Nationalism and Democracy

Abstract

Proponents of liberal nationalism argue that the promotion of national sentiment and the protection of a national context are crucial to the realisation of liberal goals and practices (Kymlicka, 1995; 2001; Miller, 1995; 2000; Tamir, 1993). In the absence of a shared national context, individuals would lack an appropriate range of meaningful options in making choices concerning their life plans. Further, in a variant of the approach, which I will term ‘democratic nationalism’, national sentiment is said to be necessary to shared rule. It is argued that, without it, individuals would be unwilling to be bound by collective decisionmaking or to contribute to a welfare state. In this chapter, I set out to examine the democratic nationalist thesis, and specifically David Miller’s seminal claim that democracy and welfare distribution is dependent on a shared national context (Miller, 1995, pp. 96–8; 2000, pp. 31–3).KeywordsEuropean UnionNational IdentityDemocratic LegitimacyDemocratic PracticeLiberal MoralityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.