The Death of the Nation-State?[i] A World beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State[/i] by Pierre Manent - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

The Death of the Nation-State?[i] A World beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State[/i] by Pierre Manent

A World beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State
by Pierre Manent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006)

DAVID CLINTON is Professor of Political Science and Department Chair at Baylor University.

If the nation-state is indeed dying, who
will be the mourners at its funeral?
Not the many figures in contemporary
academia who have denounced it as the
haven for institutionalized oppression
and international aggression, at once too
weak to deal successfully with transnational
problems like environmental pollution
and too powerful for the safety of
its tyrannized inhabitants. Among the figures
at the graveside, however, will be at
least one political thinker whose academic
credentials will be difficult to denigrate.
Pierre Manent does not dispute that powerful
forces do indeed threaten the survival
of the nation-state in many parts of the
world, but he argues convincingly that this
development is to be regretted, because of
its deleterious effect on democratic citizenship.

At its heart, his argument is that effective
citizenship requires that one be a citizen
somewhere. Without the community
provided by an identifiable group of fellow
citizens, set off from the rest of the world
by their possession of common political
traditions and a shared sense of the purposes
of that regime, democratic deliberation
is impossible. The history of Western
civilization is in large part an account of
the repeated rediscovery of this truth in a
variety of historical and institutional settings.
Although a tension exists in the
relation of the national group and unadulterated
democracy—because a nation consists
of a pre-existing community that is
thought to be “natural” and not the product
of the free choice of each individual
member of the community or even of the
majority of its individual members, and
because nation-states have traditionally
rested on the security provided by institutions
organized on principles other than
equal liberty and majority rule, such as the
armed forces—the nation exercising control
over its own sovereign state has come
to be the form in which the problem of
the coexistence of individual freedom and
communal self-government is most nearly
successfully solved. Just as some degree of
economic self-sufficiency has traditionally
been thought necessary to the well-being
of the national state, and all the individual
citizens it represents, so a political selfsufficiency, or independence, has been
considered a corollary to citizens freely
reasoning together about the policies that
will best serve their common life. Lacking
the national community, they are strangers
to one another, with little ability to discuss
among themselves (because the object
whose future they are debating is unclear)
and less willingness to make sacrifices for
the common good, if indeed the shared
good of a heterogeneous, apparently randomly
collected, group of people can be
identified.

Given what would seem to be its considerable
contribution to human flourishing,
why would the nation-state find itself
under such stress that its very existence is
said to be imperiled, if in fact, as is often
asserted, it has not already come to an
end? Manent finds his primary answer to
this question in the analysis of democracy
by Tocqueville, who may be said to be
the intellectual godfather of the volume,
even if Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Kant
are cited a greater number of times. Tocqueville
saw the power and the inevitable
advance of equality, understood as fundamental
likeness, which was the definition
of “democracy” he employed in Democracy
in America. Democracy in this sense of leveling
had two enormously important consequences
central to Manent’s theme. One
was that equality mandated the attitude
that “my opinion is as good anyone else’s,”
which implied that the only legitimate laws
were those that the individual had agreed
to himself; “democracy” as a general sense
of equality laid the groundwork for the
specifically political institutional arrangements
of democratic government: regular,
free elections, conducted under universal
suffrage, of authorities whose power would
be limited only by the restraints (such as
constitutions) set in place by the people
themselves. The second effect was the
delegitimizing of all differences because
the very idea of distinctions ran counter
to the principle of sameness. In its dissolving
effect on ancient institutions like
hereditary class structures, the advance of
equality in this sense made possible the
emergence of the nation, which, when
combined with the acceptance of democracy
as the only legitimate form of government,
opened the way for the liberal
democratic nation-state that, for Manent,
is a praiseworthy regime.

Because of the illimitable quality of
the leveling process, however, it could
not be confined only to those distinctions
incompatible with a number of independent
nation-states, within each of which
a lively non-hierarchical democratic polity
prevailed. All differences would sooner
or later be held illegitimate, and Manent
discusses several instances of this trend,
including the pressure under which traditional
views on the proper roles of men
and women, and the privileged legal position
of indissoluble heterosexual marriage,
would be placed. For present purposes, the
most central distinction to be questioned
would be that between fellow citizens and
others—in other words, the boundaries
of nation-states themselves. The “religion
of humanity,” as he calls it, would recognize
no rightful repository of authority
between the autonomous individual, on
the one hand, and the undifferentiated
association of all human beings, the entire
human race, on the other.

In turn, two consequences flow from
carrying equality to this extent. One is to
confirm the tendency of citizens to withdraw
into a concern only for the happiness
and economic well-being of themselves
and their families and to see no connection
between pursuing their self-interest
and exercising the duties of citizenship.
This effect is “individualism,” the deleterious
character of which Tocqueville analyzed.
The second consequence is more
readily apparent in our own day than in
Tocqueville’s and is described at greater
length by Manent: the deference given
to any institution labeled “international”
over one the nature of which was only
“national,” and the draining away of the
legitimate authority and independence of
nation-states.

For Manent, the combined effect of these
two trends is almost completely malign
in choking off deliberative democratic
participation. Without constant reminders
of Tocqueville’s “self-interest rightly
understood” (which held that in acting
as citizens the inhabitants of a state were
in fact serving their most important selfinterest:
protecting their liberties), individualism
reduces citizens to consumers.
Meanwhile, the international institutions
that gain power at the expense of national
governments generally contain few means
of popular control, and in any case evoke
no passionate loyalty from the people they
govern that would prompt them to defend,
much less attempt to direct, the distant
bodies that regulate their lives.

Manent adduces three contemporary
developments in international relations to
demonstrate his argument, and in doing so
he raises doubts about what in many quarters
are regarded as indisputably beneficial
curtailments of the power of outdated sovereign
states: the freeing of international
trade; the extending reach of judge-made
law, and particularly international law; and
the expanding European Union. Recognizing
that all these developments respond
to abuses committed by nation-states or
to incapacities demonstrated by them, he
wishes to remind us that they diminish
the control that people, acting collectively,
exercise over their own lives.

The phenomenon of globalization rests
on the shared desire of all persons to enjoy
access to the widest array of goods at the
lowest possible price. Manent here is most
representative of French thought in fearing
the deadening sameness that unrestricted
international commerce may bring. Arriving
at the lowest common denominator, in
this case achieving the globally competitive
price level, is incompatible with the care,
craftsmanship, and resulting cost required
of goods that truly reflect the delightful
variety of life across societies; or, as he
puts it, “trade, as it becomes generalized
and intensified, tends to erase the limited
horizons that men need in order to produce
the things they wish to exchange.”
The World Trade Organization best illustrates
the emphasis on lowering the cost of
production, above all other policy objectives,
as well as the transfer of power from
democratically controlled governments to
an international body guided by an international
law superior to the formerly sovereign
state.

For law to conform fully to the imperative
of equality, it must enforce rights that
are the same for all persons, and it must be
applied equally to all persons. The former
imperative leads to an ever-extending catalog
of universal rights, applied and often
authored by supposedly neutral judges
rather than by democratic assemblies that
might be captured by some citizens and
not all; the latter, to the growth of cosmopolitan
law, with an attendant enthusiasm
for humanitarian intervention and
decay in the principle of non-intervention.
In all this, there is much that reflects the
well-intentioned but never quite fully
realized desire to substitute the equality
and neutrality of law and administration
for the conflict of politics; there is also the
assumption (necessary to cosmopolitan
equality, though rarely borne out by reality)
that all persons everywhere rationally
desire the same list of rights and value the
peaceful preservation of these rights over
any other objective.

Likewise, the “construction of Europe”
expands the rights—to travel freely between
countries, to pursue a career within any of
them, to enjoy the judicial protection of
a common list of human rights—equally
held by all individuals within the borders
of the Union, but by transferring ever more
powers to European institutions marked
by the “democratic deficit,” it lessens the
ability of those same individuals to deliberate
together on the best means of defining
and pursuing the good life. Politics of
a kind may go on behind closed doors, but
democratic politics withers; if nothing of
importance is decided by the nation, no
particular reason exists to be and to act as a
citizen. Someone else will take care of any
responsibilities—to enforce a lengthening
roster of universal rights approved as such
by the European Parliament: the power of
the United States; to populate European
countries with birth rates that have plummeted
well below replacement levels: an
increasing supply of immigrants, from the
new countries that have joined the Union
and beyond.

For Manent, then, a world that has gone
beyond the politics that could be practiced
under the norms and institutions of
democratic nation-states is also a world
that has left behind citizenship, patriotism,
responsibility, and culture. It is an unattractive,
limited, flattened world, that, if
it avoids the tyranny of which totalitarian
states were guilty in the twentieth century,
obviates as well the opportunity for
the individuals who live within it to grow
into citizens. It is also a world in which,
without the grandeur of the country or the
principles of one’s regime to evoke loyalty,
there is very little reason for anyone to sacrifice much of anything for the sake of any
purpose. Humanitarian intervention, for
example, will be prompted by feelings of
universal compassion, even as it is deprived
of the willingness to apply the force that
would make it effective.

The author makes clear from the beginning
of the English translation of this work
that he is interpreting Europe for America,
and it is worth briefly considering in conclusion
why the attitudes he describes so
well are more powerful in the Old World
than in the New (though they are not
unknown here). One explanation is that
despite the fact that his argument is framed
in terms of universal trends responding to
the desires of humans qua human beings,
in reality the historical experience has been
different on the two sides of the Atlantic.
In Europe, two terribly destructive wars in
the first half of the twentieth century discredited
national pride as a worthy ideal,
the swift collapse of the imperial project
in the second half undercut its claim to be
making a contribution to the welfare of
civilization, and the turn-of-the-century
appearance of an international order framed
by continent-sized great powers made the
states of Europe appear too small to meet
the challenges of security and economic
prosperity on their own. None of these
things has been true to the same extent of
the United States.

A second possible answer sits strangely
beside Manent’s analysis of the loss of all
hierarchy and distinctions: that the United
States is a more purely democratic country
than its European cousins. For all the
claims of social democracy to be more
fully equal, and therefore more fully
“democratic,” than liberal democracy, in
the United States general public opinion
has a greater force over public policy than
in most of the capitals of Europe. One
might find public opinion polls reflecting
at least plurality support for capital punishment
among Europeans as well as Americans,
for example, but only in the United
States is that backing from the public at
large able to overcome elite opposition
to the practice and make it public policy.
Likewise, the great unwashed have never
demonstrated as much attachment to the
European project as have elites; and the
furthering of European integration has by
and large been undertaken without reference
to the wishes of the public, even as
it has constructed a framework of institutions
far from democratic in their spirit.

Such transatlantic contrasts mean that,
while Manent sees no prospect, and therefore
suggests no prescriptions, for reversing
the developments he observes and
recreating a richer—because more fully
political—society in Europe, he does not
insist that he is describing the inevitable
destiny of the United States. Indeed, he
predicts increasing difficulties between the
two precisely because an ever-more nonpolitical
Europe will press for humanitarian
policies without equipping itself with
the instruments of power to accomplish
its goals on its own, while a still-political
America will retain the material and psychological
capacity to fight, but will continue
to balance compassionate concerns
against strategic ones.

If the United States is to have a chance of
remaining a nation-state—if, in response
to the question in Manent’s title, we are to
see the emergence not of a “world beyond
politics” but only a region that has abandoned
the political self-identification of
its peoples as citizens—then Americans
will need to appreciate his rich argument,
which links sophisticated political thought
with immediate and very practical questions
of political action. They will need to
avoid the peculiarly American temptation
to define the United States simply as the
bearer of equally universal and abstract
notions of right and law, forgetting the
needed ballast of a country, possessing a
defined territory and a recognized assembly
of fellow citizens. Without realizing what
is at stake, he implies, the United States
could undergo a similar depoliticization.
If it escapes that fate, it will owe much to
the perspicuity and passion displayed in
this volume. In that case, Manent’s warning
would not be realized to its ultimate
extent, but one can expect that this result
would not disappoint him. No doubt he
would be pleased to arrive at what he
expected to be the funeral of the nationstate
and find several healthy members of
the family standing at his side.

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