speak with narrow ferocity. Instead, it draws its moral force to lead the nations from its own proclaimed reasonableness. The global ambitions are to be presented as the voice of tolerance (‘our’ tolerance), even doubt (‘our’ doubt, ‘our’ modesty). All the while, ‘we’ are to keep a sense of ‘ourselves’. And a sense of ‘others’: the mad and the bad, who cling to dangerous absolutes, opposing ‘our’ pragmatic, non-ideological politics (Billig 1995, 172).
Billig calls this sort of nationalism “banal nationalism,” because it denies its own nationalism while arguing at the same time for loyalty to the nation-state, to “our” nation. Such banal nationalism is, in his opinion, typical for all Western democracies that deny that “their” nationalism is nationalist, because “it is a part of common-sense imaging of ‘us’, the democratic, tolerant and reasonable nation, rightfully inhabiting ‘our’ homeland” (Billig 1995, 161).
If, in fact, Western democracies are not less nationalist when it comes to “their” homeland, even though they repress and deny this fact, can nationalism be democratic and liberal? As Erica Benner (1995) discovered (in the writings of Marx and Engels), in the mid-nineteenth century nationalist movements in Europe were in fact either politically conservative or indeed democratic. In fact, this was, according to Benner, the main contribution of Marxism—to distinguish democratic and non-democratic nationalism and, thereby, to bring politics back into the study of nationalism. The founders of Marxism believed that both within oppressed nations and within their oppressor states, there were despotic as well as democratic nationalists, chauvinists and internationalists. Benner reflects on how Marx viewed the political nature of different nationalisms:
To be eligible for support, he argued a nationalist movement should demonstrate that it is authentically ‘national’ in his democratic sense: it should, that is, positively address the concerns of a broad section of a nation’s people by improving social conditions and expanding the bases of political participation. He cited the Krakow insurrection of 1846 as an example of such a movement, applauding not only the political reforms advanced by the nationalist rebels but also their social and economic programme which represented, as Marx declared, Poland’s attempt to ‘break the chains of feudalism’ (Benner 1995, 155).
If it was possible to distinguish democratic forms of nationalism among the nineteenth century nationalist movements struggling for the right of self-determination, is it possible to apply the same principles to contemporary Europe with mostly established frontiers? Is it possible to do so outside a Marxist paradigm that, in fact, proved ineffective in handling nationalism?
There is a growing school of thought suggesting that liberal nationalism is not only possible, but also the only acceptable future for nationalism, if it is to have any future at all. The Israeli scholar Yael Tamir (1993) proposed combining the liberal admiration of personal freedom and individual rights with the nationalist emphasis on belonging, loyalty and solidarity. Tamir believes that people have the right to their own culture, and that it is possible to provide them with this right within the framework of a liberal society, if equal opportunities are provided for all members of that society. A similar approach was suggested by Will Kymlicka. Kymlicka’s liberal theory of minority rights argues for “freedom within minority groups and equality between minority and majority groups” (Kymlicka 1995, 152). However, as Judith Lichtenberg argued, this poses the difficult question of whether the state may or must privilege certain cultural practices, and disadvantage others, in the interests of social unity. Indeed, how liberal can nationalism be within or beyond state borders? And if it can provide cultural equality within a state and internationally, which is a moral prerequisite of liberal nationalism, then how different would such nationalism be from a cosmopolitan perspective? If the answer to the latter question proves difficult, Lichtenberg believes that liberal nationalism might be hard to distinguish from cosmopolitan-ism (Lichtenberg 19991, 167-88). In fact, it is difficult to disagree with such an argument precisely because nationalism is understood as relating to a single culture in a single state. So, is there any “good” nationalism that is possible or necessary? In order to address this question, it is useful to consider the relationship between democracy and nationalism on the one hand, and patriotism and nationalism on the other hand.
It is easy to observe that both contemporary democracy and nationalism became potent movements at approximately the same time, after the French Revolution, when a new concept of nation was born, within which it was people who possessed the right of sovereignty, and not the rulers as before. So, despite the popular, but mistaken, belief that democracy has nothing in common with nationalism or at least with “bad” nationalism—scholars cannot ignore the fact that, in one way or another, there must be an important correlation between the two.
Jürgen Habermas has argued that the modern state solved two important problems by its unique fusion of state institutions and the homogenizing idea of the nation. The national state established a democratic mode of legitimation, and it provided a new and more abstract form of social integration. This, however, caused an uneasy tension between a nationalist and a republican self-understanding of national society. According to Habermas, the fate of democracy depends on which of these self-understandings dominates (1996, 281-294). The normative conclusion drawn from the European history of nation-states should therefore be simple: to get rid of that ambivalent potential of nationalism, which was originally the vehicle for its success, and to replace it with constitutional patriotism. Habermas admits, however, that in comparison with nationalism, constitutional patriotism appears too thin to hold societies together. He uses, as an example, the United States which, in his view, is the prototype of a country which is united by a civic patriotism that is ultimately self-defeating: for, as he argues, “surging fundamentalism and terrorism (such as in Oklahoma [the 1995 bombing]) are alarming signs that the safety curtain of a civil religion, interpreting a constitutional history of two hundred years, may be about to break” (Habermas 1996, 290).
Jack Snyder proposed an “elite-persuasion” theory of nationalism to explain the relationship between democratization and nationalist conflict. Snyder argues that democratization produces nationalism in the early stages of democracy building, when national elites use nationalism for their own self-interests in order to organize masses behind them for the tasks of war and economic development. Snyder explains the use of nationalism by national elites, historically first in Western Europe and later in Eastern Europe, as related, not to the logic of industrialization as Gellner argued, but to the weakness of political institutions at the time. Therefore, his elite-persuasion theory rests on the assumption that nationalism is an expression of weak developing democracies, “a disease of the transition” and that “proper” political institutions solve this problem of democratic growth (Snyder 2000, 352).
David Held argued in favor of cosmopolitan democracy, but he admits that nationalism was a critical force in the development of the democratic nation-state. According to Held, nationalism has been closely linked to the administrative unification of the state because the conditions involved in the creation of nationalism were often also the conditions that generated the modern state. Contrary to Snyder, who argues that mature democracies overcome the problem of nationalism, Held notes that “the importance of nation-state and nationalism, territorial independence, and the desire to establish or regain or maintain ‘sovereignty’ does not seem to have diminished in recent times” (Held 1995, 94). This is, in his view, connected to the fact that even liberal democracies, or perhaps liberal democracies most of all, need to maintain a common national identity in order to ensure the coordination of policy, mass mobilization and state legitimacy.
Two other important questions should be discussed here: is national consciousness a derivative of nationalism, or is the reverse the case? The “modernist” claim that nations were invented to meet the need of industrial society for a culturally homogeneous and literate environment logically implies that national identity is a consequence of this invention. However, as Philip Schlesinger notes, “Nationalism ... tends to carry the sense of a community mobilized in the pursuit of a collective interest.” However, national identity “may be invoked as a point of reference
