The Virtue of Nationalism.

• Author: Mingardi, Alberto
• Position: Book review

The Virtue of Nationalism

Yoram Hazony

New York: Basic Books, 2018, 304 pp.

In his eloquent and ambitious defense of the virtues of nationalism, Yoram Hazony has a clear political target: the "emerging liberal construction" that opposes the idea that nations should have their "unique laws, traditions, and policies." Hazony wants to make nationalism great again, so to speak, and he considers the global elite unduly biased against it. By his account, the self-absorbed cosmopolitan advocates of effacing national diversities and specificities are disdainful of the habits and affections of localism, and thus lack understanding of history and peoples.

While he is right to be infuriated by the hypocrisy of contemporary elites, he distorts European history to persuade the reader of his concept of nationalism. And that concept seems to be a particular, narrowly defined one that we might call pluralism. His argument, essentially, is that a world of nations is a world where nations accept each one's right to be different. Alas, we know that this was not always the case--when the principle of nationality occupies center stage, it tends to have little tolerance for any other ideal. Nationalism tends to become an obsession for its followers and to claim the monopoly of good in the public sphere.

An Israeli, Hazony is a man of his circumstances, and sometimes proudly so. He is understandably frustrated by "the international efforts to smear Israel, to corner Israel, to delegitimize Israel and drive it from the family of nations." His national loyalty pervades the book and, although his sense of belonging is laudable, it leads him to make arguments that are tendentious to the point of being illogical.

Hazony sees liberalism as an international approach to politics, one that plays with gimmicks such as the idea of a universal human nature to foster supra-national government. This latter can be seen as anti-democratic: democracy requires people who speak one language, a lasting legacy of nationalism. It is not by chance that universal franchise is alien to international agencies--they are at best technocracies, whose actions reflect the ideology of a tiny minority rather than the wisdom of the people at large. Hazony thus defends nationalism as the broad political worldview to which Israel, England, and the United States now adhere, in contrast to the United Nations or the European Union.

Could such an understanding of the great game of power in the contemporary world, with advocates of international bodies opposing champions of nations, be a good narrative for European history at large? The Virtue of Nationalism is basically predicated on such an attempt.

For Hazony, the advent of Protestantism in Europe in the 16th century allowed the creation of "national laboratories for developing and testing the institutions and freedoms we now associate with the West." He sees institutional pluralism and the lack of a strong, leveling central power as an offspring of the Treaty of Westphalia rather than...