by Yael Tamir
alone. This is where nationalism comes into play, endowing the
random process of border drawing with a purpose, providing
reasons for its ongoing existence.
Historically, borders were determined in different ways. In a
few cases national borders are natural ones; in most instances
they are a result of wars and conquests, purchases, marriages, and
treaties. All of these processes are less acceptable as a basis of
legitimacy in modern times. It is difficult to imagine that in the
twenty- first century one could sell or hand over a country as
alimony. Excluding such procedures, democratic states must seek
legitimacy in national self- determination and self- rule. We are
then back to square one, searching for a proper definition of a
political self or a nation.
The state and the nation chose each other as partners because:
“In the long freedom wars liberalism has won a thousand impor-
tant battles, securing first the individual and his rights, and then
the right of others long excluded from liberty’s fruits. But the
costs of victory are now being paid: the price of liberal reliance
on contract and consent has been the impoverishment of its poli-
tics.”4 Negative procedural politics can provide guidelines for
fair political action, yet these politics can neither sketch the
boundaries of a political entity nor endow a political system with
meaning. Nationalism fulfills these tasks in a modern, secular
manner. As we shall see, it is a flexible and permissive provider
adjusting itself to the needs of the people as well as to those of
the state. Nationalism endows the state with intimate feelings
linking the past, the present, and the future. The fact that indi-
viduals feel they are part of a continuous entity induces in them
mutual dependencies and responsibilities and invigorates the
will to jointly pursue common ends. Consequently, individuals
are likely to develop an entire network of reciprocal attachments,
40 • Chapter
5
expectations, and obligations. When such a sense of belonging
is associated with the state, political institutions turn from bu-
reaucratic entities into an extended family, although the kinship
ties in question are highly metaphorical, and though the state
is a contingent historical product, it “feels like part of the order
of nature; it links individual and community, past and present;
it gives to cold, impersonal structures an aura of warm, intimate
togetherness.”5
With the help of nationalism, states turn into homelands—
places one is affiliated with due to love and fate rather than due
to instrumental considerations. The traditional marriage vows
exchanged before building a private home, promising eternity
rather than probability, reflect the kind of dedication states would
like their citizens to develop: “From this day forward, for better,
for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till
death do us part.” No patriot could have phrased it more
accurately.
Part II
Love and Marriage:
The Virtues of Nationalism
One does not fall in love with a woman or enter the womb of a
church, as a result of logical persuasion. Reason may defend an act
of faith— but only after the act has been committed, and the man
committed to the act. . . . A faith is not acquired; it grows like a
tree. Its crown points to the sky; its roots grow downwards into
the past and are nourished by the dark sap of the ancestral humus.
Arthur Koestler, The God That Failed
6
Living beyond Our
Psychological Means
Nationalism entered the modern world through a democratic
door and an economic corridor, bringing with it a generous
alimony: a bottom- up justification for the formation of the
modern nation- state. The voyage from Nutopia to the real world
suggests that borderless states are dystopian; in order to be
democratic and promote justice, states must depend on a clear
definition of territory and membership. The need for borders and
demarcation is grounded not only in statism, it also touches a
very personal chord. In an ever- changing world it helps individu-
als define their identity, providing them with interpretive tools
to decipher reality and make sense of their daily actions.
Categorization is deeply grounded in human psychology— it
is a necessary tool of self- definition. The term human is a far too
thin mode of delineation. Individuals need to rely on “thick
identities” to make their lives meaningful. It is therefore appro-
priate to repeat today, more than two hundred years after they
were written, the iconic words of the French intellectual
Joseph de Maistre: “I have seen, in my times, Frenchmen, Italian,
and Russians. I even know due to Montesquieu, that one may
be a Persian; but as for Man I have never met in my life; if he
exists, it is without my knowledge.”1
44 • Chapter
6
This is not to say that there are no common human features;
we have more in common with members of our species (as wel
as with other species) than we care to admit. Our individuality,
which makes us unique, is formed through a series of exchanges.
The features of modern individualism cannot be developed in
solitude. Asked to choose an animal he identifies with, Isaiah
Berlin said: “A penguin, because penguins live in colonies, they
cannot survive on their own.” This was his way of saying some-
thing profound about himself and about humanity. Humans may
be able to survive on their own, yet even the loneliest of literary
figures, Robinson Crusoe, had to find Friday to converse with
and share the knowledge he had acquired back home— without
the ability to converse he would have lost a significant part of
his humanity.
It may be assumed that personal autonomy is dependent on
our ability to free ourselves from the shackles of belonging, yet
freedom is hollow outside of a meaning- providing system.2 For
our choices to be valuable they must have a cultural and norma-
tive context. Many of our most personal decisions— the life
plan we make, the career we embark on, the family we raise (or
choose not to raise)— reflect social, cultural, and religious norms.
Modern individuals who wish to shape their life autonomously
must first internalize a set of norms and behaviors that would
guide their action. The challenge then is to develop social inter-
actions that enrich and liberate the self rather than impoverish
and restrain it.3
Like morality, identity is a sphere in which no one can be
passive. In every choice one makes one must decide whether to
be “a contributing partner” or a “free rider”; the former acts
within a cultural framework and contributes to its ability to
grow and flourish, and the latter flirts with different options
Our Psychological Means • 45
other individuals shape, e
njoying their efforts to keep such op-
tions viable. Identity thus carries not only the mark of our an-
cestors and contemporaries but also of our own (free) choices.
Freedom and determinism keep interacting in our lives, making
us who we are.
We define our identity against the background of those things
that matter to us. Cultural membership is “the context within
which we choose our ends, and come to see their value, and this
is a precondition . . . of the sense that one’s ends are worth pur-
suing.”4 Our social and cultural context provides the contours
within which choice becomes essential rather than arbitrary, thus
transforming freedom into autonomy. Hence, “to bracket out
history, nature, society, demands of solidarity, everything but
what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates
for what matters.”5
The need to belong to a cultural community, then, is not
merely an expression of a psychological craving to live in a known
environment and be part of a community to which we can de-
velop feelings of attachment. It is an epistemological need for
systems of interpretation that will allow us to understand the
world and choose a way of life as well as a creative need for means
of interpretation, exchange, and expression.
Like many other goods the importance of feeling at ease with
one’s identity is highlighted by its absence. Living in a commu-
nity that supports our identity, we may not be aware of the im-
portance of what it offers, but when we find ourselves in an alien
environment, forced to deny or disguise our identity, we experi-
ence pain and anxiety. In a beautiful, poetic paragraph Berlin
described the state of mind of those individuals who reject their
identity and are forced to set out in search of a new one. They
are, he writes:
46 • Chapter
6
betwixt and between, unmoored from one bank without reaching
the other, tantalized but incapable of yielding, complicated,
somewhat tormented figures . . . liable to waves of self- pity, aggres-
sive arrogance, exaggerated pride in those very attributes which
divided them from their fellows; with alternating bouts of self-
contempt and self- hatred, feeling themselves to be objects of scorn
or antipathy to those very members of the society by whom they
most wish to be recognized and respected . . . it is a well- known
neurosis in an age of nationalism in which self- identification with
a dominant group becomes supremely important, but, for some
individuals, abnormally difficult.6
This is why individuals desire to secure for themselves not
only a set of Mil ian liberties but also recognition as members
of particular groups and affirmation of the uniqueness and wor-
thiness of such groups. Most of all they demand:
recognition (of their class or nation, or color or race) as an inde-
pendent source of human activity, as an entity with a will of its
own, intending to act in accordance with it (whether it is good or
legitimate or not), and not to be ruled, educated, guided, with
however light a hand, as being not quite fully human and therefore
not quite fully free.7
At the heart of modern politics, Berlin concluded, lies “a great
cry for recognition on the part of both individuals and groups
and in our own day, of professions and classes, nations and
races.”8 Not only do individuals see their personal freedom as
dependent on their group’s ability to be self- governing, they also
see their own self- esteem as closely linked to that of their group.
Consequently, they regard offenses and humiliations of their
group as a personal injury and take pride and satisfaction in the
group’s success and prosperity.
Our Psychological Means • 47
A significant aspect of maintaining a positive self- esteem is
making comparisons that favor the in- group over the out- group.
Identity biases perceptions; members of the in- group are seen
as bearers of positive values and qualities while members of
the out- group are seen as carriers of negative ones. Group
membership also biases memory so that “the good actions of
the in- group are better- remembered than the bad, and for the
out- group, the bad are better- remembered than the good.”9 As
positive self- esteem is dependent on an appraisal of both the
in- group and the out- group, it is impossible to separate the
costs and benefits of membership. A large number of studies led
Dominic Abrams and Michael Hogg to formulate “the self-
esteem hypothesis” according to which “inter- group discrimina-
tion is believed to be at least partly motivated by the individual’s
desire to achieve and maintain positive self- esteem.”10
Many have hoped that the need to belong to a nation, or any
other particular group, is an expression of a transient develop-
mental stage humanity will grow out of. That group membership
will be replaced with a global one, thus abolishing particularism,
ethnocentrism, group favoritism, and stereotyping, preparing the
ground for global coexistence.
In the wake of World War I, traumatized by the experiences
of the war and the loss of young lives, leading intellectuals enter-
tained the idea of cosmopolitanism. Influenced by Kant’s
“Perpetual Peace” and the moral teaching of the Enlightenment,
they were seeking a rational formula that would allow them to
establish a human brotherhood that would end all wars. Albert
Einstein was among these intellectuals; in his reflections on the
causes of war he approached Sigmund Freud and asked him to
explain why war persists. Freud’s answer expresses skepticism
about the healing power of rationality. The ideal condition of
things, he wrote,
48 • Chapter
6
would be a community of men who had subordinated their instinc-
tual life to the dictatorship of reason. Nothing else could unite
men so completely and so tenaciously, even if there were no emo-
tional ties between them. But in all probability this is a Utopian
expectation.11
Compelling individuals to act continually in accordance
with axioms that contradict their instinctual inclinations, he
concludes, is asking them “to live, psychologically speaking,
beyond their means.”12 The great American statesman James
Madison was therefore right when stating that “the latent causes
of fraction are sown in the nature of Man.”13
Some, like Kenneth Minogue, argue that nationalism is to be
understood “as distortions of reality which allow men to cope
with situations which they might otherwise find unbearable.”14
Minogue is right; we embrace ideologies because they make our
life bearable and because other options have far more damaging
consequences. As the argument will evolve, it will become clear
why, despite being fabricated, nationalism helps individuals to
cope with the modern world, living active and meaningful lives.
> If the behavioral and attitudinal trends cosmopolitans would
like to eliminate are deeply inherited in human nature and not
the outcome of nationalism, and if they evolve in response to a
set of basic needs as old as humanity itself, then it is quite safe
to predict that if nationalism were to sink into oblivion, other
groups would be formed, allowing people to enjoy a sense of
belonging and placing particular affiliations in conflict with uni-
versal ones. Humanity has always been divided into communities
marked by one set of features or another: families, vil ages, tribes,
localities, nations, states as well as religions, races, ethnicities,
genders, classes, and ideologies. Which of these communities has
a more negative effect on human behavior?
Our Psychological Means • 49
History tells us that people are ready to kill and die in the
name of all of these groups. In recent centuries nationalism has
played a major role in evoking hateful and bel igerent attitudes,
yet such actions could be evoked by each and every one of the
abovementioned groups; from Helen of Troy to Romeo and
Juliet we have ample proof that even love, the most noble feeling
of all, can turn deadly. If subordinating human judgments to pure
reason is beyond human means, learning to weigh the dictate
of reason against the emotional and moral bias grounded in
membership must be our educational and political target.
Social psychology teaches us that membership in a group nec-
essarily leads individuals to express in- group favoritism, but
actual dislike or hostility toward the out- group is closely related
to the feeling of being subject to “an imposed, unjust distribu-
tion of resources.”15 Felt injustice or perceived unfair treatment
is a central organizing concept in discussions of intergroup
conflict:
Existing theory and research in social psychology suggests that
judgments of injustice provide the cognitive structure and dynamic
motivational force that justifies conflictual inter- group behavior. . . .
Perception of injustice of the actions of the out- group lead to
protest, retaliation, aggression, and an increase in prejudice. In
general, violation of expectations of how rewards should be handed
out or how decisions are made (or conflict handled) are the main
