Towards a Liberal Patriotism – Samuel Gregg

Of all the fractures that divide America and other Western nations today, few are as sharp as that between liberalism and nationalism. The words mean different things to different people. But as a means for categorizing the splits over topics ranging from markets to social cohesion, trade, international relations, and the role of government, the liberal-versus-nationalist dichotomy remains useful for summarizing critical disagreements now at the center of Western politics.

While there are many variants of liberalism and nationalism, it is not difficult to identify key fault lines between the two sets of ideas. Whereas classical liberalism emphasizes liberty, individual rights, and the rule of law as universal values, nationalism’s focus is upon popular sovereignty and the prioritizing of national identity, often defined by shared ethnicity, traditions, culture, and language. Economically, the liberal-nationalist division generally breaks down along free trade versus protectionist lines. As for the state, classical liberals have a principled commitment to limited government, whereas nationalists are less inhibited about using state power to intervene in the economy and society to secure specific goals deemed nationally significant.

Certainly, one can find overlap in the views of many liberals and nationalists. There is no shortage of American classical liberals who are just as skeptical as your average Western European nationalist of woke pieties or supranational projects like the European Union.

Nonetheless, the liberal-nationalist distinction helps clarify some of the stark disparities between the principles, priorities, and policies that distinguish, say, the J. D. Vance-brand of conservatism from that of those American conservatives who remain committed to classical liberal ideas about free markets and limited government. Moreover, many nationalists have specified that one of their primary targets is classical liberals and their allegedly oversized influence on public policy since the 1980s. Nor is it hard to find liberals who insist that nationalists are as great a threat to freedom as the riot-happy hard left.

Missing from this discussion, however, is attention to the ways in which liberalism and nationalism have interacted in the past. By the mid-nineteenth century, ideas that we would recognize as embodying liberal or nationalist principles had established themselves as significant political forces in Europe. Europe’s subsequent history cannot be properly comprehended without appreciating the commonalities, compromises, and tensions that marked the relationship between these two movements throughout this period. Appreciation of that background also sheds light on our present situation, and how those who variously call themselves classical liberals and limited government conservatives might address it.

Common Origins

As movements of ideas, thinkers, and activists, liberalism and nationalism began taking on more distinct form in the French Revolution’s wake. The restoration after the 1815 Congress of Vienna of political systems that bore traces of the ancien régime did not terminate the influence of liberal ideas throughout Europe. Nor was there any dissipation of the pan-German patriotism that lent popular force to the effort to drive Napoleon out of Central Europe. If anything, the aspirations of inhabitants of the Italian peninsula for a united Italy, or the desire for Poles to overturn the three eighteenth-century partitions of their country by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, started to magnify in the 1820s.

Conservatives—most notably, Prussia’s Otto von Bismarck—proved proficient at coopting patriotic sentiments, which had the effect of weakening liberalism as a force in European politics.

In this period, liberal ideas and patriotic sentiments often went together. Those who insisted upon shifting the locus of statehood away from allegiance to a royal dynasty and towards peoples with a shared ethno-linguistic identity readily identified with liberal ideas. Those agitating for the political unification of all German-speakers, or greater autonomy for the Hungarian nation inside the Habsburg Empire, were broadly committed to constitutionalism, the rule of law, and economic liberalization. Student groups throughout Europe, closely surveilled by the police throughout the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, regularly combined liberal reformist and patriotic aspirations. For them, the goal of establishing popular sovereignty centered around the nation went together with an emphasis upon realizing liberty for the individual and an end to monarchical absolutism.

During these decades, liberals and nationalists broadly agreed about what they opposed. They rejected, for example, the claim that regimes derived their authority from God rather than the people and disputed any prioritization of loyalty to the dynasty over the nation. Whatever their politics, many Europeans took it for granted that a united Italy or a united Germany would be a liberal Italy or a liberal Germany. One reason why many European rulers took a dim view of nationalist sentiments was their recognition that the triumph of patriots would lead to a significant curtailing of regal powers via the installation of liberal institutions. 

Year of Revolutions

This symbiosis between liberalism and nationalism achieved a type of apotheosis when revolutions broke out across the European continent in 1848. Whether located in Berlin, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Naples, Frankfurt, Copenhagen, or Budapest, the 1848 revolutions were initially urban, patriotic, and mostly liberal-led affairs. And the goal was emancipation: of individuals from reactionary governments and antiquated economic arrangements, and of nations from the rule of other nations or the absolutism of domestic and foreign princes. Civic freedom, national self-determination, individual liberty, and popular sovereignty were seemingly fused together.

Ironically, it was often the revolution’s opponents who best grasped that liberal and patriotic ideas were difficult to parse out from each other. Following violent clashes between the army and protestors in Berlin in March 1848, King Frederick-William IV of Prussia withdrew his soldiers from the city, and to placate Berliners, rode through the streets with the revolutionaries’ black-red-and-gold flag carried before him. As he and every other German-speaker understood at the time, the flag symbolized both the unity of the German nation and the demand for liberal constitutional forms of government.

To understand this confluence, we should recall that expressions like liberalism and nationalism were less defined than they are today. As the Cambridge historian Sir Christopher Clark illustrates in his comprehensive history of the 1848 Revolutions, Revolutionary Spring, these terms “were only just making their way into circulation and had no acquired stable meanings—they designated fuzzy and not always logically coherent constellations of arguments and claims.” It is unclear, for instance, whether most liberals in 1848 would have made all the distinctions that we draw today between patriotism and nationalism.

In these conditions, it was easy for middle-class liberals to overlook or downplay the potential tensions that might arise between liberal principles and nationalist commitments. But practical considerations also played a role in maintaining the liberal-nationalist juggernaut in place. The upsurge in patriotic feelings put more muscle behind the forces challenging the pre-1848 political arrangements than middle-class liberals might have otherwise been able to rally. Conversely, those primarily focused on consolidating ethnic groups into modern nation-states found that liberal political and economic ideas helped provide answers to those wondering what form and structure would be taken by national unity once it had been achieved.

Co-option and Tensions

The relationship between liberalism and nationalism throughout Europe in subsequent decades was a less happy one. In some cases, conservatives—most notably, Prussia’s Otto von Bismarck—proved proficient at co-opting patriotic sentiments, which had the effect of weakening liberalism as a force in European politics.

By achieving German unification through successful wars against Denmark, Austria, and France, Bismarck not only managed to link German ideas of nationhood to his conservative agenda. He accomplished what German liberals had failed to realize. In doing so, Bismarck effectively wedged German liberals into implicitly supporting his methods for realizing the unification that liberals had long desired and weakened their ability to oppose his ideas about the united Germany’s constitutional arrangements. Hence, although Wilhelmine Germany reflected some features of liberal order, its constitutional structures were far removed from the liberal ideals of 1848. Considerable executive power was concentrated in the monarchy, with ministers and the military being responsible to the emperor rather than the Reichstag.

Another set of problems for liberals arose in multiethnic settings like the Habsburg Empire and the borderlands of Central-East Europe. From the late 1860s until the late 1870s, German-speaking liberals controlled the parliament in Vienna and held influential ministries in the government. Many political and economic liberalization policies were implemented by liberal ministers during this period.

Liberals in the Austrian government, however, proved unable to manage the bitter language disputes that broke out between, for example, Czech-speakers and German-speakers in Bohemia, or Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, and Jews in Galicia. These failures produced severe political deadlocks and, when combined with a brutal recession in the 1870s, diminished the standing of liberal parties. They found themselves steadily abandoned by voters throughout the Empire who drifted towards socialist, radical, and nationalist movements. 

Liberals should stress that being a true patriot involves reminding citizens that nationalist populism, whether of the right or left variety, invariably ends up doing long-term damage to the political, economic, and legal institutions that help promote the nation’s general welfare.

In other cases, the consolidation of national unity took precedence over the solidification of liberal institutions. Some of the most important progenitors of Italian unification, like Piedmont’s prime minister Camillo Cavour, were unabashedly liberal in their economic and political ideas. The desire, however, to establish a truly Italian nation-state in a new country divided by strong regional attachments and even considerable language differences meant that successive governments were either slow to put liberal measures into effect or quietly abandoned them altogether.

The growing distance between liberals and nationalists was occasionally papered over by a shared hostility to other groups. The politically powerful National Liberal party, for instance, supported Bismarck’s anti-Socialist laws as well as his Kulturkampf against the Catholic Church. Bismarck’s measures reflected his conviction that German socialists and German Catholics had dual loyalties in the new but still fragile Empire. The National Liberals opposed socialism on economic grounds and shared the anti-Catholic sentiment that characterized large swathes of continental European liberalism.

But overshadowing these intermittent alliances was the steady drift of patriotic opinion towards conservative, reactionary, and, in some instances, racially orientated movements. Patriotism started morphing in the direction of highly exclusionary and aggressive nationalist sentiments that took on a distinctly anti-liberal hue in many European countries in the lead-up to World War I. By 1914, liberal parties in countries like Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Central-East Europe were a shadow of themselves. That added up to a vastly different political world from that of the 1840s.

Liberal Patriotism

At first glance, one might ask if this history has much to teach us. After all, today’s liberalism is more definitive about its core principles than the liberals of 1848, and many of those commitments are directly at odds with contemporary nationalism’s preferential option for an activist state—and not just in the economy. Nor do liberal principles sit well with some nationalists’ mirroring of the progressive left’s will-to-power outlook, aggressive pushing of constitutional boundaries, and flirtations with extra-constitutional proposals. 

Yet despite the disparities between now and then, two significant lessons for today’s liberals can be drawn from the experiences of their nineteenth-century predecessors. Put bluntly, don’t be co-opted by nationalists, and don’t allow nationalists to be the only visible patriots. 

The need to build political alliances is a fact of life in democratic societies. If you want to advance change, you must be willing to make compromises. But there is a world of difference between, on the one hand, supporting what you can and picking your battles, and on the other, abandoning some of your core principles in return for a seat at the table. Too many nineteenth-century European liberals allowed themselves to be stampeded into compromises that contributed to their eventual sidelining from politics. Failure to keep their distance from Bismarck, for instance, significantly contributed to the National Liberals’ steady collapse and their reduction to minority status in German politics.

Those who favor markets, limited government, and the rule of law must also ensure that the terrain of patriotism is not dominated by nationalists, particularly the populist variety. And one way to contest nationalist claims is to stress that patriotism need not involve embracing populism. Liberals should stress that being a true patriot involves reminding citizens that nationalist populism, whether of the right or left variety, invariably ends up doing long-term damage to the political, economic, and legal institutions that help promote the nation’s general welfare. In many Western countries, especially Anglosphere nations, they can also emphasize that commitment to liberal principles and institutions has long been part of what it means to be, for instance, American, British, or Australian. 

In short, liberal patriotism need not be an oxymoron. The failure of most nineteenth-century European liberals to keep liberalism and patriotism firmly linked in the wider population’s minds had serious consequences that should be kept in view by today’s classical liberals and limited government conservatives. More than ever, they should stress that it is precisely because they love their country that they oppose contemporary nationalism’s friends-versus-enemies logic, belligerent rhetoric, and terrible economic ideas. For, absent the reiteration and renewal of the liberalism-patriotism symbiosis, the political marginalization of true friends of liberty will surely continue.