From Liberal Nationalism to the Nationalisation of Liberal Values? Towards a Conceptualisation and Normative Assessment of the Relation between Liberalism and Nationalism in Contemporary Constructions of National Identity

Contemporary European policies regarding immigration and citizenship are in need of an explicit normative analysis. This paper contributes to this task by developing a conceptual and normative framework based on two notions that have hitherto not been brought together: ‘liberal nationalism’ and 'the nationalization of liberal values’. Liberal nationalism, originally developed by political theorists such as David Miller and Yael Tamir, relies on the assumptions that citizen support for economic solidarity within the welfare state in increasingly multicultural societies can be boosted by a strong sense of national identity – and, crucially, that such a national identity qualifies as liberal if it has a certain civic-cultural content that is ‘thinner’ than ethnic nationalism, yet ‘thicker’ than for example the Habermasian notion of constitutional patriotism. Recent attempts to categorize the national identity construction in several European countries today, however, show that this takes place not always on the content level of the national identity (universalistic/particularistic, or civic/ethnic), but rather on the level of boundary construction between the collective and the individual (plastic/static) (Jensen 2014). The conceptual and normative framework developed in this paper allows us to assess to which extent this aspect of national identity could be called liberal or not. It also helps assess the ‘nationalization of liberal values’, the recent trend of using liberal values, often connected to the Enlightenment, as the new way of excluding “the other”, not least in countries with a universal welfare state (Gustavsson 2014; Laegaard 2007). By nuancing the implicit assumption that liberalism and nationalism are two mutually exclusive labels, the paper shows that we can better analyze and assess the many recent empirical cases where liberal values are presented in a nationalistic way (Mouritsen & Olsen 2013).