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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Globalization is over. With US president Donald Trump pursuing an ‘America First’ agenda in trade and foreign policy, everyone now recognises the urgency of defending their own country’s national interest. But what is the national interest and why did it disappear from the political agenda? Will Trump restore American national interests, or will he betray them? How might we know the difference?
The National Interest answers these questions. It explains how and why globalist political leaders and bureaucrats abandoned the national interest over the past thirty years. Even today, many of our elites still sneer at the concept as an anachronism in an age of global environmental collapse and ‘polycrisis’. But without it, there can be no political representation, and without representation there can be no democratic accountability. The national interest can be revived as part of a strategy of nation-building and national rebirth. This book makes the case for such a revival, heralding a new era of democratic renewal and international cooperation.
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Seitenzahl: 273
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Praise for
The National Interest
Dedication
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 What Happened to the National Interest?
The national interest versus the public interest
Notes
2 The Theory of the National Interest
The theory of the national interest
The national interest: with and beyond realism
Realism against state egotism
Realism against empire
Realism, democracy and science
Intellectual retreat from the national interest
And yet it moves …
Notes
3 The History of the National Interest
Before the national interest
The rise of the national interest
The zenith and eclipse of the national interest
Retreating from the nation: political strategies of transnationalism
The Cold War: the transition from national interest to national security
The US exception
How the national interest dies
Notes
4 The Nation: A Story of Abandonment
The left, neoliberalism and the abandonment of the nation
The political geography of transnationalism
The idiom of transnational rule
The operative definition of the nation and the dominated classes
... and the dominated classes
The philosophical idiom of cosmopolitan globalization
Retreat from Davos
Notes
5 The Need for a New National Interest
From off-shoring to re-shoring
State capacity and the reality of the powerless state
The populist retreat from the nation
What might nation-building involve?
From the study of nationalism to the practice of nation-building
Notes
Epilogue
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Praise for The National Interest
‘Cunliffe argues valiantly and incisively for a concept long scorned. A revived concept of the national interest will help recover social solidarity, democratic accountability and the basis for pursuing the common good.’
Patrick Porter, University of Birmingham
‘Cunliffe’s book provides a brilliant rehabilitation of the concept of the national interest, establishing it as a founding stone of a post-globalist democratic theory and practice and making it the essential point of departure for a rigorous theory of the state-in-society that leaves the shallows of the neoliberal worldview behind.’
Wolfgang Streeck, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne
Dedication
For Circe – may her interest never lie.
The National Interest
Politics After Globalization
Philip Cunliffe
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Philip Cunliffe 2025
The right of Philip Cunliffe 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 2025 by Polity Press Ltd.
Polity Press Ltd.
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press Ltd.
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6110-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6111-7 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025931278
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
The age of globalism is over. US President Donald Trump’s battery of executive orders and tariffs in early 2025 is forcing all countries to reassess their position in global politics, including America’s allies. In pushing ‘America First’, Trump is forcing the question of national interest onto other states. The aim of this book is to help people around the world – and especially those in democratic states – better articulate and defend their respective national interests. How far the book succeeds is for the reader to judge, but the urgency of the task is demonstrated by the fact that, thus far, the response of most of the world’s democratic leaders to the Trumpian challenge has been woeful.
It is abundantly clear that democratic leaders are not used to thinking in terms of defending their own countries’ interests. Having grown accustomed to making all their decisions collaboratively at the jamboree of international summits or even simply having decisions made for them – at the United Nations in New York, in the corridors of power in Washington, DC, in the offices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or European Union in Brussels – it is unsurprising that such leaders are struggling to articulate, let alone defend, their countries’ interests. In a world of globalization, ruling elites had come to assume that everyone’s interests were essentially the same, and that only the malice of ill-educated voters and foreign tyrants could possibly disrupt the business of enriching themselves and their globalist patrons.
Hence the pathetic sight of the Danish government offering even more mining and military concessions to the US in the hope of blunting Trump’s threat to annex the Danish territory of Greenland. Or even more pitiful, the sight of Canadian former prime minister Justin Trudeau lamely defending Canadian independence from Trump’s tariffs and expansionist threats – this after Trudeau had declared Canada the world’s first ‘post-national’ state in 2017. But what point is there to Canadian independence and interests if there is no Canadian nation underpinning them?
The arguments in this book are made more urgent by virtue of the fact that Trump’s populist allies abroad are unlikely to fare much better in defending their countries’ interests than their liberal globalist rivals they seek to replace. Populists and globalist liberals represent two sides of the same problem: the absence of civic life, institutionalized representation and legitimate mass parties that once comprised the substance of national political life. The populist abjures representative institutions because they undercut populist efforts to rule directly through their own personal connection with the people. The technocrat abjures representation because it gets in the way of rule by the experts. Both share hostility to party-political representation. Yet without it, there can be no means for the nation to imprint its demands on the state. The national interest remains to be served. Trump was elected in protest at the failure of the Democratic administration of Joe Biden to uphold the national interest, as he let the US become mired in inflation, proxy wars and open borders. Yet Trump is also likely to struggle to defend that national interest. Trade wars against allies and expanding US territory in the Arctic are more likely to distract and substitute for, rather than support, America’s national renewal.
Nonetheless, we can be hopeful in virtue of the fact that new popular nations are emerging across the Western world. This is the consequence of decades of hyper-globalization that has reshaped national economies, societies and political institutions. As nations only have political existence in as much as they have representative political institutions, the outlines of the new nations are only faintly visible. We see a glimmer of a new American nation in the multiracial working-class coalition built up by Trump on the basis of national renewal and citizenship, in opposition to the globalism and identity politics offered by the Democrats. We may see the glimmer of a new British nation in the disintegration of the British bipolar party system, as the vote share of the established parties is eaten away by insurgent new parties, supported by millions of voters battering against the crumbling edifice of Britain’s first-past-the-post system. The possibility of a new nation is faintly visible in the slow disintegration of the French Fifth Republic. We see nations across Europe straining against the fetters imposed by the EU in the form of monetary union and open borders. If these new nations are to be properly formed and better express themselves through their states’ respective political institutions, they will also need to be able to express their respective national interests. Only then can a new age of international cooperation – as opposed to supranational diktat – begin afresh. The aim of this book is to help us in this effort to find a collective voice after globalization. Thus, the arguments here should, in principle, be applicable to any country.
Although the book is not specifically addressed to Britain, the arguments in the book grow out of debates surrounding Britain’s secession from the EU across 2016 to 2020. Britain’s audacious early split from the globalist order inevitably thrust questions about national purpose and identity, the meaning and benefits of sovereignty and political independence to the forefront of British public life. The failure of our governing class to articulate – let alone defend – our national interest is keenly felt. The arguments in this book build on those that I developed in Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy after Brexit (2023), written with George Hoare, Lee Jones and Peter Ramsay. The book also develops arguments offered in an earlier work, Politics without Sovereignty: A Critique of International Relations, which I co-edited with Christopher Bickerton and Alex Gourevitch. Although a collection of essays, the conclusion of this book was unequivocal – there could be no politics without sovereignty. Politics requires authoritative, representative public power to be exercised over a limited territory and people. Without such power, there is no possibility of collectively steering society to meet the challenges it faces. All that is left is managerialism, and even this will fray if the administrators and managers are not obliged to accept public input, submit to the discipline of political oversight, and benefit from the legitimacy that comes with it.
Politics without Sovereignty was published in 2007, on the eve of the Great Financial Crash. If the response to the crash in 2008 made clear the sweeping power of the state to oversee the market, it was also clear that popular interests were less well attended than financial and corporate interests – Wall Street was bailed out in preference to Main Street. We had states on the one hand, and we had the people on the other, but we did not have sovereign nation-states that served their citizens. Again, there were faint outlines of a new politics in the national revolts at the French (2003), Dutch (2004) and Irish (2008), and later Greek (2015) and British (2016) ballot boxes: each one a rejection of European integration and the supranational rule that would come with it.
Yet it was only with the election of Donald Trump on his ‘America First’ platform in 2016, and his subsequent hostile takeover of the Republican Party, that drew a line under the era of globalist liberal politics. If the US is seeking to defend its own interest rather than the world’s, we will all need to decide collectively what our national interests are, and seek to make our governments abide by them. Countries incapable of articulating a national interest – that is to say, countries that are incapable of concentrating and channelling the collective will of their own citizens – will flounder if not break apart in the new order.
Canterbury
United Kingdom
February 2025
Acknowledgements
I want to thank my editors at Polity, Olivia Jackson and especially Louise Knight, who first suggested writing the book. Peter Ramsay and Suke Wolton commented on earlier drafts of the manuscript, as did two anonymous reviewers working for the press. My place of work, the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction at University College London, has proved hospitable to carrying out intellectual work alongside the other responsibilities of academic life, and my academic and professional services colleagues there have my gratitude. Last but not least, special thanks to my partner Dean, for his patience with the evenings that I had to spend in my office to complete the manuscript. I alone am responsible for all the arguments in this book. The book is dedicated to my daughter, Circe – may her interest never lie.
Introduction
The era of globalization is over. Now we must restore the democratic nation-state. This book argues that this task requires us first to understand the idea of national interest, before we clarify what the content of our national interest should be. The national interest should be the lodestar of politics around the world. As long as our countries have no national interest to speak of, none of us have any political representation to speak of. While the discussion in this book focuses on the democratic world, the argument applies no less to autocratic and authoritarian states. If such countries are to enjoy better representation and accountability, then democrats in those countries would do well to attend to their countries’ national interests. I argue here that making the national interest the lodestar of political life will deepen popular self-rule and democratic government. We could measurably improve our collective living standards, civic order, administrative functioning and government efficiency if we subjected every political proposal and public policy to the question of how far it serves the national interest.
If we are to offer the national interest as an improvement on existing political options, we must also consider two further claims. First, we have to understand how the national interest was abandoned, and second, we must be confident that nation-states are the future of world politics. The argument developed across the book tries to cover these three themes – it elaborates what happened to the national interest, it explains why we must restore the national interest, and it argues that nations – rather than global corporations or transnational networks or global governance or non-governmental organizations – are the future of world order.
In the first chapter, I argue that national interest politics is still mostly visible by its absence. This is not merely because so many governments are making such palpably terrible choices for their peoples. Rather, whatever policies any states may pursue, they are still too rarely justified in terms of the national interest. There are plenty of policies that are defended in terms of human rights, or ‘working families’, or environmental protection, or consumer benefit, or international law, or national security. There are plenty of policies that are made on behalf of the vulnerable and the victimized, and enacted on the grounds that it’s good for business, good for trade, and (only recently) good for growth. Too rarely, if ever, is a policy justified on the grounds that it is in the national interest or for the good of the nation. Such words stick in politicians’ throats across the democratic world, and ring false in the autocratic world – and with good reason: democratic societies are riven by identity politics, and autocrats keenly feel their lack of democratic legitimacy. Both systems of leadership lack national support. So where did the national interest come from, and where did it go?
This is discussed across the second and third chapters, where I follow the established scholarship in arguing that the concept of the national interest emerged out of an earlier doctrine of raison d’état (reason of state), with which it still shares some important affinities. Yet as we see in chapter 2, the national interest proves elusive to theoretical analysis. This is not least because it is itself an unstable compound, the distillation of political processes that may work more or less well at different times, liable to evaporate or explode if not properly stabilized by the nation from which it derives, and if not channelled through politically effective institutions. Even those who might agree that there is a meaningful national interest might also fiercely disagree on its content and meaning, making it hard to concretize or fix. The chapter shows how the study of the national interest evolved from the inter-war period through the early Cold War to the end of the Cold War, as it was gradually relegated from being a centrepiece of national political debate to becoming a prop for dry theoretical debates in the academy. This change reflected the fact that the national interest itself had been petrified in the bureaucratic structures of the Cold War deep state. In academic scholarship, discussion of the national interest is generally taken to fall under the purview of realism, a broad theoretical tradition usually understood in terms of its focus on the egotistical behaviour of states, a position that, it is alleged, is forced on them by the absence of world government. As we shall see however, although the national interest is bound up with the precepts of political realism, it is not limited to them.
It is worth noting here that although this chapter engages the classical realist concept of the national interest, it does not offer a realist argument in the sense that prevails in the contemporary academy. The Ukraine war has prompted a remarkable resurgence in the profile and intellectual fortitude of realism, a perspective in the discipline of International Relations that has been all but eliminated from the British academy and was on the defensive in the US. Reckoning with or even overviewing this intellectual dispute is beyond the scope of this book. What we can say is that from the theoretical perspective of structural realism that has powered so much critique of US foreign policy, the national interest is treated as an axiomatic assumption. By contrast, the premise of this book is precisely that the national interest cannot be taken for granted as a backstop of politics or debate. The demise of the national interest is part of a wider suppression of national politics. The structural realists who vent against the irrationality of the US invasion of Iraq or US policy towards Ukraine do so from the vantage point of an imagined or desired national interest. Those readers less concerned by the theory of international relations can jump straight to the next chapter, on the history of the national interest.
If we turn to the history of the national interest, we can see how the national interest combines some of the most volatile elements of our era. As we see in chapter 3, the emergence of the national interest was stimulated by the political and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century. The first of these formally sought to suborn the state to the nation (hence ‘nation-state’), a process consummated with the American, German, Italian and Japanese wars of national unification across the 1860s. The industrialization that propelled wars of national unification and extended citizenship also created polarized classes with opposing economic interests and roles – capital and labour. Straddling this divide, the nation-states that emerged sought at once to express their peoples’ wishes and to contain and curb them.
Doubtless the national interest was honoured in the breach as much as the observance. While the nation-state offered ways to limit popular self-rule and government, as the democratic franchise expanded it also created the growing expectation that public power could be deployed to address and rectify social and economic problems – that it could enable all citizens to lead productive lives and that it should reward citizens for their loyalty in war (as in the post-war hopes of ‘homes for heroes’ and G.I. Bills). As the expectations of the ruled grew, their hopes came to be felt as more and more burdensome by the rulers. ‘Better Hitler than Blum’, grumbled the managers, bosses and bankers of 1930s France, the archetypal European nation-state, in which they expressed their wish for fascist rule by foreigners – and France’s ancestral enemy to boot – in preference to the Popular Front government of Léon Blum, the Socialist (and Jewish) leader of the French working class, who pressed French workers’ demands for higher wages and paid holidays.
The dialectic of industrial class conflict and cycles of geopolitical conflict that occurred across the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries gave state elites the incentive and opportunity to escape their nations. The recoil from the nation began but, as we shall see, there were few alternatives to it. Hitler’s barbaric New Order in Europe was an apocalyptic failure, and European and Japanese colonial empires had also proven to be dead ends. Disgraced elites, tainted by failure in the Great Depression and compromised by collaboration with occupying armies and colonial administrators, confronted restive, hostile or simply broken populations – in some cases heavily armed and politically organized as a result of war-time insurrection. These populations had to be fed, demobilized, pacified, wooed, satiated and encouraged to engage in national reconstruction. In such conditions, the lack of alternatives made nations inevitable, even as the divide between peoples and states would make them unstable. The response in Europe was to prop up these new nations through transnational structures – US-led in the West, Soviet-led in the East. At the global level, the United Nations system of organizations was established to help buffer the flood of newly independent states that would emerge from the retreat of the European overseas empires in Asia and Africa.
As we shall see in chapter 3, this era was the peak of national interest politics, and also the point at which the national interest became frozen. Held in place by powerful new alliance systems, national security began to substitute for the national interest. In place of the constant recalculation of relative benefits and political adjustment in response to oscillations in the balance of power, alliances became enduring, permanent features of national life, limiting states’ political choices. NATO, the North Atlantic military alliance, tellingly has ‘Organization’ in its title. As these transnational bureaucracies solidified and grew and they shaped the policy of their member states, who could tell anymore what was the interest of the constituent states, or the interest of the larger organization?
Yet the problem remained that the nation was still a pressure point at which publics could legitimately apply democratic force on their rulers, governing elites and state and corporate bureaucracies. This democratic pressure slowly became too costly to bear as global rates of growth began to stall when the US economy buckled under the pressures of paying for both the 1964–68 Great Society programme and the 1955–75 Vietnam War. In the face of turmoil in industrial relations and outright elite rebellions, the political response to this problem was manifold, but perhaps the central political dynamic was to systematically lower public expectations, and in so doing, divest the state of public power. Nations would be atomized, and popular aspiration vested in politics would be diffused by making state power less responsive, less accountable, less authoritative. This period would become known for the abiding influence of the economists who provided the theories to justify the systematic lowering of public expectations – neoliberals.
Unlike the inter-war period, however, by the 1970s governing elites and business classes had a hinterland in which to retreat from the democratic pressure of the nation – the transnational networks and institutions they had built up over the course of the post-war era, comprising formal international organizations under the auspices of the UN, as well as military alliances, inter-governmental fora, regional organizations and proliferation of ad hoc and informal bodies. These varied structures laid the ground for the global shift from government to governance. One means of doing this was by removing policy-making from political contestation at the national level. Transnational networks became a convenient site at which to stash away decision-making processes, safely above the reach of the nation below. International structures were a vital part of limiting states’ responsiveness to public will and their ability to respond to global shifts in political power and economic change – thereby helping to contain and limit the expression of the national interest. The infrastructure for what would later become known as globalization in the 1990s was thus laid in the post-war decades, expanded across the crisis of the 1970s, and then rolled out with the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1992 and entry of India (1995) and China (2001) into the World Trade Organization.
Shrugging off commitments to the nation was the work of neoliberal political economy, and it entailed fracturing the nation – running down institutions of collective life, battering representative institutions such as trade unions, restraining public spending, enforcing austerity. Most crucially of all, it entailed undercutting the representative claims of the nation itself. Once the state had freed itself of obligations to the nation, the nation-state itself became a looser category, distended by the process of political and economic globalization. Hence the national interest became increasingly redundant. Political competition withered as power was divested from the state – transferred upwards into supranational structures and transnational courts, bled out horizontally to independent regulatory agencies, and devolved downward in the form of greater regionalization, devolution and provincial autonomy. What was the purpose of great political contests between left and right over state power if the state had less power? By the end of the 1970s, both left and right had performed a pincer movement on the nation-state, for different reasons and with different goals. For the New Right of the 1970s, the state was inefficient, cumbersome, overbearing, predatory, potentially totalitarian. For the New Left of the 1970s, the state was a centre of ideological conformity and militarism, dangerous to minorities, dissidents and marginalized groups, potentially totalitarian. As both sides conflated political authority with Soviet authoritarianism, the end result of their combined efforts was a world without sovereign authority – the world of the last forty years, the era of cosmopolitan globalization.
In chapter 4 we see how, following on from the end of the Cold War, the national interest was finally relegated in favour of a new era of humanitarian altruism. The national interest that had been fossilized during the Cold War was now cracked apart and broken up in the newly global system. The liberal democratic ‘Free World’ of the Cold War became the ‘international community’ of the 1990s. A virtuous self-reinforcing cycle of expanding trade, markets, growth and international ‘harmonization’ dissolved away distinctive national interests. Nation-states completed the transition to member states, no longer defined by the nations they claimed to represent, but instead by the global organizations of which they were a part. As state apparatuses peeled off from the nations they used to represent, nations appeared more and more redundant. From having once embodied the promise of collective self-rule and independence, nations now became backward and unfashionable, the realm of the uneducated, the crude and provincial, a dreary hinterland of small towns and resentful rustbelt communities, overshadowed by a globalizing world that was dynamic, expanding, diverse, wealthy, aspirational, optimistic.
The national interest became correspondingly too narrow, too limited and ultimately too selfish a framework within which to justify policy for a political elite that were no longer restrained by electors within their own nations, nor by a balance of power in the wider world. After all, the Communist bloc was gone, and barriers to trade were falling everywhere. The traditional concerns of the national interest – maintaining a technological and industrial base, managing national employment levels, protecting national borders, mounting national defence – faded away. As geopolitical rivalries diminished and the risk of trade disruption disappeared, who could deny capitalists the opportunities for growth and profit that came by off-shoring production to China, Poland, Czechia, India, Vietnam. Divested of political power, states left national adjustment to the operation of the market through fluctuations in global labour and capital flows. National success came to be measured in terms of where countries sat in international rankings of ‘competitiveness’ – or how appealing they were to foreign investors and migrants, rather than how far any nation succeeded in reflecting the will of its citizens, defending their collective interests or maintaining their rights and living standards.
By this point, every major political tradition whether right, left or centre had effectively abandoned the nation. It was no longer needed by anyone. As the USSR had collapsed, the nation was no longer needed to defend tradition from the spread of godless communism. As the Red Army was gone, nations were no longer needed to defend from the risk of Soviet conquest. As socialism had failed, the nation was no longer needed as a site on which to build socialism. As capitalism globalized, the nation could no longer function as a refuge from the market or globalized finance. As globalized jihadis took up the mantle of anti-imperialism, nations were no longer needed to fend off the American empire. With NATO, the European Court of Justice and International Criminal Court to protect our global human rights, who needed nations to protect individual rights and civil liberties? With the future of Western civilization itself at stake in the new global culture wars raging in the ether of cyberspace, what use was a nation? And without the nation, what use is a national interest?
By this point even though the phrase ‘national interest’ still occasionally appeared in the speeches of politicians, the small print of broadsheet editorials or graced the cover page and executive summaries of government white papers, it had in fact regressed to being a form of raison d’état. As representation at the national level withered, the substantive content of national interest is in fact a bureaucratic reason, freed from popular input and oversight and no longer chained to national representation.
Some hyper-globalists still wanted to blend away the nation-state in its entirety, dreaming of honeycombing the old nation-states with special economic zones and free ports, encouraging prosperous global hubs to secede from their hinterlands and form global leagues of networked city-states. Yet as we see in chapter 5, the nation-state could never be fully abolished. States remained vital to the functioning of the global economy – not least the single most important national economy which was under the control of the Chinese Communist Party. The member states of global governance still relied on the political, legal and institutional infrastructure provided by the old nation-state.
