or other cultural characteristics of the
natives—to feel that they belong, and can be respected as equal citizens. An
idea that has often been used in this context is the idea of constitutional
patriotism—the idea that the focus of loyalty should not be the cultural nation
but a set of political principles laid down in a constitution (Habermas 1996;
1999, chs. 4, 8). Such loyalty, it is claimed, is a suYcient basis for democratic
institutions and policies of social justice; no thicker social cement is needed.
These disputes between liberal nationalists and their critics are hard
to settle: We do not know, for example, whether cultural coherence or
cultural me´lange is more likely to foster personal autonomy; nor can
we say, conclusively, how much cultural commonality is required for the
successful working of democratic institutions. But at the very least liberal
nationalists have focused attention on an important issue: Under what
circumstances can liberalism itself be a workable political creed and not just
a distant aspiration?
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4 Is Nationalism Irrational?
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A charge frequently leveled by critics of nationalism is that it represents the
triumph of our primitive instincts over our capacity to reason. This charge
breaks down into two others: that when we identify with a nation, we
inevitably embrace false beliefs, for instance about the nation’s history and
the special characteristics that allegedly set it apart from other nations; and
that by allowing our compatriots’ interests to count for more with us than
those of foreigners, we breach the elementary moral precept that tells us that
every human being is worth as much as every other. How do nationalists try
to deXect these charges?
The Wrst step is to concede that national identities are imaginative constructs:
they are selective interpretations both of the history of the nation in
question, and of the characteristics of its present-day members. Certain
events and ways of behaving are treated as emblematic; other occurrences
are regarded as aberrations or ignored completely. A nation may celebrate its
military victories or the achievements of its writers and painters, while overlooking
shameful defeats, or the fact that a large part of its population now
spends its time watching reality TV and Australian soap operas. In this
respect, however, national communities are much like individual people,
who construct narratives to make sense of their lives that leave out or
downplay much that has happened. They do this because a secure sense of
personal identity requires a coherent narrative, and because acting well in the
future depends on a sense of self-worth. Likewise with nations: To identify
with a nation is to align yourself with a community that has persisted over
generations and that has a coherent, albeit evolving, character. It is also to
give yourself something to live up to. When national histories recount the
glorious deeds of our ancestors, they have a moralizing purpose. In both
respects, nationality responds to well-known facts about human nature: Our
need to place our lives in the framework of a supra-personal narrative (a need
often met in earlier centuries by religious belief) and our need to be morally
inspired by more than just the cold precepts of reason.
National identities involve selective interpretation, but need they rest on
beliefs that are literally false? Where they do, these identities should be treated
as morally or politically suspect. For instance, all nations make territorial
claims that involve the identiWcation of a national homeland, and that in
some cases confront the rival claims of neighboring nations. Outright denial
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of historical fact—for example the claim that a certain territory was voluntarily
ceded, whereas in fact it was taken by force—may suggest that presentday
national claims are not legitimate. Or a ruling elite may promulgate
falsehoods designed to consolidate its rule, and these may be accepted as fact
by an ignorant population. Where national identities are secure, and openly
debated by the public and through the media, simple falsehoods are unlikely
to survive. Instead, a much more open recognition of shameful deeds perpetrated
by compatriots in the past may occur—witness the recent spate of
apologies delivered by democratic nations for historic injustices inXicted on
indigenous peoples and other minority groups. This is sometimes regarded as
a sign that we are moving into a postnational era, but paradoxically an
ongoing national identity is required to make sense of the practice:
How can we apologise for what our predecessors have done unless we see
ourselves as linked to them by something more than the accident of living in
the same place?
Even if outright falsehood can be avoided, there is still likely to be some
tension between a nation’s self-understanding and what (to borrow a phrase
from Nagel 1986) we can call ‘‘the view from nowhere’’—the account that a
detached observer might provide. At least half-aware of this, citizens in
contemporary liberal societies often embrace the national story in their hearts
while their heads tell them that it contains elements of Wction. If the needs
that national identities meet are real ones, however, this seems no
more irrational than, for example, believing at one level that your child is
the cutest baby ever born while at the same time recognizing that all parents
think the same.
What, now, of the claim that it is irrational to recognize special obligations
to compatriots—irrational in the sense that a morally arbitrary fact (whether
a person is born into this nation or that) is being used to determine our moral
responsibilities towards them (see, for instance, Caney 2001; Pogge 2002).
Cosmopolitans argue that every human being should be counted as having
equal worth, so restricted obligations can be justiWed only where this proves
to be the most eVective way of discharging duties that, at bottom, are
universal in scope (Goodin 1988). Given the extent of global inequality, and
the dire conditions under which many of the world’s inhabitants are currently
living, institutions and practices of mutual aid among compatriots—for
example the extensive welfare states found in developed societies—cannot
be justiWed unless accompanied by extensive programs of international re-
distribution.
nationalism 539
In reply, nationalists have pointed to the logical gap between the claim that
every human is of equal worth and the claim that every agent, individual or
collective, has equal responsibilities to every other (Miller 1998). We owe
something to every person—respect for their human rights, for instance—
but we also owe more to some than to others, by virtue of our past histories,
the practices we are involved in, our communal relations, and so forth. And
these special ties are integral to the relationships in question, in the same way
as friendship, for instance, would be impossible to sustain without giving
special weight to the needs and interests of our friends (ScheZer 2001). The
nationalist vision is of a world in which each national community has
adequate means to support its own members, so in the short term nationalists
and cosmopolitans can agree about the need for international redistribution
to support nations that fall below this threshold. However, the
underlying principle is diVerent: Cosmopolitans base their demands on a
global principle of equality, whereas nationalists argue that partiality towards
compatriots can be reasonable if it is accompanied by global duties of a more
limited nature. And they also argue that an ethics that recognizes the motivational
importance of national attachments as well as other forms of community
is more realistic than one founded on abstract reason alone.
In short, the answer to the question that heads this section depends on how
one understands rationality. Nationalists argue that both identifying with a
nation and acknowledging special obligations to fellow-nationals can be
reasonable, on a view of reason that takes proper account of the psychological
needs and limits of human beings.
5 National Self-determination and
Secession
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For real-world nationalists, achieving political independence for the people
you represent is often the primary objective, and this is reXected in the
importance nationalist ideology attaches to self-determination. We need
nonetheless to draw some distinctions. For cultural nationalists in the tradition
of Herder, political self-determination matters only insofar as it allows
the cultural life of the nation to develop spontaneously, secure from outside
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interference. A nation cannot Xourish when it is dominated by another and
made subject to its laws. A stronger view is that cultural Xourishing requires
positive political support. Especially in a world of global communication,
native languages and other cultural features will be swamped unless they are
protected by a state that provides cultural subsidies, supports the national
media, creates barriers to the import of foreign Wlms, TV, etc.—and only a
state staVed by fellow-nationals is likely to do this. So far national selfdetermination
is being valued for instrumental reasons. But some nationalists
Wnd intrinsic value in political autonomy. Nations are seen as collective actors
with a common will that can only be expressed in political action, whether
this is directed at other states or at their own members. National autonomy is
valuable in the same way that personal autonomy is: Just as an
individual who cannot act freely in the world cannot express her personality,
so a nation deprived of political independence cannot make its distinctive
mark in the world.
This last justiWcation is open to the objection that it assumes that nations
have common wills whereas in reality they do not—political decisions at best
express the will of the majority, at worst the will of an elite that claims to
speak for the people. However, there are also more practical objections to
national self-determination. One is that nations attempting to make policy
are in fact severely constrained by outside economic forces and the decisions
of other nations, so self-determination can be a myth that disguises, for
example, neocolonial relations of domination between rich and poor nations.
Another is that the geographical distribution of populations means that state
boundaries can never be drawn in such a way as to correspond to national
boundaries, except in a few special cases (Iceland, for instance). Nearly all
existing states contain national minorities, so self-determination cannot
mean that the members of each nation have an equal chance to decide on
their future—there are favored nations whose members dominate a particular
state, and disfavored nations, like the Kurds and the Tamils, who form
minorities in one or more of the national states of other peoples.
Under what circumstances are such minorities justiWed in breaking away to
form a state of their own? This is the far-from-academic question of secession,
an issue that has fueled violent conXicts in many parts of the world—the
Soviet Union, the Balkans, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere. In political
theory, broadly three positions have been taken on the issue. The most
restrictive is that secession is justiWable only in the case of minorities whose
rights are being violated by the state that they now belong to, or whose
nationalism 541
territory has been illegitimately seized (Buchanan 1991). Secession, in others
words, can be defended only as a remedy for injustice, where the absence of
national self-determination per se does not count as an injustice. In contrast,
the most permissive position is that any territorial majority is entitled to
secede from the state it now belongs to, so long as it is prepared to grant
minorities on its own territory an equivalent right (thus if a majority of those
living in Quebec vote in favor of independence, they should be allowed to
secede from Canada, provided they respect the right of the inhabitants of
Montreal to decide by majority vote to become a city-state or to rejoin
Canada). This view treats secession as an individual right with no intrinsic
connection to nationality, even if in practice it is most likely to be exercised by
majorities who are also compatriots (Beran 1984).
The nationalist view of secession occupies the middle ground between
these two positions. Secessionist claims are justiWed only insofar as they
promote national self-determination, taking into account not only the
would-be secessionists, but also the claims of those who would be left in
the remainder state after the secession had occurred, and the claims of
minority groups within the secessionist territory (Miller 2000). These claims
must be treated even-handedly. By losing part of their territory, the national
majority may Wnd its opportunities for self-determination are reduced, as
well as being robbed of places, monuments, etc. of national signiWcance. The
minority groups in the new state may Wnd that their culture is treated with
less respect than previously, if the original, larger, state had an active multicultural
policy. Secession nearly always creates winners and losers, culturally
as well as economically, and from a nationalist perspective the optimal
solution is one that comes closest to giving each nation an equal opportunity
to be self-determining.
The charge often made, that nationalism encourages a secessionist freefor-all
whereby each state will break into smaller and smaller pieces, is
therefore erroneous. It is important to keep in mind that there are two
strategies nationalists can pursue in nationally diverse territories. One is to
redraw political boundaries so that they are more closely aligned with national
boundaries, whether this means secession or less radical ways of
achieving self-determination, for instance federal arrangements that give
minority nations partial control over their own aVairs (see Kymlicka 1995,
chs. 2, 6, 7). The other strategy is nation-building: encouraging all the groups
within the borders of the state to participate in creating a common national
identity that they can share, using cultural materials contributed by each
542 david miller
group (see Moore 2001, ch. 5). Nation-building practices have a long history
in most of today’s nation states, but in the past this usually meant the more or
less coercive imposition of the majority’s culture on the minority groups.
Today national identities must be reshaped by democratic means, through
dialogue between the component nationalities as well as ethnic and other
minorities who lack a territorial base.
These two strategies are not mutually exclusive: achieving selfdetermination
may mean developing new and more inclusive forms
of national identity while, at the same time, recognizing the distinctness of
national minorities through devolved government or federal arrangements.
But nor can they be applied in all cases of national conXict. Where two or
more nations have a long history of mutual antagonism, building a common
identity may be impossible, in the short to medium term anyway, while
separation via secession may simply create further conXicts and leave minorities
on the wrong side of the new border vulnerable to ethnic cleansing or
worse. It is important to recognize that not all national conXicts are soluble
by nationalist means. In these cases, self-determination may have to take
second place to creating a political regime—some form of externally-guaranteed
power-sharing, for example—that can dampen down conXict and
ensure that basic human rights, at least, are protected.
6 Conclusion
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
In a world of many distinct cultures, nationalism of some kind is unavoidable.
We can now better appreciate its strengths and weaknesses. On the one
hand, it serves to bind people to the place that they regard as their national
homeland; it encourages them to cooperate and to protect their more vulnerable
compatriots; and it gives them a sense of controling their own destiny.
On the other hand, it is liable to generate indiVerence or even hostility
towards outsiders; incoming groups who do not already share the national
identity may have diYculty in integrating; and it has destablizing eVects when
political borders and national borders fail to coincide. As a guide to political
practice, liberal nationalism tries to retain these strengths while circumventing
the weaknesses. But it may only be possible to achieve this in favorable
political circumstances.
nationalism 543
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