Redefining terms is nothing new for the Left, even when they masquerade as the Right. There are far fewer examples of this than “nationalism” as purported by “National Conservatives” and specifically a confused Yoram Hazony. Some additional thoughts on Hazony’s confusion later, but first, a disambiguation of the Hazony’s conflation between Westphalian-style sovereignty and nationalism by James Lindsay, quoted in full below due to Twitter’s/X’s embed limitations.
I want to address a sneaky bit of confusion that has been introduced into the lexicon and discourse by the National Conservatism movement, namely on the definition of “nationalism.”
The best I can tell without doing any kind of deep dive into the issue is that this widespread confusion can largely be attributed to Yoram Hazony and his book The Virtue of Nationalism and his National Conservatism movement.
Hazony defines nationalism by mixing two ideas, one of which is actually nationalism. They are two ideas, though, not one.
His primary definition for nationalism is as a belief that nations should be able to exist, have defined borders, be sovereign, have some expectation or entitlement to international non-interference, and to conduct their business between nations through treaties, diplomacy, and so on, perhaps including war. He holds that this is right and virtuous in ways in his book, as the title indicates. The problem is that this is not nationalism.
The other definition of nationalism, which he also defends as virtuous (indeed, more), is that the nation itself is a principal and central political object that unites a people through common culture, common language (probably), common land (again, probably), common historicity, common tradition, common futurity, etc., and in particular common religion as a backbone (which multiplies assumptions). That is, nationalism holds that the nation, as some such, is regarded as the principal object of political loyalty and legitimacy. This is the actual definition of nationalism, and you can read his argument on its virtues for yourself; I’m not here to litigate that in this post.
The first thing refers to something well defined and well understood that is related to nations, but that thing is Westphalian sovereignty. That Hazony grounds the concept in a far older idea of national form (Israel) and uses that older concept as the bridge that blends the two definitions is not particularly relevant to the fact that “nationalism” does not mean believing in Westphalian sovereignty. It is something different, not a first or second component of a compound definition.
