The American Spectator

Templeton Essay

Freedom and the Nation-State

By Jeremy Rabkin from the November 2008 issue

(Page 2 of 3)

The Strength of Nations.

THE NATION-STATE, as we think of it today, is a product of modern times, emerging from the breakup of empires and from declarations of independence made by people wishing to claim their familiar territory as a home. In fact, the world’s most successful nation-state—certainly its richest and freest—was founded on just such a declaration. The American Declaration of Independence asserted that when subject to intolerable abuses, “one people may dissolve the political bands which have [previously] connected them with another.” The Declaration refers to the people of Britain as “brethren,” presumably in view of common origins. But it goes on, in its penultimate paragraph, to insist that the American states will henceforth hold the British “as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.” That is what independence means: national governments speak for the actual citizens of their own countries, not for groups defined without reference to national boundaries.

The Declaration of Independence is clear that nations are grounded in the consent of their current members rather than in mere ancestry. The Declaration even cites as one of the “causes” that “impelled [Americans] to the separation” from Britain that the British government had “endeavored to prevent the population of these states” by “obstructing laws for the naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither….” So the Declaration envisions the United States as a place of refuge, to which people may come to enjoy the benefits of freedom under law.

Little more than a decade later, The Federalist Papers urged the necessity of a “national government.” The very first paper acknowledged that— despite the principles asserted in the Declaration of Independence—governments founded in consent were so rare in the world that “it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitution on accident and force.”

In the history of the world, most people, most of the time, had lived in accord with the customs and folkways of their clan, tribe, village, or religion— with lives largely determined by the circumstances into which they happened to be born. Often they were incorporated into larger kingdoms or great empires, though even these larger structures usually ruled through local chiefs, elders, or warlords, with highest honors allocated to the most successful conquerors. When the United States was founded, it was not even generally accepted in Europe that distinct nations should have their own governments. Much of the continent still lived under the rule of multinational empires—most notably the Romanovs and Ottomans in the east, the Habsburgs in central Europe.

All the more striking, then, that The Federalist argued not just for government by consent but for government on a national basis. The second paper in the series (by John Jay, subsequently first chief justice of the Supreme Court) suggests a kind of divinely appointed destiny for the new nation: “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.…”

The authors did not lay too much stress on divine providence, however. The Constitution advocated by The Federalist includes a prohibition on religious tests for office, along with authorization for Congress to “establish a uniform rule of naturalization” (that is, legislation to make foreigners into American citizens) that indicates no limits on eligibility.

While the Constitution requires the president to be “a natural born citizen,” it allows naturalized citizens to serve in the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Supreme Court—as happened, in fact, from the earliest days of the Constitution. Nearly half of the ensuing papers belabor the argument that, without a strong common government—a national government—the American confederacy will break into regional confederacies, which might not only descend to war with each other but also seek foreign assistance and so become perpetually entangled in foreign wars. The final paper in the series concludes that “a nation without a national government is an awful spectacle.” The underlying argument, in short, is that a nation is not simply a given, not an inescapable destiny, but a human creation—something maintained by “reflection and choice.”

We should give due weight to the term “reflection” here. Apart from tribes and empires, the Western world still remembered the experience of the self-governing states of ancient Greece and Rome. Almost all Western languages (and many non- Western languages) have adopted the term “politics” from the Greek polis and “republic” from the Roman res publica—words preserved from dead languages because they did not have living models. What sustained such embedded reminders of the ancient republics was the appeal of citizens taking an active part in openly debating and then openly deciding how their community should be governed.

Modern nations had reason to look back on the ancient republics with mixed feelings, however. In the ancient republics, sizable parts of the population were held in slavery or helotry or excluded from citizenship as “foreigners” (metoikoi), even if born into the territory of a particular city-state. Those who were citizens took part in “politics”—but often very extreme politics, as leaders of contending factions imposed execution or exile on rivals and bolder usurpations provoked bloodier civil strife. The Federalist stressed the point: “It is impossible to read the his tory of the petty republics of Greece and Italy without feeling sensations of horror and disgust at the distractions with which they were continually agitated and…[their] perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy.”

There was, one could say, too much choice—for both political communities and their leading citizens. The Federalist several times remarks on the readiness of leaders of republics to betray their countries out of personal ambition—evidently alluding to “noble lives” recounted in Plutarch. They looked for a more stable sense of nationality to support a more stable form of politics.

Government by consent doesn’t mean government with which all citizens agree. It means government with which citizens may freely disagree. This is the great achievement of Western constitutional democracy. If the constitutional safeguards that secure my basic freedoms are in place, then I can proceed with my life regardless of those in high office; I can freely disagree with them, as they cannot punish me for doing so. Much of The Federalist celebrates the division of powers between the federal government and the states. Still more papers defend the separation of powers and constitutional guarantees of individual rights. But in the end, the force of the Constitution relies on the claim that “we the people”—collectively—stand behind it. And that theoretical claim is much easier to embrace if there is some degree of national unity in the background.

Even in the 19th century, the United States was sympathetic to independence movements of other peoples. While presidents tried to keep official foreign policy free of entanglement in foreign disputes, members of Congress were quick to express sympathy for the Greeks in their war to throw off Turkish domination, for Polish rebellions against Russia, for Hungarian and then Italian rebellions against Austrian control. Woodrow Wilson’s support for “national self-determination”—that is, the breakup of the multinational empires—at the end of the World War was almost foreordained. Senate critics of the Versailles Treaty wasted no tears on the vanished empires; rather, they complained that it was wrong to have imposed artificial boundaries on some of the new states—and wrong to have acceded to continuing foreign enclaves in China. They believed that enduring democracies could arise only where there were also nation-states to support them.

Political Costs of Supranationalisim

THE EMERGENCE OF the nation-state facilitated the spread of democracy by identifying bounded territories with the people who lived in them. In contemporary Europe, however, nationalism provokes shudders, being blamed for “centuries of conflict” culminating in two world wars, while the European Union is credited by its defenders with delivering peace. In 2005, during debate over the proposed new constitutional treaty for the EU, commissioner Margot Wallstrom, vice-president of the European Commission, went so far as to warn that if the constitutional treaty were defeated, Europe would be at risk for a new genocide. Just who would be killing whom she did not say. But, in the spirit of harmony and continental understanding, she embraced the European convention according to which the unique crimes of the Germans resulted exclusively from “nationalism”—as if Belgium or Portugal were always on the verge of invading their neighbors or Sweden (Wallstrom’s home country) in danger of exterminating the ethnic Finns.

Letter to the Editor