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.
Further:
Hazony uses this conflation to good effect to introduce another serious confusion that has vexed his National Conservatism project ever since: actual nationalists. By combining the two concepts into one, he argues, for example, that what Hitler did in National Socialist Germany was not, in fact, nationalist at all (never mind Hitler using no word more often to describe himself) because Hitler’s project was fundamentally imperialist (did not respect Westphalian sovereignty). It unambiguously did, however, hold the nation as the principal object of political loyalty and legitimacy while also holding himself up as its symbolic embodiment and encoding it in racialist Volkisch definition.
I see this confusion a lot now in the post-liberal, national conservative, etc., and adjacent crowds. They have accepted that Westphalian sovereignty isn’t just a crucial component but the primary component of what defines nationalism, after which they make all kinds of mistakes and excuse and defend all kinds of errors. Just because the Hebrew Bible commands Israel to maintain something like Westphalian sovereignty as a national principle and because Hazony leverages this fact to confuse the definition of a clear word in order to engineer a movement does not mean that it’s actually correct, even though ancient Israel predates the Treaty of Westphal and the specific modern concept being invoked.
Thank you for your attention to this matter; I hope it clears up some serious confusion that’s floating around and commonplace out there!
It goes further than mere confusion on ole’ Yoram’s part. His definitions not only conflate Westphalian-style sovereignty but conflates “imperialism” with Mondialism which posits a global ruling body. It is a false dilemma fallacy that declares that either which way you the individual are the extension of a collective with the choice being either you own smaller collective that you are familiar with or a single huge collective that would impose something different upon you.
To people who fear the normalcy they are used to being replaced, it’s easy to portray it as an attack of your loving collective against a single evil force within to replace it. In reality, Yoram’s so-called “nationalism” is just one of the many similar European cerebral onanistic ideologies that sprouted up on the European continent in the past couple of centuries or so. In essence, it is a globalist foreign idea of foreign people from a foreign land without appreciable shared history for centuries now, masquerading as American nationalism.
What Yoram’s philosophy is one of a fantasy world where nations, the originating unit of society, all respect each other under a global ideology. It is, in effect, philosophical anarchy with the collective replacing the individual! It’s less “national conservatism” and more “national anarchism”. It also shares much sentiment with a certain Italian philosophy, in that respect. In reality, powers, be they Westphalian-style sovereignties, ethno-nationalists, &c. all look out for their own interests above the interests of other sovereignties, nationalities, &c., even at the expense of the others.
You can not create a world where all collective nations act according to a philosophy of peace and mutual respect than you can create an anarchist country where all individuals act according to a philosophy of peace and mutual understanding without some higher overarching organizing element.
Ironically, under Yoram’s own philosophical definitions, “nationalism” is “imperialism” if it is to work. Without the later, the former becomes a delusional fantasy.
