And what about those self-proclaimed truce-makers between the right and the left, the liberal nationalists? Every decade a lonely liberal nationalist writes a large book that says the same thing: We are not yet ready as a species for international solidarity, nor even for baby steps like Habermas’s vision of “constitutional patriotism,” which defines citizenship on the basis of allegiance to abstract liberal ideals rather than shared history or social affinities. We—Americans, Israelis, the French—are separate peoples, bound by particular historical experiences, and we should not fool ourselves into thinking that national borders can be transcended. We should not fool ourselves that supranational political authority is desirable, much less practicable. To lose hold of this insight, they insist, is to forfeit a hard-won inheritance to the forces of the nationalist right.
Liberal-nationalist authors flatter their liberal readership by finding the solution to their accelerating sense of dislocation in the attic of their own tradition. They are bound together by the determination to reconcile a putative need for historical belonging with tolerance. If the cultural needs of a particular minority are very great indeed, then that people—Palestinians, Kurds, Rakhine, Kosovars—may have a legitimate claim to their own territory. But there’s an impatience, too, that characterizes liberal nationalists: you cannot play the game of Russian dolls forever, they seem to say.
What they do not say is that the United States will reserve the ultimate decision of whether your application for territory is approved. Perhaps the most dramatic failed “liberal nationalist” project of the nineteenth century was the Confederate States of America, whose leaders believed they were operating not only within the legal writ of the U.S. Constitution but also with the Mazzinian zeitgeist at their backs. The content of their cause—the maintenance and expansion of slavery—hardly impinged on their procedural liberal right to political self-determination. But as both the Confederates and Native Americans learned, rights to nationhood, no matter how enshrined in law, can always be revoked by the power that issued them.
Even if a truly tolerant brand of liberal nationalism could be imagined, it would be the equivalent of a horse and wagon on the Autobahn of global capitalism. An ideology cobbled together in the mid-nineteenth century yields poor results when confronted with 21st-century neoliberalism. A squadron of $150 million F-22 Raptors flies over a football stadium, or a regiment performs its goose-step change of guard at the border, liberal nationalists recommend protest: Why don’t we build more national parks with that money instead? National ideology, they believe, can be channeled to whatever ends the national public chooses. But nothing in the treasure chest of liberal nationalism encourages such social instincts, which is why its ideology of legalism and proceduralism has long been so attractive to elites who already have power.