National Solidarity at the End of the Twentieth Century: Reflections on the United States and Liberal Nationalism

Abstract

Most things of value cost something. Valuable national solidarities cost some of authority that subnational and transnational communities might otherwise exercise. When coercive power of federal government was employed in 1960s to defend civil rights of black Americans, authority of local white communities in South was diminished in interest of extending nation's rules to new social terrain. Coercion is obviously a large part of story of American belonging. Any nation is, of course, a structure of power. Gary Gerstle's Liberty, Coercion, and Making of Americans reminds us of these truths. Nationalism, writes Gerstle, demands that boundaries against outsiders be drawn, that a dominant national culture be created or reinvigorated, and that internal and external opponents of national project be subdued, nationalized, vanquished, and even excluded or expelled. These actions constitute the nasty work that building a national community entails. Some recent scholarship unwisely ignores this nastiness, according to Gerstle, and thereby yields mistaken impression that building of American national community is altogether or overwhelmingly a story of liberation and voluntarism.1 Questions abound. How inevitable are particular nationalist dynamics to which Gerstle calls attention? What differences between specific national solidarities follow from differing historical contexts in which they have developed? What actions in relation to national solidarities are rightly called nasty? What examples of coercion are relevant to a historical understanding of building, maintaining, and critical reconstruction of national community of United States? Might there be costs to diminution, amid triumphs of global capitalism and ethnoreligious particularism, of measure of commitment to one another that citizens of United States are now able to muster? What does history of United States suggest concerning kind of national solidarity to