ナショナリズムは肌の色や出身とは関係ない、と

Saturday, January 21, 2017
Lies of the Left: "White Nationalism"
via Milo

左翼が白人ナショナリズム云々といっているが、そんなものはないんだ、と。

Defining nationalism

Nationalism, properly speaking, has nothing to do with race as biologically defined, never mind with something so literally superficial as skin color. As Roger Scruton has limpidly argued, it is a way of answering the questions "to what do we belong, and what defines our loyalties and commitments" without adverting to "a shared religious obedience, still less in bonds of tribe and kinship."

Nationalism defines "us" through "the things that we share with our fellow citizens, and in particular in those things that serve to sustain the rule of law and the consensual forms of politics."

What are these things that "we" share? To start with, Scruton says: territory. "We believe ourselves to inhabit a shared territory, defined by law, and we believe that territory to be ours, the place where we are, and where our children will be in turn. Even if we came here from somewhere else, that does not alter the fact that we are committed to this territory, and define our identity--at least in part--in terms of it."

From this perspective, it is as nonsensical to talk about "global citizenship" as it is to claim that democracy can or should exist without national borders. In Scruton's words: "Democracy needs boundaries, and boundaries need the nation state. All the ways in which people come to define their identity in terms of the place where they belong have a part to play in cementing the sense of nationhood."

Second, albeit closely tied to territory, are the history and customs according to which a particular territory has been settled. These customs may include, but do not need to include, religious ceremonies; secular rituals observed in common are equally potent, as are stories about how the territory was settled.


These stories, as Scruton notes, tend to be of three kinds: tales of glory, tales of sacrifice, and tales of emancipation. But they change according to who thinks of themselves as we: we English, we Scots, we Americans, we Mexicans, we Chinese, we Russians, we French. For the English and those nations derived from England (like America), one of the most important of their national myths is that of the common law. Again, in Scruton's words: "We who have been brought up in the English-speaking world have internalized the idea that law exists to do justice between individual parties, rather than impose a uniform regime of command."

(In contrast: "To someone raised on the doctrine that legitimate law comes from God, and that obedience is owed to Him above all others, the claims of the secular jurisdiction are regarded as at best an irrelevance, at worse a usurpation"--for example, among those raised in dar al-Islam. This, as Scruton points out, is one of the most important reasons for many Islamists' resentment of the West and its representative, the United Nations: the imposition of the idea of the nation with its ideals of secular law and citizenship on Muslim communities founded rather on "divine law, brotherhood, and submission to a universal faith." Perhaps paradoxically for many modern secularists, the secular nation is a peculiarly Christian construct, grounded in the idea of the separation of Church and State.)

Showing once again his English roots, Scruton insists: "The essential thing about nations is that they grow from below, through habits of free association among neighbours, and result in loyalties that are attached to a place and its history, rather than to a religion, a dynasty, or, as in Europe, to a self-perpetuating political class."

From this perspective, America would seem to embody the ideal nation.

Defining America as a nation

Still in Scruton's words:

Under the American settlement, people were to treat each other, first and foremost, as neighbors: not as fellow members of a race, a class, an ethnic group or religion, but as fellow settlers in the land that they shared. Their loyalty to the political order grew from the obligations of neighbourliness; and disputes between them were to be settled by the law of the land. The law was to operate within territorial boundaries defined by the prior attachments of the people, and not by some trans-national bureaucracy open to capture by people for whom those boundaries meant nothing.

　ナショナリズムとは自分たちは誰か、という問いに対して、自分たちの領土、その領土で通用している法、共有する習慣、歴史、物語によって、自分たちを規定しようとするイデオロギーであって、人種や宗教によって、自分たちを定義づけようとするものではない、と。

　 同じ国民、隣人に対する義理・人情があるから、社会に対する忠誠や愛着がわくのであって、その意味で国民国家は下から構築されるのであって、EUのように上からの法律で押し付けられるものではない、と。

ーーーそれはそれでいいんだが、しかし、肌の色やら出身、所属宗教などを問題、あるいは最大の関心事にするオルタナ右翼とか、ネトウヨとかが多いので、排外主義のにおいがして、一般人には、嫌気がさしてくるのである。