Een liberale weg naar het nationalisme?

Jurgen De Wispelaere, Trinity College Dublin

Abstract

This chapter explores the possibility of a liberal road to nationalism. The main challenge, I argue, is that any viable liberal state must be able to constrain its nationalist dimension within certain acceptable boundaries. Unfortunately, liberal nationalism is ill-equipped to determine these boundaries and therefore contain its nationalist tendencies. I illustrate some of the key problems in relation to the allocation of both political and non-political goods. Underlying many of these problems lies a distinction between a cultural and a political conception of the nation, and this chapter argues that only the latter is viable and desirable. Once a proper political conception is adopted, nationalist claims are given their proper weight within the overall liberal debates on justice in a modern state. The resulting conception liberal nationalism is comparatively weak, but nevertheless capable of negotiating the many competing claims arising from different cultures living together within one nation-state.