Why Nationalism.

• Author: Whaples, Robert M.

* Why Nationalism

By Yael Tamir

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Pp. xvi, 205. $24.95 hardcover.

* The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity

By Kwame Anthony Appiah

New York: Norton, 2018.

Pp. xvi, 256. $19 hardcover.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono asked us to

Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion, too. Imagine all the people living life in peace. And they hoped that someday we would join them, and "the world will be as one."

In Why Nations, Yael Tamir--president of the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Israel, former member and minister in the Knesset, and adjunct professor at Oxford--directly addresses Lennon and Ono's challenge. She forcefully rejects this Utopian fantasy, arguing that a world without true nations would instead be dystopian. In The Lies That Bind, Kwame Anthony Appiah--professor of philosophy and law at New York University--is much more sympathetic to Lennon and Ono but ultimately concedes that the liberal state's "true anthem" is an earlier song by Lennon and Paul McCartney, "We Can Work It Out" (p. 103).

Tamir sees immense creative potential in nationalism and warns that because it is not going away, the "tragedy" would be "if nationalism ... were left in the hands of extremists" (p. 181). Rather, because "[nationalism is a too powerful and flexible tool to be given up" (p. 182), she wants to wield it to rebuild unity, to make the state great again so that it can solve the problems that the drift from nationalism to globalism has unleashed. Despite this overreaching agenda, the problems addressed in Why Nationalism are worthy of consideration.

The main issue, as Tamir sees it, is that elites around the world have abandoned nationalism for globalism. Today's cosmopolitan elites wish to become nationless "citizens of the world." This trend has eroded the national fabric and left a generation suffering from social alienation. Both the Left and the Right are to blame, according to Tamir. "Right-wing ideologists" (p. 93), on the one hand, have convinced the state to withdraw from the public sphere, eviscerating the welfare state, leaving those vulnerable from economic globalization to swim or sink on their own. The elites of the Left, on the other hand, despise these victims--especially less-educated, working-class whites, those who live in the angry, reactionary, frustrated American heartland. The elephant in the room is the increasingly well-known "elephant" graph by Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic (see Homi Khara and Brina Seidel, "What's Happening to the World Income Distribution: The Elephant Chart Revisited," Brookings Institution, April 2, 2018, at https://www.brookings.edu/research/ whats-happening-to-the-world-income-distribution-the-elephaiit-chart-revisited/), which she interprets as showing that the middle class and working class of rich countries such as the United States have been "swept ... away" by the "tsunami" (p. 112) of economic globalization, thanks to neoliberals of the Right. The hyena in the room is those on the left who yap with glee and then force these lost souls to apologize for privileges they don't have. Because this liberal disdain is deep and mean and painful, she shocks her progressive friends by calling Donald Trump's victory (perhaps the pinnacle of today's nationalist backlash) a "democratic victory" rather than a "democratic crisis" (p. 135).

Globalism won't do, says Tamir. Left, Right, and center must return to the idea of nationalism to put things right. In soaring tones, Tamir summarizes her argument this way:

[T]hough the nation-state's powers have been eroded, its solidarity worn, its distributive powers limited, and cultural homogeneity challenged, the theoretical inability to define an alternative set of agreed-on, applicable moral and political principles leaves the nation-state the only viable option.... Globalism failed to replace nationalism because it couldn't offer a political agenda that meets the most basic needs of modern individuals: the desire to be autonomous and self-governing agents, the will to live a meaningful life that stretches beyond the self, the need to belong, the desire to be part of a creative community, to feel special, find a place in the chain of being, and to enjoy a sense (or the illusion) of stability and cross-generational continuity, (p. 155) The primary ingredient in Tamir's nationalist recipe for reform is statism. Nationalism endows "the random process of border drawing with a purpose." It "endows the state with an intimate feeling linking the past, the present, and...