THE TWENTY-FIRST century is the era of the nation-state. Today there are 193 members of the United Nations General Assembly, even though at the time of its formation, the UN had only fifty-one members. Where did those 142 members come from, in the last seventy-seven years? The new states were formed from the partition of former European empires like the British and French Empires, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which was the successor state to the Romanov Russian Empire, and in some cases, like those of Yugoslavia and Sudan, the disintegration of post-colonial successor states into even smaller states.

Many of the post-colonial successor states have inherited the borders of former empires, sometimes drawn deliberately by European colonial administrators to split some ethnic nations and throw others together, as part of divide-and-rule schemes. As a result, many post-colonial countries in Africa and the Middle East—like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Nigeria, and others—lack any ethnonational majority and have often been held together by dictatorships of one kind or another. In some cases, entire ethnic nations like the Kurds and Roma find themselves with no nation-state of their own, scattered as tolerated or abused national minorities among a number of countries.

In spite of all of this, most post-imperial successor states are less ethnically diverse than the former empires as a whole, and many fit a broad definition of a nation-state, in which a majority, though not necessarily all, of the citizens belong to a common linguistic and cultural community whose members may but do not necessarily share a common ancestry.

Paradoxically, the global triumph of the more culturally homogeneous nation-state over the polyethnic empire as the dominant form of territorial organization in the world has been matched by the repudiation of the very idea of the nation-state by most prominent Western intellectuals. I have been studying and writing about nations and nation-states for more than three decades. In that time, almost all academics and public intellectuals in the United States and Europe who write about nationalism have rejected the nation-state as evil, anachronistic, or both.

THE ANTI-NATIONALIST consensus comprises otherwise different groups on the political spectrum from Left to Right. The Western Left appears to be almost unanimous in its hostility to the nation-state as an institution. You might suppose that liberals and leftists would defend the nation-state. After all, from the revolutions of 1848 until the period of decolonization after World War II, most liberals cheered the replacement of European empires and royal autocracies by independent nation-states whose citizens could choose their own leaders. Socialists as well as liberals were anti-imperialists for most of the twentieth century.

But in the last few decades, the nation-state has come into bad odor, particularly among Western scholars. Some of these academics promote a philosophical version of cosmopolitanism like Peter Singer (Martha Nussbaum has renounced her earlier ethical cosmopolitan philosophy). Other liberals hope that the sovereignty of nation-states can gradually be eroded by supranational institutions like the European Union and by doctrines like the “responsibility to protect” which, by allowing outside powers to invade countries with illiberal or undemocratic regimes, weakens the post-1945 prohibition against aggressive war.

For their part, most contemporary Western leftists view national boundaries as illegitimate, either on the basis of a crude version of Marxism—“workers of the world, unite!”—or because they view world politics through the lens of domestic antiracism: “The border line is the new color line.”

Another anti-nationalist faction is made up of centrist neoliberals and right-wing libertarians. Their view of the world is shaped by free-market economics. Countries are impediments to free flows of goods, services, labor, and capital. Commerce-obstructing borders should be eliminated, or at least made as porous as possible. In the neoliberal-libertarian utopia, countries would have no more moral or political significance than zip codes. States are sweatshops or shopping malls, to be invested in or abandoned, as global capital chooses.

On the Right, there are reactionaries nostalgic for the glory days of European empires, when invaders in pith helmets machine-gunned “natives” and looted their resources—for the good of the natives, or so they would have us believe. Some “TradCaths” on the Right idealize the Habsburg Empire as the most recent version of medieval Catholic Christendom before it was disrupted by the Reformation and later by nationalism. Unlike the one-world Left or the global market Center, the defenders of imperialism on the Right at least can point to a model of government that was predominant in much of the world for much of recorded history.

WHAT EXPLAINS the triumph of nationalism over imperialism? The sociologist Ernest Gellner argued that the need for mass literacy gave nationalists an opportunity to spread “the national idea.” But it may be doubted that a world that industrialized under, say, Confucian Chinese or Roman imperial auspices would have been based on sovereign nation-states, merely because of mass literacy and the printing press.

Explanations that attribute the worldwide spread of nationalism to the influence of the West are more persuasive. The immediate cause of postwar decolonization was the shared opposition to European colonial empires of the two most powerful states, the United States and the Soviet Union. And beginning with the American and French Revolutions, the idea of national self-determination, paired with the idea of republican self-government, had undermined monarchical empires, first in Europe and then throughout the world.

In his book The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony claims too much for ancient Israel as an inspiration for modern nationalist movements. But there are deep strains of anti-imperialism and anti-royalism in both of the major traditions that contributed to modern Western civilization: the Judeo-Christian and the Greco-Roman. For example, in 1 Samuel 8, Western Christians could read the prophet Samuel’s warning to the Hebrews when they called for a king:

And he said, “This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you. He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen, and some shall run before his chariots … And he will take your daughters to be confectionaries, and to be cooks, and to be bakers. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.”

With a few exceptions, like the Persian Empire under Cyrus, who restored exiled Jews to their homeland, the reputation of kings and empires in Judaism has not been high, and this skepticism was bequeathed to Christians, even in nominally Christian monarchies and empires.

Europeans and Euro-Americans also inherited a deep suspicion of empire and monarchy from Greek democracy and Roman republicanism. Classically-educated elites read of how the tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton saved Athens from monarchy and how the Romans overthrew the Tarquin kings and established a republic. Indeed, the very word “king”—Rex in Latin and Basileus in Greek—was so tainted in Roman tradition that the emperors preferred the alternate term Imperator, or commander. The idea that the people of Rome had delegated their powers to the emperor was fossilized in the Roman Lex Regia; it was natural for Europeans influenced by the classics to wonder whether the people could revoke the grant.

None of this might have mattered if the Byzantine Empire had regained control of Western Europe and endured, or if there had arisen a centralized neo-Roman empire in the West, in the way that Chinese central government was repeatedly restored under new dynasties. But from Charlemagne to Napoleon and Hitler, all efforts at uniting most or all of Europe under a single empire failed. The historian Walter Scheidel, in his book Escape from Rome, attributes the scientific, technological, and commercial innovativeness of early modern Europe to its disunion and the military and economic and cultural competition among rival states, which might have been squelched in a stagnant continental empire. In the words of Tennyson: “Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.”

While superior technology and organization, forged in centuries of intra-European warfare, allowed the British, French, and other European empires to expand worldwide, these very empires helped to delegitimate empire as a form of government when they promoted movements of national self-determination to undermine their imperial rivals. Imperial, royalist France intervened in the American Revolution to secure national independence for the former British colonists. Imperial Britain in turn benefited from the secession of the Latin American republics from Spain, and during World War I encouraged Arabs to revolt against the Ottoman Empire. During the same war, Imperial Germany encouraged Muslims in British territories to rebel against British imperial authority, while Irish nationalists often viewed the French or German enemy of Britain in favorable terms (on May 3, 1945, the Irish leader Eamon de Valera called on the German ambassador in Ireland to express his condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler). During the Cold War, the United States called for the liberation of the “captive nations” of the Soviet bloc, while the Soviets sponsored nationalists seeking independence from Britain, France, Portugal, and other colonial powers. In the First Indochina War, the United States reluctantly backed the French Empire, but squelched the attempt of the British, French, and Israelis in 1956 to seize the Suez Canal from the radical Nasser regime, which had nationalized it.

While success in national independence movements has often depended on great power sponsorship, most people throughout the ages have preferred to be governed by members of their own tribes rather than foreigners. There are exceptions, to be sure. Local collaborators have sometimes appealed to imperial powers to secure themselves in struggles against rival co-ethnics, and persecuted groups may see a remote empire as less of a threat than nearby bullies. But wars of ethnic independence or failed national uprisings, defending the customs or the very survival of their own ethnocultural nations against outsiders, have been recurrent throughout history, as scholars like Walker Connor, Anthony D. Smith, and Azar Gat have shown. The claim that people everywhere cherish individual rights is dubious. The claim that humans are nepotistic social animals who generally prefer communal autonomy to rule by invading ethnic foreigners is far more plausible.

Any benefits of premodern empires to their populations were incidental to their predatory nature, like the decline of random crime in a neighborhood controlled by the Mafia. While traditional agrarian empires were satisfied with the payment of tribute from conquered provinces, early modern European mercantilist empires systematically sought to choke off the economic progress of their colonies by deliberate strategies of deindustrialization, in order to provide captive markets for the manufacturers in the metropole.

Here are three examples of how the parasitic British empire sought to thwart the industrial development of its colonies in Ireland, North America, and India. The Wool Tax of 1699 protected English textile manufacturers by outlawing the export of woolen goods by English-ruled Ireland and the North American colonies. The Iron Tax of 1750 outlawed colonial iron manufacturing and export from the North American colonies. The truly sinister Salt Tax of 1882 prevented Indians under British rule from collecting or selling salt, an essential part of the Indian diet, to provide a monopoly to British business. Gandhi made the protest against the salt tax a major part of the campaign for Indian independence.

There is no reason for any person today, British or otherwise, to be nostalgic for the British Empire, which was a predatory economic racket from beginning to end. I am not aware of any Indians or Pakistanis who wish for restoration of the British Raj, or any Croats, Serbs, Czechs, or Slovaks who want to be governed today by Habsburg family figureheads of a restored ethnic German-Magyar condominium.

ALL THREE groups of intellectual opponents of the nation-state—the one-world leftists and liberals, the free-market globalists who want the world to be a borderless bazaar, and the nostalgic imperialist Right—routinely deploy the argument ad Hitlerum, claiming that the nation-state invariably tends to promote political repression, war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. According to Colonel Blimps of the imperial Right, if the Habsburg Empire had continued to exist it would have thwarted that Austrian Pan-Germanist, Adolf Hitler. The free-market globalists frequently repeat the falsehood that tariffs and economic competition led to World War II—as though Hitler invaded Europe to sell Volkswagens, rather than to turn Germany into a superpower that could rival the United States. The American and European Left routinely compare border security personnel to the Gestapo, border fencing to the Berlin Wall, and illegal immigrants—most of them ordinary economic migrants in no danger of their lives—to Jews and others fleeing the Nazis.

Despite the abject failure in the real world of alternatives to the nation-state, the intellectual anti-nationalists of Right, Center, and Left have so thoroughly stigmatized nationalism as an idea that showing support for the major legitimating principle of states in the world of the twenty-first century is widely seen as taboo. Books defending the legitimacy of the nation-state tend to be written by thinkers treated as pariahs by bien-pensant American and European professors, mostly journalists in the conservative subculture, like Richard Lowry and Daniel McCarthy in the United States, or Israeli thinkers like Yael Tamir, Yoram Hazony, and Azar Gat, whose arguments at least implicitly justify the existence of a Jewish nation-state in its historic homeland. Ironically, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, many sophisticated American liberals and leftists who would have sneered at flag-waving fellow citizens publicly embraced the flag, national colors, and even the national anthem of Ukraine in a show of solidarity so over the top that it sometimes seemed like sublimated or vicarious nationalism.

Most of the discussion of nationalism and the nation-state in the academy and in the elite media leans on a few clichés. Let us examine them:

Nationalism is outmoded because one hundred percent congruence between ethnocultural nationality and citizenship is rare or nonexistent.

This is just a debating trick, which uses a ridiculously narrow definition of the nation-state to discredit the idea. For a country to be a nation-state, it is not necessary for 100 percent of the population to belong to the majority ethnocultural nation. In most or all nation-states, there is a cultural majority, whose language is the official or de facto language of the state, along with national minorities, which may be “autochthonous” groups that have resided in the territory for centuries or millennia, or, in countries which allow immigration, immigrant diasporas.

Most so-called nationalities are inauthentic creations of modern state propaganda.

This argument has been embraced by Marxists and others on the socialist Left, influenced by Eric Hobsbawm in his 1983 book, The Invention of Tradition, co-authored with Terence Ranger. Hobsbawm followed up with another assault on nation-state, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. The examples of traditions fabricated or exaggerated by nationalist intellectuals in the twentieth century discussed by Hobsbawm or Ranger are real but trivial. Medieval Scots did not run around in tartan kilts and Vikings did not wear horned helmets, but that does not mean there were no medieval Scots or Vikings.

Hobsbawm, a long-time communist, was an intellectual captive of the Marxist dogma of proletarian internationalism. With singularly bad timing for a historian, he predicted that the nation-state was an anachronism on the verge of withering way, shortly before the break-up of the USSR and Yugoslavia into nation-states, the rise of nationalism and populism in Western democracies, and movements seeking independence from supra-national organizations like Brexit.

In addition to quoting the phrase “invented tradition,” anti-nationalist intellectuals recite a few other touchstones to substitute for argument, the way that Biblical fundamentalists cite verses from Scripture as proof texts. One ritual phrase is “imagined communities,” taken from the title of a 1983 book by the sociologist Benedict Anderson, and taken to mean that national communities are “imaginary” and therefore “fake” or “unreal,” something that Anderson did not mean to suggest.

Another much-cited proof text for Western academic anti-nationalists is Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914. Often, Weber is cited by anti-national thinkers as authority for the statement that most French people did not even speak French until the twentieth century and therefore had no conception of a French nation. This is nonsense. Most inhabitants of France may not have spoken standardized French before the advent of mass schooling, but they spoke dialects of French, except for Corsicans, who spoke Italian; Alsatians, who spoke German; and Bretons, who spoke their Celtic dialect at home. And the implication that premodern speakers of different dialects of the French language had no sense of being more related to each other than to Germans or Italians is false. Petrarch and Machiavelli dreamed of the unification of Italy, and Luther addressed “the Christian nobility of the German nation.”

Yet another favorite quote that is deployed out of its context by anti-nationalist intellectuals is Ernest Renan’s phrase in his essay “What is a Nation?” describing the nation as a “daily plebiscite.” Most who cite this snippet apparently believe that Renan meant to argue that nations, in addition to being “imaginary,” are reinvented each day—so that the French, tomorrow, could vote to cease being French.

This is a misreading of Renan, whose argument was that historic nations, although not defined by race or religion or territory, are quite real and deserve to be perpetuated. Here is the phrase in its context: 

A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. It presupposes a past; it is summarized, however, in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life. A nation’s existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual’s existence is a perpetual affirmation of life.

For Renan, a nation which repudiates its tradition and chooses not to continue is the equivalent of an individual who commits suicide. Most of the anti-nationalists who quote Renan’s phrase about the “daily plebiscite” without ever having read Renan would be horrified by his peroration:

Of all cults, the cult of the ancestors is the most legitimate, for the ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past, great men, glory (by which I mean genuine glory), this is the social capital upon which one bases a national idea …The Spartan song—“We are what you were; we will be what you are”—is, in its simplicity, the abridged hymn of every patrie.

Let us turn to the next part of the anti-nationalist catechism:

Even if definable national communities existed in the past, the cultural pluralism caused by immigration and globalization has made national cultural unity impossible.

The scale of cross-border migration in the contemporary world tends to be greatly exaggerated, by open-borders leftists, neoliberals, libertarians, and sometimes by populists who seek to restrict immigration. According to the United Nations, in 2017, as a share of the global population international migrants were only 3.4 percent. In other words, nearly 97 percent of the people on Earth live in the countries in which they were born.

To be sure, migrants make up a larger share of the relatively prosperous Western democracies that attract economic migrants and admit large numbers of refugees. But the immigrant share of the U.S. population is only around 14 percent—roughly the level that it was in the 1900s, before World War I and the restrictive laws of the 1920s that slashed immigration to the United States for half a century. The number is higher in Canada (22 percent) and Australia (28 percent).

The wave of populist support for immigration restriction that powers much of Trumpian conservatism and various right-populist movements in Europe is sometimes based on outright racism or nativist hysteria, like the claim of the fringe Right that America is in danger of being subjected to “sharia law.” But the economic and cultural concerns of opponents of mass immigration are often legitimate. In the case of national economies, unskilled immigrants tend to compete with unskilled natives, competing for jobs and preventing wages from rising in immigrant-heavy sectors. In addition, unlike in the past, today’s low-wage immigrants migrate to advanced welfare states, where their over-representation among tax-consuming government welfare benefits often triggers political backlashes. Mainstream economists try to change the subject by saying that consumers and businesses in general may benefit from low-wage immigration. But this is telling the low-income native workers who are displaced by immigrants, or whose wages are prevented in immigrant-flooded labor markets from rising, that it is necessary for their well-being to be sacrificed so the better-off national majority can save a little money that might otherwise be spent on higher wages for those who make their goods or provide their services.

While populist demagogues exaggerate the threat of the “Great Replacement” of natives by immigrants in Western countries—particularly European Christian natives by Muslim immigrants—whether contemporary waves of immigrants assimilate to national cultures as others did in the past is also a legitimate question. Nineteenth-century fears that Irish-Americans and other Catholic immigrants would seek to overthrow American democracy because of the Vatican’s opposition to liberalism and democracy at the time were unfounded. But the presence of radicalized jihadists among second- and third-generation Muslim communities in the United States and Europe, along with the evident difficulties associated with assimilating Middle Eastern and North African diasporas in Europe in particular, are genuine social challenges that cannot be dismissed as xenophobic hallucinations.

In the United States for the last half-century, mass immigration, mostly from Latin America but increasingly from Asia, has produced toxic effects from its interaction with the bizarre American system of five official races—Blacks, non-Hispanic Whites, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans—and the elaborate system of quotas in college admissions, business subsidies, and other areas built on this unscientific and politically-manipulated taxonomy. Instead of a color-blind society, the United States is an increasingly color-obsessed society in which national government, business, educational, and media elites insist that all institutions must reflect the demography of the country as a whole in their racial makeup. Not only does this lead to widespread, though illegal, discrimination against so-called “non-Hispanic White” Americans in favor of Black Americans and members of the vaguely-defined “Hispanic” or “Latino” category, but it is also leading to escalating discrimination in public education and college admissions against Asian-Americans because they tend to score better on tests than Blacks, Hispanics, and the “non-Hispanic White” statistical majority.

Fears that America’s racial patronage system will act as a disincentive to assimilation by nonwhite immigrants to mainstream American culture, however, appear to be unfounded. The descendants of today’s non-European immigrants tend to replace the language of their immigrant parents with American English as their first or only language at the same rate as the European immigrants of a century ago. Three-quarters of Americans speak American English and no other language. Compare that to Iran, a nation-state where only around half of the population speaks Farsi. Far from being Balkanized along linguistic lines, the United States is an unusually monoglot nation.

In spite of frequent claims that the melting-pot metaphor is irrelevant to today’s more diverse America, the melting pot is bubbling away, erasing differences among races as it once erased differences among British-Americans and other White ethnic groups. Around a third of Hispanics, and a higher number of Asian-Americans, marry out of their group, mostly into the “non-Hispanic White” population, with intermarriage increasing with each generation. Among Black Americans, the historic victims of the most intense prejudice in the United States, 18 percent marry outside of their category and the share grows with each generation. Once-strong opposition to interracial marriage has collapsed. Indeed, President Barack Obama and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the journalist famous for the claim that the “real” founding of American society was in 1619 with the first arrival of African slaves in the British colonies that became the United States, are both half White in ancestry.

RETURNING TO anti-nationalist clichés, let us consider the next one:

Even if nation-states can exist in the modern world, they necessarily discriminate against national minorities.

Opponents of nationalism typically identify all nationalism with illiberal “blood-and-soil” nationalism that excludes people who do not share the same race and religion from the definition of the national majority or from equal rights within a nation-state. But this debating trick ignores the existence of liberal nationalism, which grants a privileged role for the language and some of the culture of the ethnocultural majority nationality, while granting equal rights to all citizens regardless of race or religion and, in some cases, special protections to national minorities.

Most of the new nation-states that have been founded since the end of the Cold War have constitutions that explicitly incorporate liberal nationalist principles. Consider the constitution adopted by Serbia in 2006, following the break-up of Yugoslavia along national lines. The constitution begins by distinguishing ethnic Serbs from other citizens but granting identical rights to all: 

Republic of Serbia is a state of Serbian people and all citizens who live in it, based on the rule of law and social justice, principles of civil democracy, human and minority rights and freedoms, and commitment to European principles and values.

Article 10 makes the Serbian language and Cyrillic script official, and Article 7 provides for a national anthem and flag and coat of arms reflecting the Serbian heritage. Like many national democracies, Serbia has a special relationship to non-citizen Serbs abroad, expressed in Article 13: “The Republic of Serbia shall develop and promote relations of Serbs living abroad with the kin state.” But this is preceded in the same article by the line: “The Republic of Serbia shall protect the rights and interests of its citizens [regardless of ethnicity] abroad” (bracketed words mine).

Article 11 declares that Serbia is a secular state. Article 14 incorporates protections for “autochthonous” non-Serb minorities into the constitution: “The Republic of Serbia shall protect the rights of national minorities. The State shall guarantee special protection to national minorities for the purpose of exercising full equality and preserving their identity.” Similar provisions can be found in the other nation-states that emerged from the partition of Yugoslavia—Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia (Bosnia and Herzegovina was set up as a multi-national state, like Switzerland or Belgium).

Whether these paper guarantees are enforced in the long-term remains to be seen. The point is that they reflect a highly-sophisticated, twenty-first-century version of liberal nationalism that separates cultural nationalism from racial or religious nationalism and seeks to balance the privileged role of one national community in the state with equality for all citizens of any ethnicity and a degree of cultural autonomy for permanent national minorities. Rather than engage with such sophisticated liberal nationalism, contemporary critics of the nation-state prefer to pretend that the typical nation-state is in perpetual danger of degenerating into something akin to Hitler’s Germany.

The next indictment in the prosecution of nationalism is this:

Even liberal, democratic nation-states that respect and protect national minorities are inherently exclusionary and militaristic. 

This is really an argument against territorial states in general, not against nation-states in particular. Any territorial state smaller than a world government is going to have territorial borders. Whatever its principle of legitimacy, the territorial state must defend and police its borders. If it allows immigration, it will need to decide which immigrants to favor and in what amounts. In other words, any territorial state will be exclusionary, in the sense that it excludes some people who like to migrate to it.

As for militarism, any territorial state—even one that repudiates the idea of nationalism for some other principle—must have the means to defend itself militarily, if it is not to depend wholly for its defense on some other territorial state. That means preparing to fight and kill soldiers and citizens of other territorial states, if necessary, in defense of itself or its allies.

Territorial states may rely on professional soldiers or mass conscription, depending on the levels of danger they face from other territorial states. Even states that rely on professionals or mercenaries are likely to promote some sense of patriotism in the population—non-national patriotism, if necessary—to justify the extraction of taxes to pay for the military, if not to justify a draft.

In short, it makes no sense to criticize nation-states for characteristics that they share with all states, particularly if the implied alternatives are world government or anarchy.

Even liberal, democratic nation-states that respect and protect national minorities are too small to deal with the challenges of our time, like climate change and global inequality.

This criticism of the nation-state is the easiest to dismiss. There exists a method by which sovereign states, national or otherwise, can deal with problems common to all of them: diplomacy. Dealing with climate change or some other issue by replacing nearly 200 independent states with a handful of neo-imperial blocs or a world government would be a cure worse than the disease.

NOW WE come to the conclusion that invariably follows when today’s anti-nationalist professors or pundits or politicians make one or more of the arguments that I have listed above:

QED. The nation-state should therefore be rejected as a legitimate form of political organization, in favor of [insert utopian political alternative here].

In the first half of the twentieth century, many idealistic intellectuals hoped that nation-states would soon be superseded by world federalism. Disillusionment in the League of Nations and the United Nations led some to transfer their hopes to the European Union as a model for a future post-national polity. But the EU failed to inspire any similar regional entities elsewhere, and Brexit and internal dissensions have destroyed the appeal of Eurofederalism. 

Another alternative to the modern nation-state is what the German philosopher Juergen Habermas calls “constitutional patriotism.” Instead of sharing a common majority language, culture, and traditions, the inhabitants of a territory would have nothing in common except a political creed defined by support for a liberal and democratic constitution. Thinkers of this school like to distinguish not only racial but also inclusive cultural nationalism (bad) from cultural-content-free patriotism (good), unaware, perhaps, that patriotism literally means “Fatherlandism.”

What would the adoption of constitutional or creedal patriotism mean in practice? Would nation-states that are transformed into post-national constitution-states need to abandon the language of the national majority? Should Poland—quite plainly, the land of the Poles—reject Polish and adopt Esperanto as the state language?

What if multiple post-national territorial states share not only the same burning zeal for liberal democracy, but also identical institutions? Does that make them branches or franchises of a single worldwide liberal democratic constitution-state? Should they rename themselves Creedal Democracy 1 (North America), Creedal Democracy 2 (Africa), and Creedal Democracy 3 (Asia)?

If to be an American is to believe in the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, does that mean that any human being on earth who believes in those ideals can demand to become a naturalized citizen of the United States? What about Americans who reject the Lockean liberal ideals of the Declaration of Independence—American Marxists, say, or American communitarian conservatives? Should they be tried as apostates from the civic-patriotic creed, stripped of citizenship in Creedal America, and deported?

Some claim that, while the nation-state may be legitimate elsewhere, the United States was unique in being founded as a universal constitution-state with no national majority. This betrays a deep ignorance of American history. Modern American Fourth of July rhetoric to the contrary, from the first naturalization act of 1789, which limited naturalized citizenship to “free white persons,” to the immigration reform of 1965, U.S. immigration policy was designed to create and preserve a White racial majority in the United States. White immigrants, moreover, were pressured to assimilate to Anglo-American Protestant culture, in ways both subtle (Fitzgerald’s German-American character Jay Gatz changing his name to Gatsby in order to advance in East Coast society) and crude (state laws banning government aid to Catholic schools and other state laws banning instruction in the German language).

In Federalist No. 2, writing under the pseudonym of “Publius,” John Jay, who later was appointed the first chief justice of the United States by President George Washington, identified the American people with the Anglo-American Protestant settler majority:

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

The equation of the American people with British or European settlers in the thirteen colonies was the view of most, if not all, the Founders. For the Great Seal of the United States, Thomas Jefferson submitted a design showing Moses leading the Hebrews out of Egypt on one side—and, on the other, Hengist and Horsa, Germanic barbarian chieftains in the Dark Ages, leading the supposed Anglo-Saxon ancestors of the American people out into the British Isles. Benjamin Franklin’s design for the Great Seal was more diverse, including the national symbols of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, and Holland—“the Countries from which these states have been peopled”—while excluding Jews, Blacks, and Native Americans. As late as 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge wrote in Good Housekeeping: “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.” Even some opponents of slavery like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, and the Black nationalist Martin Delany at times supported the colonization of freed Blacks abroad, on the theory that they could never be equal citizens in the United States, if only because of White majority prejudice. The civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, which abolished racial discrimination in domestic law and immigration policy, was not a realization of the ideals of America’s Founders, but a revolutionary—and long overdue—repudiation of their White racial nationalism.

As we have seen, in modern liberal nationalism common ancestry—“race”—can be rejected as a criterion of membership, but common language and culture remain to define members of a national cultural majority in a nation-state. Unfortunately, there is no word in general usage for the large majority of Americans of all races and religions who share the same broad culture and speak a dialect of American English as their native language. The term “Anglomorph” has been adopted for this concept in the Australian context. If American English as a person’s first language is the criterion, then three-quarters or more of U.S. citizens—including most so-called “non-Hispanic whites,” nearly all Black Americans, and a growing number of Hispanic and Asian-Americans—belong today to the Anglomorph majority, even if the federal government insists on separating citizens from their fellow Anglomorph-Americans and lumping them together as individuals with unassimilated immigrants and foreign nationals of other arbitrarily-defined “races.”

IN HIS recent book After Nationalism: Being American in an Age of Division, Samuel Goldman, a professor of political science at George Washington University, argues that Americans have a choice of three identities: “covenant, crucible, and creed.” “Covenant” is his term for what, following the distinguished constitutional theorist Sanford Levinson, he also calls the “Publius 2” theory of American identity, referring to John Jay’s reference to “one united people” in The Federalist.

To his credit, Goldman does not dismiss this as inherently racist, pointing out that the version of “Anglo-Protestant” identity defended by Samuel P. Huntington in his book Who Are We? is defined by culture and not by race or even religion. From what might be called an anthropological perspective, the Anglomorph nationalities of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other, smaller countries are cultural offshoots of Britain, in the same way that the nations of Latin America are offshoots of Spain or Portugal. In all of these former European settler states, the language and culture of the multiracial/mixed-race majority are that of the local settler majorities of the former empire, modified by indigenous and immigrant influences and generations of separate post-colonial development.

What Goldman calls the “crucible” is the theory that the amalgamation of different groups in a “melting pot” has produced a new, unique national identity. To date, however, the one-way assimilation of non-British immigrants to what I am calling Anglomorph culture has tended to prevail over the “crucible” or melting pot. Americans of German and Irish descent outnumber Americans of English descent, but only residual trace elements of German and Irish culture remain in our predominantly-British common culture—Christmas trees, Oktoberfest in a few places, and St. Patrick’s Day.

Goldman suggests that only coercive measures and conformist pressure during the world wars and the Cold War, of a kind unlikely to be repeated in the United States, explain the dissolution of the older European immigrant diaspora cultures in the United States. But the descendants of Mexican immigrants today assimilate and marry outside of their group at the same rate as European immigrants in the past, in spite of the official celebration of diversity and the material benefits of being identified as nonwhite in the U.S. racial spoils system. The rate of intermarriage among Black American descendants of slaves, who have shared the Anglomorph culture for centuries, is rising as well. Only self-segregated minorities in which religious taboos discourage exogamy, like the German-speaking Amish, may be able to resist absorption into the multiracial Anglomorph majority.

Defending a “creedal” conception of identity, Goldman seeks to synthesize American constitutional patriotism with pluralism, among whose defenders he lists me. But this confuses two different things. The tradition of institutional or social pluralism—associated with Catholic and Calvinist social thought, modern English pluralism, and the secular French republican pluralism of Durkheim and Duguit, as well as with American thinkers like Christopher Lasch and Robert Nisbet—seeks a “third way” between atomized individualist liberalism and collectivism, in which the state reigns but does not rule over self-governing communities. In pluralist thought, the most important communities are occupational, like trade unions, religious, and sometimes local.

Pluralism is neutral with respect to the question of whether the citizens in a pluralist society share a common national language and culture or not. Pluralist institutions like occupational representation that supplements territorial political voting can work in explicitly binational states like Canada or Belgium, or explicitly multinational states like Switzerland. But institutional pluralism is equally possible and desirable in highly homogeneous nation-states like Japan or Austria. So there is no necessary correlation between institutional pluralism and ethnocultural pluralism. And there is unlikely to be one in the United States, as long as most immigrants of all backgrounds continue to assimilate voluntarily to the Anglomorph majority culture and to marry outside of immigrant diasporas that tend to dwindle over time, with the exception of small, self-segregated sectarian communities.

IN ANY event, a definition of American identity as a common commitment to abstract universal ideals and governing institutions on the part of groups, as distinct from individuals, is unlikely to appeal to anyone other than a few academics and journalists and career ethnic activists. Most Americans take it for granted that there is an American people or nation with its own particular culture and traditions, and that the human race in the world as a whole is divided among culturally distinct peoples or nations, who should be able to choose their leaders rather than be ruled against their wishes by foreigners. And they are right.

Michael Lind is a professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, a columnist for Tablet, and a fellow at New America. He is the author of The New Class War (2020) and The American Way of Strategy (2006).

Image: Wikimedia Commons.