Three Objections to Constitutional Patriotism

Abstract

As is well known, constitutional patriotism designates the idea that political attachment ought to centre on the norms, the values, and, more indirectly, the procedures of a liberal-democratic constitution. Put differently, allegiance and attachment are not owed primarily to a national culture, as liberal nationalists have claimed, or to “to the worldwide community of human beings,” as for instance Martha Nussbaum’s conception of cosmopolitanism has it.1 As is less well known, the concept of constitutional patriotism has enjoyed very varying fortunes. It was born in postwar divided Germany and has often been seen as a poor substitute for a ‘proper’ national identity – a substitute that was to become redundant after the country’s unification. Yet the concept experienced a major renaissance in the 1990s when observers both inside and outside Germany began to view it as a normatively attractive form of civic attachment for increasingly multicultural societies; in recent years, it has also been advanced as a way of conceptualizing “civic identification” at the supranational level, with some scholars explicitly calling for a “European constitutional patriotism.”2 Finally, constitutional patriotism has even been advocated as a form of belonging in deeply divided, postwar societies; for instance, the head of Bosnian Muslims has explicitly called for a pan-Bosnian constitutional patriotism.3 I will not address in this essay the political prospects of constitutional patriotism; and in fact I will also not address what I take it to be the most common objection to the concept of constitutional patriotism: that it is somehow too “abstract” or, as a particularly inappropriate metaphor has it, too “bloodless.” Others (and I, for that matter) have addressed this essentially moral-psychological objection to the very idea of an attachment to universalist, democratic principles elsewhere.4 Rather, I seek to deal with three less common objections that do not in principle doubt the motivational power of patriotism, but rather converge on the claim that constitutional patriotism necessarily tends to become illiberal, irrespective of the universalist, democratic norms and values that are generally said to constitute its core. Put differently: constitutional patriotism might not be able to avoid the normative and practical pitfalls that tend to be associated with nationalism and that in fact animate the criticisms of nationalism advanced by advocates of constitutional patriotism themselves.