Patriotism and the Mearsheimer/Walt affair

I recently wrote a review of a couple of books on global justice, one of which expended a great deal of effort in explaining how a liberal cosmopolitanism could be consistently combined with a reasonable patriotism.

Can you provide the reference for that book?

Rather, liberals and leftists should say, that perhaps such a policy is indeed contrary to the country’s interests so conceived, but that (a) no ordinary citizen is under an obligation to be patriotic and (b) a reasonable patriotism neither requires nor permits citizens to promote their country’s interests in that sense.

No, liberals and leftists in America most definitely shouldn’t say this, whether or not your speculative theory about the relationships holding among justice, moral obligation and the interests of privileged groups is true.

Presumably these liberals and leftists are under some sort of obligation to work collectively to do good. And doing good requires achieving positions of responsibility and institutionalized power. And outside a tiny handful of very left-liberal districts in the US, it is quite impossible for a candidate to get elected by saying that citizens are under no obligation to be patriotic. Nor is it at all likely that a candidate who says “I will promote policies contrary to the interests of national power, where justice and morality demand it” will be elected.

Nor is it likely that a given candidate will be elected if that candidate is seen by the majority of the electorate as the champion of a group of people who say the things that you hold liberals and leftists “should say”. Even if the members of that group have convinced themselves of the truth of your theory, they should probably keep their views to themselves, or else they will irreperably damage the ability of their champion to achieve office.

This fact of life is not just connected to the pursuit of governmental office. We live in a world in which the capacity to influence events in any significant way, including public affairs and governmental policies, is strongly constrained by a network of pre-existing roles and institutions, all of which have occupancy conditions that include sets of conventional and institutionalized obligations. The public acceptance of these obligations is usually a causally necessary condition for coming to occupy those positions.

I think there is a basic division in viewpoints between the US and the UK on the legitimacy of citizens promoting the interests of another state. The UK, which demands more assimilation by immigrants than the US (though less than France) has very little tradition of ‘ethnic’ lobbying groups (though it has other kinds of lobbying). And there is some active hostility to the idea of these by the British Old Left. I remember an article by Roy Hattersley, who used to sit for a constituency that had a lot of British Asians in it. Some of his constituents were saying they would vote for him if he supported ‘their side’ on the Kashmiri question. He was insistent that this was not the sort of demand they should be making: they should be making their voting decisions based on domestic politics, while governments should decide foreign policy on principles. (I don’t know whether this socialist opposition to ethnic politics is also driven by the fact that historically, the only lobbying groups that have had any foreign policy influence in the UK are White South Africans/White Rhodesians.)

If you’re going to take the US view that it is legitimate to have ethnic lobby groups, then the normal qualification must be put in place: it is legitimate to promote another country’s interest to the extent that justice allows. A liberal argument against AIPAC and similar lobbying groups (the Irish-American lobby during the IRA bombing campaign springs to my mind), is that they encourage political decisions that are unjust.

“For example, some people think that actions by democracies should always and in all cases be viewed more favourably than actions of dictatorships. That’s a defendable position, but it’s very difficult to see how it might work in practice, especially since the distinction between ‘autocracy’ and ‘democracy’ is not actually as clear in reality as it is in theory.”

Posted by brendan

It’s crystal clear, actually – if the democratic actions are pleasing to right-wingers, they’ll say that. If those actions are displeasing, they’ll go right back to where they were before the Iraq war, sucking up to dictators and talking derisively about ‘the mob’.

Don’t be fooled by the current propaganda line from right-wingers (in the US/UK) about them waging war for ‘democracy’. They’ve usually waged war against democracy, with body counts comparable to Saddam at his worst. This current line about democracy in Iraq was brought up from the fine print only when the ‘vast stockpiles of WMD’s’ and ties to Al Qaida failed to materialize.

Here’s a place where the liberal/left should take the right’s favorite piles of moralizing crap and dump them right back. What profiteth it a nation if it gain the whole world but lose its soul? There will be a few neo-realists laughing somewhere, but who among the players on the right hasn’t claimed moral authority (rather than practical gain) for muscular patriotism?

And no, I don’t think those piles of moralizing are always crap — otherwise patriotism would alway consist simply in following the commander in chief.

Hi Chris,

KC Tan is indeed Candian via Singapore. I think he’s even met w/ John Holbo a few times in Singapore, though I might not be remembering correctly. We’re all very happy to have him here in Philadelphia now, though.

I’m not willing to descend that far into cynicism, not yet anyway. Any line of propaganda reaches a point of diminishing returns eventually, and I think the right-wing BS of the post-Reagan era may finally be approaching its sell-by date (with assistance from Bush’s staggering incompetence and bad faith which are becoming visbible even to a lot of the fools who voted for him twice.) At least, I try to think that in order to remain somewhat sane…

“…promoting the interests of one’s country within the bounds allowed by justice is allowed but not obligatory.”

Whaaa? You might want to go back and consider Spinoza’s dictum that right extents only so far as power. One promotes the good (and not just the narrowly defined “interests”) of one’s own country and fellow citizens, because, assuming it is a duly constituted, reasonably democratic republic,- (a big if),- that is where one can effectively promote the good, and that is obligatory, not merely optional, because of the mutual pledge that constitutes the commonweal. The “universalist” aspect comes out in that other countries should, for their own sake, be duly constituted, reasonably democratic republics, within an international order of mutual agreements between such republics that maintains the peace and resolves or tempers the conflicts of interests between them. (An even bigger if, but then it’s a merely normative question. See Spinoza’s dictum.)

The problem with the Israeli lobby is not that they are unpatriotic because its an ethnic lobby, but that they are mobilising in support of bigoted policies (Israel’s permant policies of colonising and ethnic cleansing the Palestinian Arabs, especially in and around Jerusalem) which tend to impose negative externalities in terms of Arab and Islamic hostility towards America. Its a small organised group with intense preferences distortion of policy-making which is the objection, just like steel, farm, Cuban etc lobbies.

In fact there are lots of ethnic groups in the UK who want the UK to take up their foreign policy issues. But UK politics is not so amenable to small group shakedowns.

…all voters get one vote each, and some might be motivated by concerns other than their self-interest…

That is correct, but I just can’t imagine any significant number of voters being consistently motivated by nothing but altruistic desire for international justice. If something like that were possible, then the world would’ve been very different; people probably wouldn’t need any government in the first place. Even if we do want to be idealistic, we still need to be realisic. And that means promoting international justice by creating strong international institutions.

Chris’s principle — that one may promote the good of one’s nation/family and friends only within the bounds set by justice — sounds uncontentious, but it all depends on what “justice” demands, doesn’t it?

Everyone will accept the principle if justice means only not killing, not maiming, etc. innocent people. But the debt-forgiveness, Iraq, and Darfur examples suggest much, much more. They suggest that you’re not permitted to promote your nation’s or family’s good if there are any injustices being committed by others that you could instead prevent.

Surely no one believes that about the family, and surely no one believes the similar claim about distributive justice, i.e. that I’m not permitted to give my children more than barely enough food to avoid starvation if there are any children in the world who unjustly have less.

The same, I would argue, holds for states. Their pursuit of their citizens’ good is absolutely constrained by the duty to avoid positive unjust acts like killing, aggression, etc. But it’s not ABSOLUTELY constrained by the duty to prevent any unjust acts by anyone else in the world, or to prevent any distributive injustice. That demand is way too strong to be plausible.

I’m not defending a neo-realist view. These more expansive demands of justice (if they’re properly called that) do have independent weight and can outweigh the demands of partiality towards one’s nation or even family, so one must sometimes sacrifice their interests. And debt-forgiveness and Darfur may be examples where that happens. It’s just that the more expansive demands don’t have ABSOLUTE weight, as Chris’s principle suggests. Again, given his implicit understanding of what justice involves, his principle is way too strong.

BTW, re #5, I attended a conference on the ethics of nationalism back when that topic was new (how many eons ago was that?). And it was exactly as Matt says: the defenders of (moderate) nationalism were the Canadians (including me) and Israelis, whereas the Americans were mostly hostile. The obvious explanation is that it all depends on whether your own nation has used nationalism to defend itself or to attack others.

It’s still being written, Chris, so won’t be coming otu for a while. But Adam’s own book is a good start.

Tim W: as Chris says I’m thinking about this a lot at the moment. I think you are right about Singer thinking (something like) what tom says no-one thinks. But not (or not obviously) G.A. Cohen; his analysis is carefully hedged by acknowledgement of various unspecified agent-centered prerogatives which must surely include various prerogatives to act on obligations, and even on simple non-obligatory beneficent feelings, to one’s own family members. Singer (whose work I know less well) doesn’t seem to hedge in the same way.

“It all depends; if my child has reasonably good prospects of a fulfilling life (which I certainly have a duty to provide if I can), there’s a point at which it does seem wrong to me to spend further money on her advancement when I could be giving to Oxfam, etc.”

Okay in terms of buying your children a seat in Parliament etc. But would this really apply in practice in the case that ABB1 refers to, i.e. in relationship to an effective tutoring service? For example, the prospects of a life in academia (yes yes, not nec fulfilling etc) really rely on getting the sharpest possible education when young? If you are willing to withhold that, even though it does cost resources one way or another, there are all sorts of limits on children’s possibilities. I suppose the same might apply to becoming a musician.

Harry b:

The view mentioned by Hurka (and attributed to Chris Bertram) mentions starving children, so it seems to even rule out, as too strong to be plausible, views of justice requiring the sufficient meeting of people’s needs. Cohen’s view of justice is even more egalitarian than anything brought up so far. I bet that any hedges Cohen puts around his view would qualify his extensive egalitarianism; they would not, in effect, bring him below a sufficiency floor. I think Cohen (if he is a cosmopolitan) would not say that the personal space is so large that we can refuse to feed starving kids. The end result, I would think, is that his demands would be more stringent than the view Hurksa says no one believes. In sum, Cohen’s qualification of his egalitarianism still makes him more demanding than a suffiency view.

Suppose everyone’s basic needs were met and/or their human rights were protected adequately.*
Someone could claim that, beyond that floor, we are permitted to keep an unequal amount of stuff. But Hurka seemed to go farther than that.

* This need not mean that no violations occur. See, for example, Thomas Pogge on one take on what ‘adequately’ means.

By the way, let me just add that I really liked Hurka’s peice on national partiality in a volume edited by McKim.

In line with 24, there’s also the enormous question of what these realistic practical interests of a country are, that it is supposed to promote them within the bounds of justice. Even people of intelligence, knowledge and goodwill can differ strongly one where the interests of the country (as distinguished from those of some subset of its citizens, or the corporations headquartered there, or of corporations whose main shareholders or operations are or have historically been located there) actually lie, and even more on how those interests should be promoted. And of course once you leave off the requirement for intelligence, knowledge or goodwill all hell’s out for noon.

Certainly the last half century was littered with the bloody mistakes of governments that thought they were pragmatically forwarding their country’s interests and turned out to be doing things quite different.

Political positions such as “ordinary citizens are under no obligation to be patriotic” and “ordinary citizens are not required to promote the power interests of one’s own country” are simply non-starters as far as the demands of practical politics is concerned. So these ivory tower speculations offer no guidance at all as to what liberals engaged in practical politics should say.

Similarly, any members of the Israel lobby in the United States who might be tempted to defend themselves against the Mearsheimer and Walt paper by saying “we are under no duty to promote the interests of the United States in terms of its relative prosperity and military power” would be guilty of an extraordinary political ineptitude. For all the good it would do them, they might as well say “we are traitors who wrote the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Consider any work in the business world. One might sympathize with the moral notion that the employees of a company are required above all to promote justice, and that they are not required to promote the competitive interests of their own company. But the fact is that it is part of their jobs to promote those competitive interests, and they will be fired for failing to to their jobs.

Some companies attempt to implement social responsibility agendas, or green agendas. But if they are publicly owned, then their directors are legally bound by the terms of their obligations to their stockholders to promote their own companies’ competitive interests. They must constantly justify their claim that the “progressive” agenda enhances the bottom line. If they can’t justify it, they are removed.

Government is also a business – it is the business of administering a state, and those who assume places in the government are typically charged with advancing the interests of that state in fairly conventional economic and security terms. Their scope for action is strongly constrained by the legal and institutional responsibilities of the positions they hold. If they pursue progressive global agendas, they are required to defend those agendas as enlightened pursuit of national self-interest. If their pursuit of these agendas noticeably damages the country’s bottom line, they are usually removed.

In a democracy, in principle, the government can do whatever the people who elected them want them to do, subject to Constitutional restraints that cannot be overridden. So in principle they can even follow moral policies which damage the country’s interests in terms of prosperity and power. In principle. But in practice, the moral aspirations of the public are so diverse, and so tenuous, and so variable, that the interests of power and prosperity continually assert themselves as the chief governing principle and least common denominator for practice. The rulers serve at the pleasure of those who have secured for them their positions – that is, coalitions of voters and powerful economic interests. And these very large groups tend to act as a group, whatever the moral preferences of their individual members, as self-regarding leviathans seeking their own interests.

Chris, I agree that citizens of a state are not at all like the employees of a company. But the employees of the state’s government surely are like the employees of a company. The citizens are more like the stockholders, and the government employees are constrained by what the stockholders demand of them.

Of course, in actual practice, some citizens have much more influence on these government employees than other citizens. And government officials are able to create some additional freedom of action for themselves by dissembling, or lying or otherwise shielding their actions or the motives for their actions from public scrutiny. The Bush administration’s employment of secrecy and deception is particularly egregious, but it is a major factor in all US administrations.

In the case of corporations, the prohibitions you mention mainly exist in the form of law. Law is a mechanism by which rules of action seen as publicly beneficial are given force by attaching sanctions to them, and turning them into requirements of prudence. The chief executive of a company then justifies his obedience to these rules not on altruistic moral grounds, but on the ground of legal requirement. Because disobedience carries penalties, the company’s self-interest aligns with the law.

The other force that can move a company in the direction of acting in accordance with justice is, as you mention, non-legally binding public expectations. If a company acts in a way that brings widespread discredit and disapproval, the negative views may hurt its business. And then once again, the chief executive can justify acting in accordance with certain publicly esteemed rules or principles, because failure to do so will harm the compnay’s own interests. However, whether the incentive of public expectations really is a force for justice depends on whether the public is just.

What do the “stockholders” demand of their government? I can’t speak about other countries, but only about what seems to me to be the case here in the US. There are lots of different kinds of Americans, driven by lots of different kinds of enthusiams, and they would all severally like to government to pursue various moral and ideological causes around the world: Christianity, liberalism, free trade, etc. But the diversity of these causes means that they tend to cancel each other out, and resolve themselves into a wary and practical resultant consensus based on prudential principles. And where they do have an effect, the effect is a temporary one that does not extend beyond a transient burst of partisan ideological enthusiasm. The more persistant, enduring public expectation in the realm of foreign policy is that the government will work to (i) make them richer, (ii) uphold the laws that protect their interests and liberties and (iii) keep them safe from foreign threats. In general, US citizens want the government to maintain the country’s military power because that power is seen as the chief guarantee of security. In contrast to many elite opinion leaders of the right and left, most citizens tend to have a live and let live attitude toward the affairs of other countries, but can be persuaded to act aggressively when they see the aggressive action as a pro-active security measure. Once they believe the threat is no longer there, the support for force disappears.

There is some disposition to support pro bono military action, where the action is seen as relatively pain free. But as the example of Somalia shows, the support for pure altruism tends to dissipate suddenly in the face of even modest losses.

Economic globalisation, of course, might easily help fuel nationalism everywhere and sharpen conflict between the nation-states. Isn’t this what the WWI was pretty much all about?

Wouldn’t the Boeing like Airbus factories bombed and destroyed? Doesn’t the GMC CEO hate Honda?

Ever since the Mearsheimer and Walt paper on the ‘Israeli Lobby’ hit the streets there has been a discernable decrease in the fear of being called anti-Semite by those that criticise right-wing Israeli politics and right-wing Zionism. The initial reaction from the pro-Zionists and the Israeli-supporting neoconservatives in America was highly predictable – they, of course, called Mearsheimer and Walt ‘anti-Semites’. They did it so loudly and so often that it became clear that it was the Israeli Lobby itself that was doing the name calling. Problem is they went overboard with it. They did it to such an extent that it doesn’t mean anything anymore.

It’s got to a point now where people no longer care about being called an anti-Semite because they know that is just a bit of name calling that no longer has any relevance or meaning. People are now very much aware that those that criticise right-wing Israeli politics and right-wing Zionism are going to be labelled by those that are being criticised as anti-Semites, just as a matter of course. It has become expected. But now everyone knows that really they are not anti-Semites but just critics of right-wing Israeli politics and right-wing Zionism. The right-wing Zionists have clearly failed in their attempt to introduce criticism of right-wing Israeli politics and right-wing Zionism as the ‘New anti-Semitism’.

The real anti-Semites are those that have been around for centuries. These are the racists and white supremacists that have always been there. They are the ones that were totally discredited at the end of World War Two as the world realised that their blind hatred had resulted in the systematic deaths of millions of those that they hated. There are a few still around but, thankfully, not in any significant numbers. These people don’t hate because they dislike right-wing Israelis or right-wing Zionists. They just hate Jews because, well, just because they are Jews. The hatred that real anti-Semites have has nothing to do with politics. And the politics of anti-right-wing Israeli Zionism has absolutely nothing to do with race.