Saturday, March 1, 2008
According to Jerry Muller in Real Clear Politics, they don't 'get' cultural assimilation abroad. Maybe they never will..?
Americans also find ethnonationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is a product not of nature but of culture, often deliberately constructed. And ethicists scorn value systems based on narrow group identities rather than cosmopolitanism.
But none of this will make ethnonationalism go away. Immigrants to the United States usually arrive with a willingness to fit into their new country and reshape their identities accordingly. But for those who remain behind in lands where their ancestors have lived for generations, if not centuries, political identities often take ethnic form, producing competing communal claims to political power. The creation of a peaceful regional order of nation-states has usually been the product of a violent process of ethnic separation. In areas where that separation has not yet occurred, politics is apt to remain ugly.
[link thanks to Alan Sullivan]
A superb essay that asks most all of the right questions and perhaps answers a few of them as well. But there are some dialectics that go unexplored and some categories that could be better clarified. For example his liberal nationalism (in contrast to an ethnic nationalism) could perhaps be better labeled as a cultural nationalism and identity (e.g., the U.S.) since it reflects something that is fostered and nurtured and does not simply or directly flow from classical liberal ideas, even if those ideas play a prominent role. Ultimately, in socio-political terms, an acceptance of the constituting hallmarks of the social contract need to be felt and accepted deep within the marrow of the citizen if those terms are to be truly accepted, i.e. consciously, intellectually, morally, etc. Hence a socio-political monism - as is conceived for example by salafists and jihadists and other dominant strains of Islam - may simply not permit a deeply felt congruity between personal beliefs vs. socio-cultural and political assimilation.
Iow, ultimately, personal identity in its deepest reaches is the subject matter, the "raw material" that needs to be addressed and personal identity is founded, in substantial and critical part, upon how ultimates are approached and dealt with, whether consciously and actively or unconsciously and in a "taken for granted" manner. It can be no other way as those factors are reflective of the human condition as such and human nature, no matter the postmodern and other initiatives to deny the existence of the latter.