Patriotism E-Book

Charles Jones

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Political Profiles Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 197

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

From flag-waving to the singing of national anthems, the practices and symbols ofpatriotism are inescapable, and modern politics is increasingly full of appeals topatriotic fervour. But if no-one chooses where they were born, and our ethicalobligations transcend national boundaries, then does patriotism make any sense? Doesit encourage an uncritical attachment to the status quo, or is it a crucial way ofunderstanding and applying our freedoms and moral duties? In this engaging book, Charles Jones and Richard Vernon guide us through thesequestions with razor-sharp clarity. They examine the different ways patriotism has beendefended and explained, from a republican attachment to free and democraticinstitutions to an ethical and historical fabric that makes our entire moral life andidentity possible. They outline its relationship to a range of other key concepts, such asnationalism and cosmopolitanism, and skilfully analyse the issues surroundingpartiality to country and whether we should prioritise the welfare of our compatriotsover outsiders. This concise and lucid volume will be essential for both students and general readerswishing to understand the contemporary resonance and historical development ofpatriotism, and how it intersects with debates about global justice, cosmopolitanismand nationalism.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title page

Copyright page

Introduction

Republics, flags and ways of life

What to make of patriotism? Four initial questions

1: Community, Loyalty and Partiality

Community, identity and patriotic attachment

Loyalty

Patriotism, partiality and morality

Conclusion

2: Nationalism, Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism

Nations and nationalism

Nationalism: for and against

Cosmopolitanism

Constitutional patriotism

3: The Republican Alternative

Between civic humanism and liberalism

Republican particularity

Republican universalism?

Beyond the republic

Honorific republicanism

4: Justice for Our Compatriots

Coercion as a source of special concern

Benefit-based arguments

Conclusion: A Subsidiarity Defence

Making sense of ‘association’

Subsidiarity

The patriotic society and its enemies

References

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

CHAPTER 1

Index

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Copyright page

Copyright © Charles Jones & Richard Vernon 2018

The right of Charles Jones & Richard Vernon to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2018 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1832-6

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Introduction

While we were writing this book, the topic of patriotism moved suddenly and (to many, at least) unpredictably from the margins of political thought to a place where it demanded attention. Excellent recent work had been done on the topic, to be sure (for example Kleinig et al. 2015); but for a generation or more political theorists had given an unprecedented amount of attention to questions of global justice – to the relative levels of wealth and poverty among nations, to the fairness of international trade and transnational institutions, to immigration and refugee policy, to the limits of state sovereignty, and to questions about international aid. These concerns paralleled real-world phenomena: the globalization of economic relations, international trade agreements, the gradual emergence of international criminal law and of other rule-based conceptions of global order, and of course the evolution of the European Union as a possible more transnational future. While no one could have been unaware of patriotism as a background political fact, to the extent that most political theorists took note of it patriotism would have figured as a constraint rather than as one of the political values defining the concerns of their discipline. As this book was being written, however, the explosive rise of populism in many states generally defined by liberal-democratic values, the manifest dislike on the part of many publics for immigration and globalized interstate relations, and in particular the election of Donald Trump in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK, all signalled that patriotism could no longer be left in the margin of political thought, but demanded serious attention.

Political theorists typically write (and teach) about concepts such as justice, equality or freedom, that is, concepts that in the first instance are not tied to anyone's particular time or place, even though, over the past few decades, the discipline has become very much better at taking account of the ways in which time and place can radically modify the interpretation and application of such concepts. For example, in addition to tackling the ways in which the idea of justice needs to take account of the hugely unequal distribution of benefits and burdens in the world, theorists have addressed the ways in which the idea of equality needs to take account of the differently placed concerns of minority cultural groups, and the ways in which the idea of freedom needs to be explored in terms of its real rather than formal – or positive rather than negative – aspects. So no serious critic could fairly accuse political theorists of the early twenty-first century of disconnection from political reality. But the challenge of patriotism is basic in that it raises the question of what we should take the first instance to be. For the (re)emergence of ‘America First’ politics in the United States, of resistance to transnational institutions in the UK and elsewhere, and of the general questioning of the idea of a rule-based international order in the name of a re-affirmation of national sovereignty, all point in the direction of something that is in the first instance particular: the fact of belonging to one political society rather than another. What seemed to be emerging in public discourse, as we wrote this book, was a view that we could no longer think that particularity was simply something that political theorists would need to take account of, eventually, in exploring concepts of universal importance. For if the strongest claims of resurgent patriotism are true – if people are to be seen as, above all, compatriots who share with others of their kind a particular identity, shared interests and a distinctive tradition – then the tables are turned, and universal concepts such as justice, equality and freedom will need to find their place, if they can, within a framework for which they no longer provide the point of departure. That people belong to a particular political society, and attach primary importance to their belonging, may demand attention as a basic political fact.

Although recent events have given prominence to our topic, in this book we take a longer view. While the explosion of patriotic sentiment may have taken political theorists (especially liberal political theorists) by surprise, the tradition of political theory is not exactly without resources in terms of addressing the place of particular loyalty within our normative world. Each of the chapters below examines a distinctive and well-developed approach. All of these approaches deserve attention if the defensibility of patriotism is to be established.

What, though, is patriotism? There is near-consensus on how to define it: every source tells us that it is love of and loyalty to one's country, together with special concern for the well-being of one's compatriots, even though, as we shall see, some details in this formula vary. But that general idea is one that has been filled out in many ways, put to many uses, and both celebrated and reviled from many points of view. We do not attempt to give a history of the idea's uses here: the history is a rich one, for the engagement of people with their homeland, as well as efforts to reinforce that engagement, are such common elements of political life, and the meanings of ‘love’, ‘loyalty’ and ‘country’ are so open to interpretation. To introduce our discussion, we simply begin with three historical examples that, between them, raise many of the themes and issues that this book is to explore: an eighteenth-century sermon, a late-nineteenth-century textbook, and a famous twentieth-century academic lecture.

Republics, flags and ways of life

Our first example is a sermon delivered by Richard Price, ‘A Discourse on the Love of Our Country’ (1789). Price was a British ‘Radical’, that is, a member of a group of thinkers and activists who advocated constitutional reforms, and who also – contrary to official British policy – sympathized with the revolutionaries in the former American colonies and, a decade later, in France. Interestingly, Price's sermon combines appeals to two traditions that have been enormously influential for the development of the idea of patriotism, often in conflicting ways. Price begins by invoking an ancient view that is generally attributed to Stoic writers such as Seneca and Cicero. Borrowing from those sources, Price employs a very well-known image, that of concentric circles of association radiating out from the individual: we are connected first with those who are personally close to us, such as family and friends, then with our country, and then with humanity at large. Very much in line with this tradition, Price declares that it is an arbitrary matter that one has been born in a particular place, that ‘the soil or spot of earth on which we happen to have been born’ has no moral significance, and that it is what we owe to the largest circle of association, humanity itself, that has overriding importance. Nevertheless, ‘we are so constituted that our affections are more drawn to some among mankind than to others, in proportion to their degrees of nearness to us, and our power of being useful to them’. He continues, ‘We can do little for the interest of mankind at large’ (1789: 9–10), and so we should think of our country as the place in which we can most effectively bring to bear what we owe to other people (see Duthille 2012 for discussion).

On this view, although one's country is made out to be a site of duty – a duty of special care to compatriots – we may seem to be at some distance from anything that would normally be called ‘love’. We ‘happen’ to have membership in one country rather than another, and Price warns us against excessive partiality toward it – we are (wrongly) ‘disposed to overvalue’ its particular features (4). But Price's initial view soon merges with another tradition, one that is often called ‘republican’, or ‘neo-Roman’ because its exponents looked back to the Roman republic as an inspirational model. And on this view, a more intense engagement with one's country is demanded. A country is to be valued because it has free political institutions, and maintaining those institutions calls for active participation and vigilance on the part of citizens. They must be ‘awake to encroachments’ on their freedom (29), and ‘anxious’ to transmit the blessings of freedom to their descendants (42). What one could be said to ‘love’ is the spirit of freedom that one's country embodies. In the British context, Price identifies this spirit with the Revolution of 1688, which gave force to the right of liberty of conscience, the right to resist abuse, and the right of a people to choose their governors. Those rights, however, are still incompletely realized (33–4), and so the duty of the patriot is to fight to realize them more fully, by making religious liberty more comprehensive and electoral representation more equal. Patriotic love is, then, a critical love, one aimed at the improvement of the love-object. The upshot of ‘love of country’, according to Price, turns out to be, essentially, commitment to legal and political reform.

Who, though, can be a patriot on this view? The British, obviously, and, by the time Price is writing, the Americans and the French, whose revolutions he regards as successor events to the English Revolution of 1688. But patriotism, if understood as a zeal for liberty (19), would seem to be impossible in countries whose political institutions and traditions do not harbour that zeal. Price writes: ‘What is now the love of his country in a Spaniard, a Turk, or a Russian? Can it be considered as any thing better than a passion for slavery, or a blind attachment to a spot where he enjoys no rights, and is disposed of as if he was a beast?’ (6). That seems to allow that the subjects of an oppressive state can be patriotic, in some sense, but that, being ‘blind’, their attachment is of no moral worth, being connected to nothing more than an arbitrary ‘spot of earth’. So what Price offers is a powerful but decidedly exclusive conception.

Our second example is a book published under the authority of the Legislature of the State of New York in 1900, entitled Manual of Patriotism: For Use in the Public Schools of the State of New York. To what may now seem, to some, a remarkable extent, this substantial book (465 pages) is a sustained and passionate celebration of the symbol of the flag. ‘Patriotism is love of country, born of familiarity with its history, reverence for its institutions and faith in its possibilities, and is evidenced by obedience to its laws and respect for its flag’ (New York State 1900: i). The book implements an 1898 Act of the New York Legislature that requires, firstly, that every public school in the State be provided with a flag and flagstaff; secondly, that regulations be made for the care of the flag; and, thirdly, that a programme of ‘patriotic exercises’ be drawn up to accompany the salute to the flag that is to begin each school day.

The Manual was published at almost the mid-point of the enormous waves of immigration that transformed society in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and what its authors were attempting makes immediate sense in that context. They were trying to foster attachment to a political symbol, one that embodied a national history, as a way of assimilating people of different cultures. While there are recurrent references to freedom as a value, the emphasis does not fall, as in Price's sermon, on a constitutional ideal, but on a national story or epic, told by way of ‘noble utterances … [and] vivid pictures of great deeds and patriotic sacrifices’ (ii). In line with the editor's view that ‘much repetition and constant reiteration’ is the only way to transmit strong beliefs, the story is recapitulated not only through the lives of major figures such as Washington and Lincoln but through almost daily anniversaries of important events. The seventy pages that list the anniversar­ies convey relentless optimism, and on the few occasions on which events of a negative kind are noted, the negativity is instantly mitigated. The Civil War, of course, poses a problem in this regard, but the Manual provides stage directions for a tableau whereby students enact the drama of reconciliation, to be followed by a reading of ‘The Blue and the Gray’ (146–7), a sentimental poem that is entirely silent on either the war's origin in the slavery issue or its actual outcome for former slaves.

If Price's sermon offers critical patriotism, the Manual offers what we may term celebratory patriotism. It has many of the features of a civil religion (even though, interestingly, the explicit invocation of God in the daily pledge was not to be added until half a century later). The daily exercises are termed ‘observances’, and they are to reach ‘the very souls’ of the students. The language of ‘reverence’ in connection with the flag, the hymn-like songs, the memorization of formulas, the rituals of commitment, and the list of anniversaries somewhat mimicking a sacred calendar, all tend to convert the schoolroom into a secular church. If Price is to be faulted, as one contemporary critic immediately alleged, for his austerely instrumental view of the state, for exaggerating the appeal of the ‘general’ at the expense of the ‘local’, and for neglecting the ‘heart’ in favour of ‘refined’ principle (Coxe 1790: 8–12), then the Manual would surely provoke different worries altogether: worries about what happens when the critical faculties are blunted in the interests of belonging.

Our third example is a lecture by the political philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Is Patriotism a Virtue?’ (1984). MacIntyre's lecture actually takes the form of a confrontation between liberal political theory and patriotism of a communitarian kind, but since he gives the communitarian the last word in the exchange it seems legitimate to suppose that his sympathies eventually settle on one side. The view that he concludes by rejecting clearly resembles the first of Price's models, described above as (broadly) ‘Stoic’. This is the view that one can satisfactorily conceive of a country as, basically, a local container for universal beliefs; that in principle all moral duties are duties to human beings as such, but for contingent reasons they have to be restricted in their scope of application. What that view fatally neglects, MacIntyre claims, borrowing a Hegelian term, is the morality of Sittlichkeit, that is, the whole accumulated weight of traditions, customs, narratives and memories that one inherits as a member of a political society and which shape one's understanding of it. It is a fundamental error to neglect this, MacIntyre argues, for three reasons. First, moral learning is always local learning, that is, it takes place in interaction and dialogue with specific others with whom one has specific kinds of relationship. Second, the content of what is learned is always local, and is coloured with specific ideas of the good. Third, behaving well is hard, and is possible only because the standards of behaving well are reinforced by membership in a community in which common standards are upheld. To suppose that we can become good by learning what is due to all humans indifferently is, then, to ignore the actual source of moral development. (We discuss these claims critically in Chapter 1 below.)

The New York State Manual, we noted above, was intended to encourage the political integration of people from many different ethnicities and backgrounds, and for that reason developed political rather than cultural symbolism. MacIntyre's view of the role of patriotism, however, goes deeper. One's country is taken to be an all-encompassing source of identity rather than simply a shared point of political reference. Its narrative is not something distinct from the varied cultural identities in an immigrant society but something to which one's own personal identity is connected. ‘Each one of us to some degree or other understands his or her life as an enacted narrative … A central contention of the morality of patriotism is that I will obliterate and lose a central dimension of the moral life if I do not understand the enacted narrative of my own individual life as embedded in the history of my country’ (1984: 16).

MacIntyre denies, importantly, that patriotism as he understands it is uncritical: here he is closer to Price's view that love of country may provide a basis for criticizing its policies than he is to the much more purely celebratory style of the Manual. He points out, for example, that a particular conception of what it meant to be German could lead people to find the Nazi regime deeply dishonourable, and destructive of what was taken to be essential to German nationality – a critical viewpoint distinct from the ‘disputable, at worst cloudy rhetoric’ of appealing to ‘the best interests of mankind’ (14). Moreover, being part of a society entails taking ownership of its past wrongs and responsibility for making good, and thus calls for a sober understanding of its history. If I do not understand my life as embedded within my country's history, I will not understand ‘for what crimes of my nation I am bound to make reparation’ (16).

On the other hand, the claims that MacIntyre makes for asserting one's nationhood are more robust than we find in either of the two earlier examples. For Price, the only just war is a war of defence against external aggression (1789: 29). The Manual appears to add to this another permitted war, a war of liberation to free oppressed peoples from im­perial control, representing the Spanish-American War in this light (New York State 1900: 197–202). MacIntyre's lecture, however, admits a forthright appeal to national interest: ‘What your community requires as the material prerequisites for your survival as a distinctive community and your growth into a distinctive nation may be exclusive use of the same or some of the same natural resources as my community requires for its survival’, and, recognizing this, we must therefore endorse ‘a willingness to go to war on one's community's behalf’ (1984: 6). In the last resort, then, patriotism will be incompatible with an ‘impersonal’ or impartial standpoint that assigns equal value to all humans, and any proposed moderate patriotism that limits what we owe to our country in the name of some universal values would be untenable. For engagement with one's country's way of life – and hence one's own moral identity – may eventually require defending the resources that alone make it possible.

What to make of patriotism? Four initial questions

Here, then, we have three cases in which (some version of) patriotism is strongly articulated, but in which the ‘country’ that we are to love, what it means to ‘love’ it and what we owe to our ‘compatriots’ are all differently defined. So let us briefly survey some salient differences, simply as a way of framing the issues to be taken up in this book.

Content

The most straightforwardly political conception is, obviously, Richard Price's. Patriotism is the defence of a political value, understood (according to the dominant strand in his thinking) as a constitutional regime with civil freedoms and equal political representation. The bare fact that this freedom is ours is, morally speaking, beside the point, except to the (significant) extent that it falls to us to defend it. The freedom in question is to serve as a critical standpoint from which to evaluate domestic policy, and foreign policy to the extent that this involves relations with other free polities, such as revolutionary America and France. The conception of political institutions involved is strictly instrumental, as we can see from the austerely non-reverential forms of address that Price recommends (1789: 23–7). We have already noted the contrast with the New York State Manual, distinctly thin on principle, really strong on reverence, and constructed around a symbol that encapsulates an epic national story, while MacIntyre's epic narrative is more all-embracing. It is a narrative that underwrites one's moral and cultural identity, and one's ‘country’ is understood not as the geographical locus of a principle, nor