Civic nationalism — practically impossible and theoretically absurd?

The seeds of totalitarianism

‘We are Britain

And we have one dream

To unite all people

In one great team

Strong Britain, Great Nation

Strong Britain, Great Nation

Strong Britain, Great Nation

Strong Britain, Great Na-a-tion.’

—Lyrics to ‘One Britain, One Nation’

Many right-wingers — and even some left-wingers — will profess a faith in ‘civic nationalism’: the idea that membership of a nation is determined solely by adherence to a set of ‘values’, usually ‘liberal’ ones. Under David Cameron, in response to the alleged failure of ‘multiculturalism’, this idea of nationalism was increasingly formalised: it became a major part of modern British state ideology, with laminated sheets enumerating ‘British values’ now found in classrooms all across the country. Civic nationalism is often defended on the basis that it is more likely to create a state that guarantees freedoms and successfully integrates ethnic minorities than both other types of nationalist state and states that lack nationalism altogether.

Civic nationalism’s main foils are usually ‘ethnonationalism’ — i.e., a nation-state that defines itself solely by membership of a certain ethnic group — and ‘state multiculturalism’ — i.e., a state that, rather than seeking to bind all citizens together under a singular set of ‘values’, instead tolerates the existence of plural sets of ‘values’ with no necessary overlap. The general idea is that civic nationalism successfully preserves the best of nationalism while getting rid of the worst of it. Through civic nationalism, it is argued, Britain can permit people with few or no historical links to Britain, ancestral or otherwise, to become part of the nation; in this way, we can reap the real or alleged gains from immigration — or at the very least deal with its consequences — without the British nation-state disintegrating in the process.

In this article, I tap on the idol that is civic nationalism, and find that it rings hollow. Civic nationalism is not only theoretically flawed and impractical (if not impossible) to implement; in fact, if taken to its logical conclusions, far from protecting individual freedom, civic nationalism is more likely to sow the seeds of totalitarianism.

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Let us begin by actually looking at the list of so-called ‘British values’ that schoolchildren in Britain are now taught:

1. Individual liberty

2. Mutual respect

3. Tolerance of different cultures and religions

4. Rule of law

5. Democracy

Under civic nationalism, ‘Britishness’ is now defined in terms of adherence to these values, so someone is British if and only if they subscribe all five of these tenets, with no other requirements of ancestry, religion, culture, et cetera. However, this way of understanding ‘Britishness’ is extremely unintuitive: Clive of India is universally considered to be ‘British’, but it’s doubtful whether he adhered to all of these values when he was laying the foundations of British colonial rule in the Subcontinent. This list of ‘British values’ turns ‘Britishness’ into a very modern concept; indeed, it is blatantly ahistorical. Few people born before a certain date will have adhered to all of these values — especially Value 2 (‘mutual respect’) and Value 3 (‘tolerance of different cultures and religions’) — even if others — especially Value 4 (‘rule of law’) — can be more legitimately argued to have a long history in this country.

Yet even if we accept — or simply ignore — the consequences of ejecting nearly everyone born before about 1900 (if not 1930 or even later) from ‘Britishness’, confining our analysis only to the present day, we will still encounter problems. The average Southport rioter — many of whom will have ancestry on these isles that can be traced back to the Bronze Age, and will likely have no claim whatsoever to any other citizenship — is intuitively ‘British’, but it’s doubtful that this person has much respect for Islam, meaning that they are not in communion with the ‘British value’ of ‘tolerance of different cultures and religions’ (Value 3). Perhaps a small number of people might argue that, by disgracing themselves through their hatred of Islam, they have abruptly become ‘non-British’, but it is doubtful that this would be accepted internationally or that this would be practically enforceable, especially in less blatant cases of non-adherence to ‘British values’ (more on this later). As such, it seems that defining ‘Britishness’ in terms of adherence to the five ‘British values’ simply fails to capture many intuitively British people.

It also often fails to capture precisely the sort of people that most civic nationalists want to capture with their definition. It’s ridiculous how many self-described ‘civic nationalists’ will argue that Shamima Begum is incontrovertibly ‘British’, as if her literally joining ISIS was in no way motivated by her contempt for such ‘British values’ as religious tolerance, individual liberty, and democracy. Some civic nationalists will, of course, accept the ejection of Shamima Begum from ‘Britishness’. But civic nationalism surely demands that we go much further than merely removing those who have committed the most heinous of crimes from ‘Britishness’. Surely it also requires the ejection of those who have committed no crimes at all, but nonetheless do not adhere to one or more of the five values. It is, after all, doubtful the extent to which many members of certain immigrant groups who have obtained British citizenship subscribe to ‘British values’. For instance, 8% of British Muslims deny the Holocaust. Firstly, this suggests that civic nationalism lacks real integrative power (despite better integration being one of the alleged benefits of civic nationalism). And secondly, while Holocaust denial is not criminalised in this country, it is surely something of an indicator of many members of this community’s lack of tolerance of certain cultures and religions (Value 3). Yet there are strikingly few calls from civic nationalists to conduct thorough investigations in order to find and eject most of this 8% from ‘Britishness’.

Not only does defining ‘Britishness’ in terms of ‘British values’ fail to capture many intuitive examples of ‘British’ people: it also captures people who no-one would view as ‘British’. Let us assume that there is a small, remote island state with no connection — historical, cultural, ancestral, or otherwise — to Britain, yet they collectively decide to solely define their national identity in terms of adherence to the five values of individual liberty, mutual respect, religious and cultural tolerance, the rule of law, and democracy. Let’s also assume that they define their national identity in this way without knowing that Britain does the same, or indeed even knowing that Britain exists. Are the people of this small, remote island state ‘British’? Intuitively not, since we’ve specified that they have absolutely no connection to Britain, and they would probably be very confused if you were to tell them that they are in fact classified as ‘British’ — as civic nationalism seems to insist.

A civic nationalist could try to downplay the results of this thought experiment by arguing that until we find a nation that has defined its national identity as adherence to the exact same values that the British ought to define themselves in terms of, this is a purely theoretical problem of little relevance to the real world. However, to what extent are the five ‘British values’ distinct from those of other Western liberal democracies? Is there really that profound a difference between the five ‘British values’ and the values of France, the United States, or Germany? If not, then the French, the Americans, and the Germans can all now be defined as ‘British’, or at least some of them probably can be — but this is absurd. As we can see, the civic nationalist’s conception of ‘Britishness’ not only fails to render all of those we would intuitively consider ‘British’ as ‘British’, but also renders some people as ‘British’ who not even the most cosmopolitan Guardian journalist would consider to be ‘British’. Perhaps some of the worst absurdities could be dealt with by adding a rider that all ‘British’ people must, as well as adhering to the five values, additionally positively affirm that they are ‘British’. But what would this even mean if we can’t distinguish the concept of ‘British’ in any real way from, say, ‘German’, let alone from whatever we call the national identity of our fictional islanders?

For the sake of argument, let’s say that a civic nationalist accepts our criticisms of his attempts to define ‘Britishness’. ‘However’, he argues, ‘rather than abandoning the concept of “civic nationalism”, it would be better for us to abandon altogether the idea that the United Kingdom is a state of, by, and for a “British people”, with all the inconvenient historical baggage such a concept has.’ ‘Instead of giving up’, our civic nationalist interlocutor continues, ‘we need to go far, far further than any of our current leaders, Left or Right, are willing: we must entirely reconstitute these isles. The “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” will be no more; instead, we will establish an entirely new “United Kingdom of Valuesstan”, both theoretically and practically untethered from the historical concepts of “Britain” and the “British people”. You are a Valuesstani if and only if you believe in individual liberty, mutual respect, tolerance of different cultures and religions, rule of law, and democracy — i.e., the five “Valuesstani values” — and, moreover, Valuesstan — unlike Britain — would actually attempt to be internally consistent in who it does and does not define as Valuesstani, and would ensure that no-one who fails to adhere to “Valuesstani values” can ever claim to be Valuesstani.’

What would Valuesstan look like in practice? What would a pure, unadulterated implementation of civic nationalism actually entail?

Firstly, Valuesstan would have to abandon all birthright citizenship, whether jus soli or jus sanguinis: a newborn baby is incapable of understanding such abstract concepts as ‘the rule of law’, let alone positively affirming their adherence to them. In fact, it would be impossible for any young children — or indeed the intellectually disabled, as well the brain-damaged, comatose, or senile (even those who previously obtained citizenship, see below) — to be Valuesstani, regardless of who their parents are and whether or not they were born in Valuesstan, as people would only be able to gain citizenship if they are able to both understand these values and publicly affirm their adherence to them whenever required.

In a nation-state, citizenship (or a certain tier thereof) is meant to be for nationals, and so it seems that in order to make sure that citizens are also nationals, both potential and current citizens would need to be subject to some form of ideological testing. As such, we would need to implement laws concerning ‘anti-Values speech’ (and perhaps also ‘anti-Values thought’), wherein those caught making (or thinking) statements contrary to the five Valuesstani values would have their citizenship, and thus some or all of their rights, revoked. Shamima Begum, much to the dismay of certain people, would probably be unable to return to — or, more accurately, arrive in — Valuesstan. Moreover, those who for whatever reason are no longer mentally and/or physically capable of both understanding and professing their adherence to Valuesstani values would also immediately lose their citizenship. No dementia patients could become, or indeed continue to be, Valuesstani — such is the nature of pure civic nationalism.

Even if this is unethical, it does not sound too impractical until we think through the full implications of the fact that in Valuesstan, citizenship cannot just be given out at a single point in time — whether at birth or any time thereafter — and then not thought about anymore. Quite aside from the bizarre problems caused by those who for whatever reason become mentally and/or physically incapable, the values that mentally and physically sound people hold are obviously liable to change, meaning it will be necessary for the government to closely monitor its people to detect value changes and respond accordingly. Ideally, you would want some kind of brain scanning technology, in case some Valuesstani citizens in fact secretly hold anti-Values beliefs but do not speak or act on them in any way, which is still unacceptable as a Valuesstani citizen. Until this technology was developed, you would need to construct a gigantic police state to try to obtain a reasonable, if still far from perfect, level of enforcement.

Ironically, therefore, pure civic nationalism would in fact be much more inherently totalitarian than even the purest form of ethnonationalism. This is because, for the pure ethnonationalist, your ethnicity is immutable and therefore need only be examined once. A pure ethnonationalist state, ‘Nordland’, would only need to perform a DNA test or investigate a prospective citizen’s family tree once, whereas Valuesstan would require ideological testing followed by unending surveillance to make sure that the values you professed on the Valuesstani citizenship test do in fact match the values you espouse and act upon in your daily life.

Additionally, regardless of how unseemly their citizenship test may be, Nordland would have a significant amount of freedom in how it governs itself: Nordland could be a democracy or an autocracy, secular or religious, socialist or capitalist, et cetera. Valuesstan, by contrast, is locked into a certain ideological path by its very nature, and if it were to deviate from that path then, by definition, it would no longer be Valuesstan. Valuesstan would be incapable of having any real freedom of speech (or even freedom of thought), since those caught voicing (or holding) opinions contrary to the five Valuesstani values would immediately have their citizenship revoked. Nordland, on the other hand, could have absolute freedom of speech; or, if it so wished, it could have significant speech restrictions. The point is that it would be inherently more ideologically flexible than Valuesstan. (This paragraph and the above are not, for the record, meant to be a defence of ethnonationalism, pure or not, but rather an illustration of the inherently unsavoury nature of pure civic nationalism.)

In the long run, Valuesstan’s ideological inflexibility would also risk the country being outcompeted internationally. In a world where, for whatever reason, expansionist powers developed more effective ‘values’ than Valuesstan, the country would be incapable of adapting itself to meet the challenge without destroying the Valuesstani nation-state in the process. This is not a merely theoretical problem. In fact, there is a concrete example of something quite similar to this happening in reality: the collapse of Qing China, a state which in some sense defined itself by its adherence to the ‘values’ of Confucianism. Although Qing China, under pressure from European imperialism, was happy enough importing modern weapons, it refused to adapt to modern modes of governance. This was because the minority Manchu rulers of Qing China had legitimised themselves with their majority Han populace through their adherence to (if we may) ‘Confucian values’ — ‘values’ which modern ideas often directly contradicted. Without Confucianism, the legitimacy of Manchu minority rule — and thus the Qing state — would likely be destroyed. This was one of the (many) reasons that China and the Chinese dithered, taking much longer than Japan and the Japanese to institute fundamental institutional reforms to deal with the European threat; in effect, such a path was closed to the country until the 1911 Xinhai Revolution brought down the Qing Dynasty, setting off a wave of anti-Manchu pogroms in its wake.

None of this is to say that non-civic nationalist states cannot also have state ideologies which they may seek to promote through authoritarian means: Nordland could adopt Nietzschean vitalism as its state ideology and decide to criminalise ‘incitement to life denial’, or something along those lines. However, what’s important is that this is not an inherent feature of Nordland’s pure ethnonationalism: Nordland could very well decide to promote its chosen state ideology without authoritarianism, and it even has the option of forgoing a state ideology altogether (insofar as it is even possible for a state to not have some kind of value system/ideology when creating laws).

Because pure civic nationalism requires Valuesstan to conscientiously work to strip the citizenship of anyone who embraces heterodox values, pure civic nationalism would in practice violate international law by making massive numbers of people stateless, since many Valuesstanis might not possess or have an entitlement to any other citizenship, especially if they were born in Valuesstan to Valuesstani parents. Valuesstan would thus very quickly become a pariah state. International law — which we can now clearly see was founded on very different principles indeed to those of civic nationalism — is simply not properly equipped to deal with such a national idea. At least some of those who had their citizenship revoked would presumably be subject to deportation, either immediately or when their visa expires. But this is not the mediaeval world, where states semi-regularly exiled people for the rough equivalent of anti-Values behaviour or beliefs: in a world with border control, who would even accept these Valuesstani exiles? Valuesstan would in effect be constantly attempting to dump its refuse — and more besides (given the totalitarian nature of the state) — on the rest of the world. Some commentators made the same criticism of our decision to strip Shamima Begum of British citizenship: shouldn’t we deal with our own ‘Very British Problems’, rather than palming her off on Syria or Iraq for violating our ‘values’? It’s therefore ironic to enshrine ‘the rule of law’ (Value 4) as part of Valuesstan’s identity, because doing so opens the door to international law — to which Valuesstan presumably subscribes, given what most civic nationalists tend to believe — needing to be violated to deal with those who fail to adhere to said value.

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Whilst pure civic nationalism does not currently exist in Britain, and it is doubtful that it ever will exist given the absurdities inherent in implementing it, Britain is increasingly coming to resemble it in at least some aspects. We already do have laws against ‘anti-Values speech’, only that (thus far) these laws seem to only criminalise speech that is directly inconsistent with Value 2 and Value 3, ‘mutual respect’ and ‘tolerance of different cultures and religions’. Granted, the penalties for speech that goes against these values do not yet include the stripping of citizenship — only the singular case of Shamima Begum, someone who went far beyond mere speech, even comes close to such an approach — but it is still possible to see how the totalitarian logic of pure civic nationalism already exists within such laws in embryonic form. This is why it is important for us to criticise civic nationalism, at least as it is currently defined: if the Right adheres to civic nationalist ideas, then how can it complain when the British state takes civic nationalism closer to its logical conclusions by becoming more and more totalitarian?

I will leave it to the reader to decide what kind of nationalism they think best — assuming that they think that nationalism is even desirable in the first place — but I hope to have shown that civic nationalism, at least in the form described in this article, is both irreconcilable with our intuitive notions of British national identity and inherently inimical to certain freedoms. A different approach, whether based on an old concept or something new entirely, is sorely needed.