Liberal Nationalism in a Competitive Market for Governance

Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. The influences which form opinions and decide political acts are different in the different sections of the country. An altogether different set of leaders have the confidence of one part of the country and of another. The same books, newspapers, pamphlets, speeches, do not reach them. One section does not know what opinions, or what instigations, are circulating in another. The same incidents, the same acts, the same system of government, affect them in different ways; and each fears more injury to itself from the other nationalities than from the common arbiter, the state. Their mutual antipathies are generally much stronger than jealousy of the government. That any one of them feels aggrieved by the policy of the common ruler is sufficient to determine another to support that policy. Even if all are aggrieved, none feel that they can rely on the others for fidelity in a joint resistance; the strength of none is sufficient to resist alone, and each may reasonably think that it consults its own advantage most by bidding for the favour of the government against the rest.

While we want to carefully avoid arguing for the necessity of culturally pure states, we need to take the problems caused by diversity in a democracy seriously. The problem with simply insisting that we need nation-states, of course, is that national identities are never well-defined (and many group identities are not geographically-concentrated). Identity groups overlap and we each belong to many groups at many different levels. How can we to make states match salient group identities without creating pointless ethnic segregation at the behest of a few racists? In general, we need to make state boundaries more dependent on individual preferences.

Given sufficiently low barriers to secession, libertarians shouldn’t treat nation-states merely as something of instrumental value in preventing the tyranny of the majority. People get genuine satisfaction from having their state represent their tribe; we should not begrudge people their nationalist sentiments if they can be indulged without causing harm.

Since the power of exit will make individuals pay the cost of intergroup violence and place limits of preference heterogeneity, a decentralized competitive market for governance will produce a more harmonious world – even if everybody chooses to retain their tribal identities.