Very short summary: This essay examines whether public reason liberalism can accommodate nationalist considerations. Against both cosmopolitan dismissals of nationalism and nationalist claims that the nation is the sole legitimate democratic body, it argues that nationalist reasons are intelligible and should not be excluded from public deliberation – but neither should they be privileged. Drawing on Pierre Manent’s distinction between nationalism as identity and as political community, it contends that the delimitation of “the public” is open to multiple considerations, with implications for European integration.
In the wake of the Enlightenment, many 19th-century liberal thinkers viewed nationalism as a pathology to be cured by economic, cultural, and moral progress. Most of them rationalists, liberals treated nationalism as a residue of tribal instincts that would not survive the transition toward an open society. Nationalism, alongside myths and religion, would be relegated to the status of curiosities among humanity’s history of archaic beliefs. At the time, liberalism was often equated with one form or another of cosmopolitanism that disentangled morality from national ties.
The 20th century and the first quarter of the twenty-first century have proven these liberals wrong, not regarding their normative beliefs about the moral irrelevance of national identity per se (on this, the debate is still open), but rather regarding their belief that nationalism’s fate was to become a curiosity of the past. Nationalism fed two world wars in the 20th century and today drives the political success of populist movements in many Western countries – and of course justifies aggressive national and foreign policies in autocracies. Now, some may stick to the moralistic stance that cosmopolitanism is the only normatively right attitude and righteously condemn nationalism in whatever form it takes. However, I shall argue that if political morality (the morality that underlies political actions and institutions, that is in relation to the use of coercion in the organization of society) is social, then this stance is mistaken and wrong. Mistaken because it makes it impossible to understand what drives political behavior; wrong because it leads us to ignore a constitutive (social) aspect of contemporary political morality.
Though I frame this discussion within what is now largely known as “public reason liberalism,” I think the insights extend to any strand of liberal thought. This framing choice is mostly a matter of personal preference but is also motivated by the fact that the idea of public reason is highly relevant to understand the normative role of nationalism and nationalist sentiments.[1] The basic tenet of public reason liberalism is that, in societies that have reached some threshold of diversity and pluralism, political institutions and moral rules cannot be grounded on any kind of “perfectionist” moral beliefs, for instance on a particular set of religious beliefs. In particular, in diverse societies, it’s highly unlikely that individuals, as citizens, would acknowledge the political legitimacy of institutions that justify the use of coercion in the name of beliefs about God, if only because many of them are not religious believers. Hence, a different and broader basis must be found to justify the use of coercion.
One strategy is to argue that individuals can consensually agree on a set of principles of justice that are compatible with a broad range of moral and religious beliefs. This is Rawls’s and his followers’ approach.[2] Rawlsians would presumably agree that nationalism and nationalist feelings have their rightful place in the liberal society as long as individuals don’t invoke them to reject liberal justice principles, i.e., principles that recognize equal rights and liberties and fair opportunities for everyone. There are some difficulties, though. For instance, what about the rights of non-citizens or the justification of a law that would give priority to “nationals” for jobs? Because beliefs tied to national feelings or national identity are part of what Rawls calls “comprehensive doctrines,” they cannot by themselves justify a law or its rejection, at least regarding “constitutional matters.” So, presumably, liberal principles should cover everyone living on the national territory, citizens as well as non-citizens. If some individuals invoke nationalist reasons to justify, say, discriminatory laws against foreign workers, Rawlsians will characterize them as “unreasonable” and exclude them from the overlapping consensus that grounds the justification of liberal principles of justice. In this sense, the Rawlsian version of public reason liberalism is largely inimical to nationalism.
This result illustrates the “sectarian” dimension of any form of public reason liberalism that restricts the range of reasons that can be publicly used to justify laws or more generally social rules. It reflects the liberal prejudice against non-rational considerations, including nationalist ones, in inherited from the roots of liberalism in the Enlightenment. However, public reason liberals like Gerald Gaus or Kevin Vallier reject this sectarianism and defend a more open-ended conception of the idea of public reason.[3] Rather than disqualifying from the start reasons that don’t fit with some preconceived liberal principles, they only require that public justification proceed based on mutually intelligible reasons. That makes the idea of public reason far more friendly to religious and nationalist views. After all, while you can disagree with someone who claims that a discriminatory law is justified on the ground that foreign workers “steal” the jobs of nationals or that it reflects a form of national solidarity, the reasoning is intelligible and open to deliberation. It could be countered that such a claim goes against the liberal postulate that individuals are free and moral equals, but that’s not obvious. We are all “nationals” in some country, and a nationalist could argue that their reasoning treats everyone equally by granting priority to everyone in their country.
This approach bears an obvious risk. The more public deliberation is opened to a great diversity of reasons, including those tied to religious or national identities, the less likely everybody will agree on a common set of laws, just because the chances that someone has a “defeater” (i.e., an intelligible reason that decisively leads one to reject a law) are increased. However, in what follows, I will not discuss how public reason liberals have responded to this objection and will instead focus on an alternative way the nationalism issue can be tackled, still within a public reason framework.
“The Constitution of 3 May 1971,” Jan Matejko (1891)
In a short article titled “La démocratie sans la nation ?” (Democracy Without Nation?), the French philosopher Pierre Manent argues that there is a deep relationship between modern democracy and the concept of nation.[4] According to Manent, the democratic expression of the general will must necessarily take place within the national body. Indeed, for Manent, with the rise of secularism, the nation progressively emerged as a substitute for religion that offers the indivisible whole in which political sovereignty can be grounded. Manent’s argument especially targets what he sees as the fiction of a European democratic political union, a fiction that, if pursued, nevertheless risks destroying the national roots of European democracies. There is a lot to quarrel with in this view, starting with Manent’s essentially illiberal conception of democratic legitimacy. However, more to the point is Manent’s distinction between two possible expressions of nationalism: as an identity or as a political community. The former echoes what I said above regarding how nationalist considerations can or cannot be legitimately invoked in the public justification of coercive laws and rules. The latter points toward a different question: what is the proper delimitation of the set of “members of the public,” i.e., who are the individuals who have a say in public deliberation and justification.
If nationalism is foremost viewed as the particular expression of an identity, public reason liberalism can rightfully respond, without disqualifying nationalist considerations, that national identity is only one identity among many others. There is nothing that justifies giving it special treatment over others. Public reason liberals à la Gaus are right that beliefs and reasons tied to nationality should not be excluded from the public justificatory endeavor. But there is no moral, anthropological, or naturalistic[5] argument that decisively establishes that national identity is more important than, say, religious or supranational (e.g., European) identity. In this sense, the problem with nationalism is not that it supports illegitimate or unreasonable views, but that it nowadays tends to become, in some part of the population, a “narrow identity”[6] that trumps all other (identity-based or not) considerations. From the perspective of public reason liberalism, nationalism becomes problematic when it is the exclusive perspective through which some members of the public deliberate and thus unable to make any compromise with other considerations.
The expression of nationalism in terms of political community poses different difficulties. A strict nationalist perspective here would entail that non-nationals’ beliefs and reasons are totally irrelevant for the justification of coercive laws, even if they live on the national territory (and therefore are directly affected by the use of force). This national sectarianism is hardly acceptable.[7] Nationalists’ most consistent stance is then just to forbid entry to the national territory to non-nationals. Counterintuitively, on some accounts at least, this would not count as “illiberal.”[8] Nonetheless, there are at least two strong objections to this stance. First, while national homogeneity doesn’t entail complete homogeneity, a society that closes itself in such a way is likely to undermine its diversity and dynamism. This is, in itself, a strong reason that nationals themselves can invoke to (partially) open their borders – but then that means welcoming non-nationals that must figure as “members of the public.”
Second, it’s hard to see on what ground the restriction of public membership to nationals could be justified. Here, the nature of the justification at stake is not in terms of “public justification” (which is always relative to some public) but concerns even more fundamental considerations about what counts as a person to whom justification must be addressed when they are coerced. Here, there are two extreme views, the restrictive and the extensive. On the restrictive view, justification is only due to individuals who are directly or potentially coerced by political authorities. We then circle back to the option of closing the frontiers to non-nationals and the difficulties this generates. On the extensive view, justification is due to everyone who is indirectly affected by coercive decisions, even when no direct coercion applies. This basically vindicates the cosmopolitan perspective that all living (and eventually future) human beings are members of a “global public.”
The extensive view is not necessarily more plausible than the restrictive view. Because none of them is clearly superior to the other, this suggests that the identification of the members of the public is open to a myriad of considerations and contingencies and that neither “nationality” nor “humanity” is automatically the right delimiting criterion. From this point of view, Manent’s quasi-anthropological claim that the nation is nowadays the only appropriate democratic body is doubtful. Of course, nationality does provide a non-arbitrary historical and cultural substrate on which the political order can build. But it seems wrong to assert that, as religion has receded, the political order cannot rest on anything else. In the same way that humans have learned to cooperate and form moral ties beyond the family and the tribe, there is no reason to think that the nation is the ultimate horizon of political morality. Also, nations themselves are not pure and immutable essences. Just consider the history of what is today called Central Europe from the emergence of the Holy Roman Empire onward, and it quickly appears that nationalities and national identities are themselves historically variable entities that respond to many contingencies, including political decisions.[9]
All this is of course relevant for the future of the European Union. Nationalists and more generally “European skeptics” very often endorse something like Manent’s argument. An error that has often been committed by proponents of a more federal Europe has been to dismiss nationalist concerns, repeating the same mistake as 19th-century liberals. Nationalist considerations are legitimate, and, from a liberal and federalist perspective, one could even argue that national “loyalties” are needed to prevent excessive centralization.[10] But, at least for public reason liberals, national identities are not the only relevant identity-based considerations – a “European identity” can also provide such considerations, especially in the current geopolitical context. Also, there is no decisive argument against the possibility of a European political community where public membership transcends national borders. To be sure, this community is not given and must be patiently constructed. The point is that public reason doesn’t stop at national borders.
[1] For a good introduction of public reason liberalism and its two main branches, see Kevin Vallier and Ryan Muldoon, “In Public Reason, Diversity Trumps Coherence,” Journal of Political Philosophy 29, no. 2 (2021): 211–30.
[2] John Rawls, Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1993). Jonathan Quong, Liberalism Without Perfection (Oxford University Press, 2010).
[3] Gerald Gaus, The Order of Public Reason: A Theory of Freedom and Morality in a Diverse and Bounded World, Reprint edition (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Kevin Vallier, “In Defence of Intelligible Reasons in Public Justification,” The Philosophical Quarterly 66, no. 264 (2016): 596–616.
[4] Pierre Manent, Enquête sur la démocratie: Études de philosophie politique (Gallimard, 2007), pp. 166-84. I have already discussed Manent’s text on this newsletter.
[5] See my recent essay on the naturalistic roots of politics.
[6] Partha Dasgupta and Sanjeev Goyal, “Narrow Identities,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE) / Zeitschrift Für Die Gesamte Staatswissenschaft 175, no. 3 (2019): 395–419.
[7] Note that this not the same as restricting the right to vote in national elections to nationals. Elections are only one way through which an individual’s views can be publicly reflected.
[8] This would perfectly be consistent with Kukathas’s liberal archipelago, for instance. Chandran Kukathas, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (Oxford University Press, U.S.A., 2007).
[9] Luka Ivan Jukic, Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea (C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 2025).
[10] Jacob T. Levy, “Federalism, Liberalism, and the Separation of Loyalties,” American Political Science Review 101, no. 3 (2007): 459–77.
Is the EU the first political structure that is neither one state, nor one nation ?