Politics as Family
The Virtue of Nationalism. By Yoram Hazony. Basic Books; 236 pages; $30.00.
Much of political philosophy is concerned with the birth of the state, namely a standing government with the power to raise taxes and provide for the common defense. But at what exact stage of the state’s development does the discipline begin its inquiry? In The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony chastises today’s political scientists for leapfrogging steps in their teaching. Their core concern with the ideal state’s features places them in a subfield he terms “philosophy of government”, as opposed to the “philosophy of political order”, namely the study of the conditions that bring the state into being in the first place.
Historically, Hazony recounts, states are born out of alliances between human groups larger each time, much as a growing Russian doll made out of smaller parts jumping into one another. Families unite to form clans, which then merge to produce tribes, ultimately uniting to create nations. But what exactly makes humans leave the comfort of smaller, close-knit groups in favor of the hardship of governing larger and composite aggregations?
On this point, Hazony questions the entire foundation of modern political philosophy. Liberalism as framed in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government (1689), Hazony argues, misconstrued this process of political formation by assuming that humans in a state of nature are free and unbound by ties of any kind, exclusively concerned with the preservation of life and the pursuit of property. In Locke’s seminal view, they come together to govern the collective much as business partners deal with one another to seek profit. The weak bonds underlying these enterprises are necessarily subject to recurring reassessment, and termination when no longer deemed advantageous.
Modeling the early state on the functioning of a business assumes away any mutual loyalties binding the polity and making individuals capable of risking life and property for one another. Such fealties only exist in the family, which is the model for Hazony’s alternative view of the state. Whether one espouses the business or the family template, the implications for assessing the evolution of states and contemporary geopolitics will be vastly different. Anchored in his alternative view of the paste that glues nations together, Hazony’s ideal world order is one of free and independent nations internally bound by familial loyalties.
Another point where Hazony claims students of political science are deluded by the liberal tradition is whether state-forming is a matter of free choice. Much like a parent’s tale that their kid was delivered by a stork out of unease with telling the realities of baby-making, Lockean philosophy omits the uglier conditions that push people in the state of nature towards political formation, instead staging free individuals consenting to form states out of utilitarian calculations.
In Hazony’s telling, the state of nature is nothing of the sort. Its anarchical order is one of warring tribes where states can emerge in only one of two ways, neither involving individual consent. These tribes are either conquered by stronger ones claiming loyalty to universal peace and prosperity (imperialism), or governed by leaders whose decision to form a state stems from the ideal of self-determination (national freedom). In both scenarios, Hazony argues, the individual is far removed from the original venture.
With the realm of possibilities sharply reduced to these two channels of state-forming, Hazony elevates national freedom to an ideal with manifold virtues palpable among today’s “national-states” such as Israel, Turkey, Japan, Switzerland and others. Among them, for instance, is mutual non-interference and the disdain for conquest. Countries concerned with preserving their borders will be reticent to foray into the affairs of neighboring states, keenly aware of how that might in turn risk their own integrity. Another benefit of an order of independent national states, Hazony argues, is the competition among differing regulatory and economic systems, driving each country towards the kinds of innovations meant to outperform rivals and attract wealth. Hazony argues such virtuous competition is inconceivable in an integrated multi-state economic order of the kind cherished by liberal thinkers such as Hayek.
However, one is hard-pressed to see the real-world manifestations of this latter point. When it comes to matters of tax and regulatory competitiveness, the outcome of economic integration is far from static. The EU, for instance, has sought to keep its various regulatory regimes competitive, even when the direction adopted isn’t to the liking of all member states or interest groups. Largely, the current global economic outlook is one of frenetic competition, regardless of the size of the players involved. Hazony’s critique of economics for advocating competition between firms as a driver of innovation while encouraging multinational economic policymaking falls flat. States don’t innovate — companies do, and economic policies will seek to spur them to do so regardless of the level at which they’re adopted.
The ideal end-state of Hazony’s model of political formation is thus a world order of free states mutually respective of each other’s independence. His model allows scant ways through which free and separate states can tackle common challenges by pooling sovereignty. One of them is the voluntary adjudication of disputes, whereby rival states may submit to the arbitrage of multilateral bodies on specific matters, or else remain at the margin if their mediation is deemed flawed. Hazony claims these bilateral mechanisms have been perverted by the EU and the UN’s tendency to impose diktats.
This is where Hazony’s telling of contemporary world politics can seem warped. In the case of post-Second World War Europe, he makes little room for the possibility of sovereign and independent European nations freely coming together to devise common paths to securing peace and prosperity without the imposition of supranational diktats. This very impulse was oftentimes, however, at work in the early days of European integration, before the process got co-opted by the supranational dynamics of an unelected executive placed above national governments and legislatures.
This failure to devise the sovereign driving forces behind some of Europe’s integrationist impulses ends up permeating Hazony’s entire assessment of the EU’s role on the world stage. He paints a picture where Brussels is the capital of a liberal internationalist paradigm bent on heaping hate on the independent conduct of national states such as Israel’s sovereign defense of its own security.
In this, Hazony blames European opinion for adopting Kant’s model of the three-stage journey of nations from barbarism (the anarchical order of warring tribes) to reason and morality (an international state) via a middle stage of national self-determination. While nations of largely European ascendancy, including America and Israel, are presumed to have transcended national sovereignty in favor of Kant’s ideal of an international state, others in the Arab sphere and the Third World are still deemed to be in the throes of nationalist instincts. Europe’s adoption of this paradigm introduces the double standard that Hazony so reviles when applied to Israel. The aggressive posturing of states like Turkey or Iran ends up getting wrist-slapped at best, while Israel’s self-defense attracts Europe’s harshest vilification.
Hazony’s dislike of the EU, however, pushes him to make far bolder claims, such as equating the bloc to “an American protectorate”, or even tracing its diplomatic sanctioning of Israel’s self-defense to the immemorial friction between Christendom and Judaism. For all of its overdone postulates, The Virtue of Nationalism remains a compelling, thoughtful re-examination of the limits of a liberal international order bent on eviscerating national sovereignty. A worthy read.
