‘The Virtue of Nationalism’ and ‘The Nationalist Revival’ Review: Against the Liberal Empire - Note for a Discussion, "E Pluribus Unum? What Keeps the United States United."

The Wall Street Journal

Two new books examine the recent global rise 
in nationalism—and consider the proper role
of the nation-state in today’s world. 
Jason Willick reviews 
“The Virtue of Nationalism” by Yoram Hazony
 and “The Nationalist Revival” by John B. Judis.

PHOTO: VLADIMIR SMIRNOV/TASS 

By  Jason Willick
Oct. 9, 2018 6:49 p.m. ET

The Auschwitz death camp represents two distinct horrors, according to Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony’s new book, “The Virtue of Nationalism.” The first is Jews “standing empty-handed and naked, watching their children die for want of a rifle with which to protect them.” The second is “German soldiers using force against others, backed by nothing but their own government’s views as to their national rights and interests.” Which account you find more compelling—Jewish powerlessness or Nazi savagery—likely determines where you stand on many of the most pressing political issues today.

If Auschwitz was a tragedy of Jewish powerlessness, the most complete repudiation of it was a nationalist project—the creation of an armed, sovereign state of Israel. If Auschwitz was a tragedy of Nazi savagery, the most complete repudiation of it was an anti-nationalist project—the creation of the European Union to limit the power of nation-states.

PHOTO: WSJ

THE VIRTUE OF NATIONALISM

By Yoram Hazony
Basic, 285 pages, $30

THE NATIONALIST REVIVAL

By John B. Judis
Columbia Global Reports, 157 pages, $15.99

Certainly it’s possible to support both Israel and the EU. But in Mr. Hazony’s mind, they embody two poles of the philosophical divide that is splitting the West in two—national particularism on one hand and universal liberalism on the other. In this view, it’s no wonder EU officials harbor irrational animosity toward Israel—they “cannot abide even a single, obstinately dissenting people, no matter how small.” And it’s no wonder Israel’s conservative prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, makes common cause with Euro-skeptic politicians—even if they hail from right-wing parties with anti-Semitic pasts. They are allies in a global struggle between nationalism and what Mr. Hazony calls “liberal empire.”

The moral basis for the nation-state, the author says, goes back to the Old Testament, where “the world of Israel’s prophets was dominated by a succession of imperial powers: Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia.” Though it had economic advantages, empire was inherently coercive, expanding relentlessly outward and depriving peoples of collective self-determination. Like ancient imperial powers, Western liberals today seek “to bring peace and prosperity to the world by uniting mankind, as much as possible, under a single political regime.” 

Mr. Hazony is dismissive of claims that liberalism may in fact be the regime most suited to human flourishing: All imperialists have made the same claim, he insists—whether they ruled ancient Rome, Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. He is therefore heartened by the revival of nationalist sentiment in the West. For him, the U.K.’s vote to leave the EU and Donald Trump’s election in the U.S. reflect rebellions against an oppressive liberal empire and re-assertions of the nation-state as the proper unit of political order. 

Mr. Hazony’s definition of the nation-state draws from the Bible’s account of the ancient Israeli nation. The most basic unit of organization is the family; groups of families join together to become tribes; and tribes come together to form nations. To cohere, a nation must share “commonalities of language or religion” and a “history of uniting in wartime.”

Individual rights and liberties cannot exist without those preconditions, Mr. Hazony says. In multinational states such as the late Austrian empire, for example, “every grant of individual liberties” to particular peoples was also used “to press ever more forcefully for the dissolution of the imperial state.” The state could only be held together by severe oppression. The observation that liberal rights will undermine themselves unless they are underwritten by a certain level of national cohesion is the most important of Mr. Hazony’s book. It is also acutely relevant to the warring political tribes in the U.S. today.

John B. Judis, author of “The Nationalist Revival,” does not see a death-match between imperial liberalism on the one hand and nationalism on the other. His more modest book argues that elites have overreached, both in the U.S. and in Europe, in advocating large-scale immigration and trade deals and foreign interventions. As a result, Mr. Judis—a former New Republic editor who has long supported progressive and pro-labor economic policies—calls for a synthesis between liberalism and nationalism.

“Trump has clearly rejected the excesses of the post-Cold War period,” Mr. Judis writes, “but he may also be casting aside what was positive and constructive in liberal internationalism—the attempt to create international obstacles to the outbreak of war and economic depression.” For Mr. Judis, Mr. Trump and the European nationalists are not avatars of a new order but symptoms of the failure of policies that Western leaders have pursued for three decades. The author argues that immigration has reduced native wages, that trade deals have placed the interests of corporations over workers, and that America’s Russia policy has not been in the national interest. But Mr. Trump, he believes, has polluted these legitimate critiques with bigoted and nativist appeals.

Like Yoram Hazony, Mr. Judis rejects the idea of a “creedal” nation based on commitment to liberal principles alone—the notion that Americanism is “an idea, the idea of liberty under law as expressed in the Constitution.” While the U.S. doesn’t have an ethnic identity the way that many European states do, Mr. Judis argues, it was “born out of a core ethnic and religious identity. Over the next 225 years, that identity has been called into question, modified, and expanded, but never entirely lost.” The crucial question, which neither Mr. Judis nor Mr. Hazony quite answers, is what that identity should look like in today’s America.

Nationalists like Mr. Trump risk defining American identity too narrowly, so that only people who look a certain way are seen as fully American. But the “creedal” view, which dismisses nationalism altogether, also has dangerous implications. Because if America is simply an idea of cosmopolitan liberalism, then people who don’t believe in cosmopolitan liberalism are themselves less than American—and easy to write off as “deplorables,” or worse.

Mr. Willick is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.