The autonomy argument for liberal nationalism

The article examines a recent nonnative argument for ‘liberal nationalism’ that can be found in the work of a range of influential contemporary writers. That argument seeks to defend the view that the state has a responsibility to preserve and promote national cultures. It does so by arguing that the liberal ideal of an autonomous individual chooser presupposes a rich and healthy national culture which provides, and gives meaning to, the options which an individual faces. The claim of the present article is that the liberal nationalist argument is much less successful than these writers would like to think. Although the argument may be valid in certain restricted contexts, the article shows that it runs into severe difficulties for a wide range of central cases that nationalists have traditionally been concerned with. Liberalism and cultural nationalism A distinction can be drawn between two different varieties of nationalism which are important both in theory and in practice. Political nationalism can be defined as the doctrine that nations should be self-governing. On the strongest version of this view, each nation should have its own state; on weaker versions, each nation should enjoy a significant degree of political autonomy within a multinational state. Cultural nationalism, by contrast, I shall take to be the doctrine that an important responsibility of the state is to preserve and promote some national culture that is contained within its borders. Political nationalism is a doctrine about how politically meaningful boundaries ought to be drawn. Cultural nationalism, on the other hand, is a doctrine about how the state, in the context of a given set of boundaries, ought to exercise its power and authority. In practice, these two doctrines are often conjoined into a single nationalist view. Cultural nationalists frequently believe that the only guarantee that the state will fulfil its responsibility of preserving and * Assistant Professor of Political Science, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. A number of people made helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, including Dario Castiglione, Jerry Cohen, Iain Hampsher-Monk, Stuart White, Andrew Williams and the referees for this Journal. To all these people, my thanks. Thanks also to Emily Morton for research assistance.