Over the last few days, I’ve hopped round a series of apparently unconnected sources which seem, nevertheless, to have a common theme. I’ve been looking, for example, at material about the experience of poverty in low income countries; at political arguments concerning Zionism and anti-Zionism; at arguments for a distinct Scottish currency; and a constitutional arrangements concerning the rights of European citizens. The issue that they have in common is a sense of the nation as a body which defines the scope of public policy.
Some years ago, Daniel Béland and André Lecours wrote a fascinating book on the relationship between nationalism and social policy. The key question they are concerned with is how far our communities, and our responsibilities, extend. The case examples they looked at, such as Belgium and Canada, are effectively multi-national states, but so are others which see themselves as having a unifying culture – look, for example, at the constitutions of Ireland or Poland. (Those constitutions, for what it’s worth, show that there is nothing exceptional about Zionist nationalism.) The link between nationalism and social policy isn’t just that nationalist movements tend to emphasis the importance of mutual welfare, though it makes sense that they should do so. It’s that social policy itself depends on the construction of a political community – an identifiable group which defines the scope and limits of mutual responsibility and support. However, solidarity in a political community commonly extends across nations and ethnicities – and some political communities extend beyond territory, too, which is how a few hundred thousand people have recently been able to claim Irish citizenship. To be legitimate, solidarity and citizenship have to be reasonably inclusive: any such community needs to accept that there will be people from more than one nation within it. Scottish nationalism meets that test; I’m not sure that all the other contenders do.