INTRODUCTION: LIBERALISM AND NATIONALISM

To argue that the relationship between liberalism and nationalism reveals a profound ambivalence seems to be an understatement. For some, liberalism and nationalism are irreconcilable antagonists. Michael Oakeshott maintains that nationalism is a product of the uniquely modern miscegenation between “political rationalism” and “political romanticism,” combining, despite the nationalist pretext of atavism, the fanatic zeal for a complete breach from an immediate past and the utopian longing for a refounding once and for all of political society. Thus understood, nationalism is held responsible for the degeneration of the liberal social foundation. It erodes value pluralism and the procedural rule of law embedded in “civil associations [societas],” only to replace them with “enterprise associations [universitas]” in the name of administration and management. On account of the mode of political society it promotes, then, nationalism is no less a foe to liberalism than socialism and totalitarianism – spiritual cousins of nationalism according to Oakeshott's genealogical account of political modernity.

Without denying the logical tension between the liberal-individualist ideal of civil society and the organic-communitarian vision of national society, others hold that nationalism entails a set of values and beliefs more complicated than Oakeshott exposes and even at times self-contradictory.