R_0032_3217

Review of:

The Rights of Nations: nations and nationalism in a changing world by Desmond M. Clarke and Charles Jones
Cork University Press, Cork, 1999.
viii + 208 pages. £14.95.
ISBN 1859182070

Reviewed by:

David Miller
Nuffield College, Oxford

Reviewed in:

Political Studies

Date accepted online: 14/11/2001

Published in print: Volume 48, Issue 3, Pages 576-680

Political Theory

The seven essays collected in this book were commissioned by the editors to ‘represent a cross-section of views from recent discussions of nationalism’, and they discharge this function admirably. The selection is well-balanced between those favourable to, and those critical of, liberal versions of nationalism, and the quality of the contributors is high: Anthony Smith, Michael Freeman, Neil MacCormick, Yael Tamir, Will Kymlicka, Brian Barry, David Archard. The book’s limitation is that in general the essays summarize positions developed at greater length in previously published work (or in Barry’s case in his forthcoming book on Culture and Equality), so the book is best suited to readers who want to get a feel for how the arguments about nationalism have been going in political theory rather than those who already know the literature well. However there are tantalizing glimpses of new issues that deserve fuller treatment, for instance in Yael Tamir’s discussion of the functions of acts of political atonement and in Anthony Smith’s analysis of the ways in which nationalism has been shaped by religious models.

One issue that reappears in several of the essays in the relationship between nationalism of the kind defended by recent liberal political philosophers, and nationalism as it exists in the real world of politics. Barry, for instance, argues that ‘real’ nationalism is invariably of the blood-and-soil type, (even if it has learnt to present itself in cultural terms), so the liberal philosophers in question are wittingly or unwittingly lending their authority to some nasty political movements. Kymlicka, by contrast, is at pains to show that many recent minority nationalisms have a strongly liberal ethos, and this view is echoed by MacCormick. Archard dissects the Northern Irish conflict in these terms, separating Nationalist claims that conforms to liberal nationalist principles from those that do not. This issue, too, looks like one for further debate.