https://www.city-journal.org/intellectual-defense-of-nationalism-16187.html
“Nationalism was not always understood to be the evil that current public discourse suggests,” philosopher Yoram Hazony notes in the introduction to his new book, The Virtue of Nationalism. Hazony is president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem and director of the John Templeton Foundation’s Jewish Philosophical Theology project. His previous books include The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul and The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture.
In The Virtue of Nationalism, Hazony defines nationalism principally by distinguishing it from imperialism. He begins by offering an overarching historical framework, describing how English, Dutch, and American Protestants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries revived the Old Testament’s strong affinity for individual liberty, thereby freeing large parts of the world from the system of universal empire promoted by Holy Roman Emperors under the aegis of the Catholic Church. This individual-centered vision gave birth to an intellectual current against empire-building after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, according to Hazony, resulting in the rise of independent nation-states worldwide.
Since the middle of the last century the tide has turned against nationalism. “Globalists” argued that nationalism brought about two world wars and the Holocaust. Their primary solution has been the promotion of the idea of world governance, either to a limited or more total extent, ordered by a set of liberal democratic values devised by experts, and run by professional administrators. Hazony persuasively argues that this internationalist approach represents a return of the imperial, totalizing vision of the world, which, rather than initiating a golden age of peace and humanism, has aroused old sectarian hatreds, and sown chaos and revolt across the globe. We will soon be forced, Hazony predicts, to make a stark choice between a world in which people, upholding their natural and inalienable rights, are able to choose their destiny within the framework of nation-states; or a renewal of universal empire—probably in the form of the European Union, or the hegemony of America or China. “The debate between nationalism and imperialism is upon us,” he writes.
In this debate, the defense of a centralized global order based on the familiar rationales of either economic efficiency or security is “too narrow to provide an adequate answer to the question of the best political order. In reality, much of what takes place in political life is motivated by concerns arising from our membership in collectives such as families, tribes, and nations.” In this alternate vision of human collectivity, religion, culture, and tradition are primary motivating influences and provide the major sources of value, rather than strictly economic or security factors. This implicit acknowledgement of the importance of national identity—though Hazony never uses that term—is a virtue of The Virtue of Nationalism. In large part because of that recognition, he quite cogently argues in the book that anyone who values his freedom should reject universalism and fight for a future of nations.
