Between Kin and Cosmopolis. Nigel Biggar
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compatriot, for they too are loved by, and answerable to, God, and they too might mediate God’s prophetic word. But human beings might owe others more than mere respect and a commitment to refrain from intentional or wanton harm. They might also owe them aid. In addition to non-maleficence, that is, they might also owe beneficence. However, whereas we are always able to refrain from harming other people intentionally or wantonly, we are not always able to benefit them. We may be responsible, but ours is a responsibility of creatures, not of gods; and our creaturely resources of energy, time, and material goods are finite. Therefore we are able only to benefit some, not all; and there might be some to whom we are more strongly obliged by ties of gratitude, or whom we are better placed to serve on account of shared language and culture or common citizenship. In short, notwithstanding the fact that all human beings are equal in certain basic respects, no matter what their native land, we might still be obliged—depending on the circumstances—to benefit near neighbors before or instead of distant ones.
However, whether near or far, human neighbors are not the only proper objects of our respect and care. So are customs and institutions. Humans come into being and grow up in a particular time, and if not in one particular place and community, then in a finite number of them. A human individual is normally inducted into particular forms of social life by her family and by other institutions—schools, churches, clubs, workplaces, political parties, public assemblies. These institutions and their customs mediate and embody certain apprehensions of the forms of human flourishing—that is, basic human goods—that are given in and with the created nature of human being. It is natural, therefore, that an individual should feel special affection for, loyalty toward, and gratitude to those communities, customs, and institutions that have benefited her by inducting her into human goods; and, since beneficiaries ought to be grateful to benefactors, it is right that she should. We have yet to specify the forms that such affection should and should not take; but that they should take some form is clear.
II. Why Loyalty to the Nation?
It is proper for an individual to have affection for, feel loyalty to, and show gratitude toward those communities that have enabled her to flourish. But why must this stretch as far as a national community or national institutions? Why is it not sufficient to identify with local and regional and even supranational ones? Why is loyalty to family or church—to kin or cosmopolis—not enough? There is no reason in principle why it should not be enough. The nation is not a cultural unit or form of social or political organization that is inscribed in nature’s D.N.A., and no particular nation is guaranteed eternal life. Historically it is surely true, as Benedict Anderson and Linda Colley have argued, that particular nations are human constructs, not natural facts.17 As they have evolved, so they will change and perhaps pass away. The United Kingdom did not exist before 1707. The United States could have ceased to exist in the early 1860s. Czechoslovakia did cease to exist in 1993.
If historians have reasons to be sceptical of the claims of nations, so do theologians. According to many authoritative students of the phenomenon, the nation as we now know it is a specifically modern entity, appearing first in late eighteenth-century Europe and progressively capitalizing on the cultural decline of the Christian religion. As Europeans lost their faith in God, so the story goes, they transferred their faith to the nation; and as they ceased to hope for life in the world-to-come, they began to invest themselves in the nation’s immortality.18 This certainly seems true of Romantic nationalism, judging by the following statement by Johann Gottlieb Fichte:
The noble-minded man’s belief in the eternal continuance of his influence even on this earth is thus founded on the hope of the eternal continuance of the people from which he has developed, and on the characteristic of that people. . . . This characteristic is the eternal thing to which he entrusts the eternity of himself and of his continuing influence, the eternal order of things in which he places his portion of eternity. . . . In order to save his nation he must be ready even to die that it may live, and that he may live in it the only life for which he has ever wished.19
Given the patently idolatrous character of Romantic nationalism, Karl Barth, writing in the shadow of its infamous Nazi expression, refused to accord the nation any special status at all in the eyes of the one true God. As he presents it in Volume III/4 of his Church Dogmatics, first published in 1951, national communities—or “peoples”—dissolve into near and far neighbors.20
Barth is surely right to puncture the pretension of nations to the status of something absolute or essential. Nations are fundamentally constituted by national consciousness, by a sense of national identity, by the feeling of individuals that they belong to this people. And such a sense of community is usually born in reaction against another people, which is culturally different and whose difference grates or threatens: I belong to this people because I oppose that one. Thus, the various clans occupying the island of Ireland developed a sense of Irish identity partly in common opposition to English (and Scottish) intrusion. And the English and Scots together developed a sense of British identity partly in common opposition to French Catholic monarchical absolutism and then French revolutionary republicanism. And the various American colonists developed a common sense of American identity, first in reaction to the cultural difference of Britons and then in opposition to what they perceived as British tyranny. Since nations are constituted by national consciousness, and since this consciousness is reactive, it follows that nations are contingent in origin.
Notwithstanding this, the fading of the original irritant need not cause the dissolution of common national consciousness, insofar as that consciousness has found institutional expression. For through institutions a people’s peculiar linguistic grip on the world, customary incarnation of social values, and political ideals achieve a relatively stable state, which can survive the cooling of the original crucible. These institutions can be cultural and civil social, rather than political; and if political, they can enjoy varying degrees of autonomy. Not every nation is a nation-state; and not every nation-state has maximal sovereignty.
Take Scotland as an example. For almost three hundred years from 1707–1999 the Scottish nation expressed its self-consciousness primarily through the Church of Scotland and the Scottish legal system, both of whose jurisdictions covered the same defined territory. While retaining a measure of autonomy over local government (much of which operated through the church or “Kirk” well into the nineteenth century), the Scots had no autonomous control over economic, welfare, or foreign policy. Insofar as they elected representatives to the British parliament at Westminster, and insofar as their representatives succeeded in wielding influence there, they were able to exercise some control—but it was not autonomous. However, since the devolution of power by the British government to Scotland in 1999, and the creation of a Scottish parliament, the Scots now exercise a much greater degree of autonomy over the shape of life in the territory of Scotland. Nevertheless, this autonomy is limited: while they can participate in shaping and pursuing a British foreign policy, the Scots still cannot shape and pursue a simply Scottish one. The Scottish nation, therefore, enjoys statehood, but not of a fully sovereign kind.
Nations are contingent, evolving, and transitory phenomena. In that sense, they are artificial, not natural. And they are certainly not divine. However, in another sense they are natural, insofar as their customs and institutions incarnate a particular, perhaps distinctive grasp of the universal forms of flourishing suitable to human nature. Like families and churches and schools and supranational bodies, nations too can embody forms of human good, thus wielding moral authority and obliging our love. Moreover, when nations acquire full statehood, they come to possess maximal power to shape life within their borders so as to defend and promote goods. They also become centres of international agency, which bear responsibility for goods between nation-states, not least that of international order. Insofar as a nation-state has a record of virtuous action internally and externally, shaping life well within and without its borders, it deserves a measure of affection, loyalty, and gratitude as much as any beneficent family or global charity.
III. Babel’s Benefit: The Good of Diversity
So far I have argued that considered reflection upon the Christian concept of the creatureliness of human being can justify a preference for benefitting near neighbors over distant ones, compatriots over foreigners; that it can also justify affection, loyalty, and gratitude toward those communities, customs, and institutions that mediate