Via Ross, here is George Kateb’s essay against patriotism.  Within the first few paragraphs, he makes the classic mistake that nationalists tend to make when he says:

Are such feelings properly transferred to a country? Should love of country overwhelm all self-centered reluctance? In particular, is gratitude, a kind of love, the right emotion to feel towards one’s country? Although children are not usually asked to die for their parents, and most parents wouldn’t accept the offer if it were made, some defenders of patriotism imagine the state as a super-parent that may ask its children to die for it. The idea of patriotism is inseparable from killing and dying for your country. A good patriot is a good killer.

Right away this confuses the state and the country, and also rips out of context the obligation to defend one’s country against invasion.  Regarding Ross’ question, I don’t know what Mr. Kateb thinks about Prof. Lukacs’ crucial patriotism/nationalism distinction, but I can say that the distinction vitiates this objection to the connection between patriotism and force, because patriotism is essentially defensive while nationalism tends to be aggressive and domineering.  Children aren’t usually asked to die for their parents, but then their parents aren’t usually placed under threat of attack.  In the general course of life, episodes when one’s parents and country are under attack are happily rare, but would Mr. Kateb really say that there is literally no obligation to defend either when they are under attack?  Grant that your parents would probably not ask you to die that they might live–would you not rightly feel a duty to risk your life in their defense anyway? 

In any case, there are two different questions raised here: should the state be able to oblige you to serve it in a military capacity in the name of patriotism regardless of circumstances, or does a general obligation for all eligible citizens to serve in the military only become operative if your country itself is under attack? 

Next, Kateb focuses his attack on obligations one owes the political community, which is once again distinct from the obligations one owes the patria/patris.  Whether or not we should think of the polis as being prior even to the family, it seems to me that an obligation to one’s home country is prior even to obligations to the polis, which came into existence at some point in association with a particular place where people had already settled in some kind of community.  Arguably, in the case of Greek poleis the distinction between country and political community might be at its weakest, but even here it exists.  Nonetheless, what Kateb finds offensive is the idea of unchosen obligations to the political community.  The confusion between government and country continues throughout the essay.

Kateb’s essay is weighed down further by his reliance on contract theories of government, which advance pleasant fictions (the consent of the governed and social contract) as if they bore some relation to political reality anywhere in history.  If Kateb wants to argue that you can only be patriotic if you reject the fiction of social contract, I might be tempted to agree with him, but for a very different reason.  You need not endorse a Filmeresque idea of a paternalistic or absolute monarchy in which the monarch serves as father of the country to believe that you have obligations to both state and country to which you never consented.  It is telling that Kateb then acknowledges that even theorists of social contract could not, or at least did not, maintain a contrary view.

Kateb has raised two lines of defense for patriotism that are actually defenses of something else, has found both wanting and therefore declares that patriotism has no justification.  But patriotism won’t go away, and this worries Kateb because:

The trouble is that this brute fact contributes to the erosion of the sentiment that government exists by consent and has the status of servant to the people.

So the “brute fact” of patriotism helps to dispel a myth woven by 17th and 18th century political philosophers, which means that patriotism actually works to demystify the real structure of politics.  I suppose patriotism does facilitate “the erosion of the idea of rational consent,” which is mainly a problem for those whose defense of constitutional government is bound up with this implausible theory.  According to Kateb, unless we maintain this myth liberty itself is in danger.  Apparently there are no other arguments, prudential or otherwise, for checking the consolidation and abuse of power and providing legal protections to citizens against their own government unless we embrace the Whig fairy tale that the people are sovereign and have only delegated their sovereignty to some public authority.  This is not right.

All in all, what Kateb wants more than anything is to make an argument against war, and particularly against senseless foreign wars, but scarcely talks about war or the incentives that the state has in waging wars.  Instead, he pins the cause of wars on a sense of obligation to political communities, which he continually mistakes for patriotism, and then blames patriotism for all of it.  In general, what Kateb is complaining about, to the extent that it has anything to do with patriotism, is the tendency of the state to wrap up its war propaganda in appeals to patriotism.  Rather than focusing his criticism on the state for its war propaganda and its desire for more power, Kateb blames patriotism for creating the possibility for the state to exploit natural sentiments of loyalty to country.  The state claims the right to invoke the obligations owed to the country, even when its policies may be contrary to the interests of the country and patriotic duty may demand non-compliance or open resistance, and Kateb takes for granted that the obligations are the same.  Indeed, he makes the state’s conflation of the two the basis for his critique of patriotism.  Patriotism has been horribly violated by warmongers, and it seems that Kateb blames the victim. 

What is frustrating about all of this is that Kateb seems to accept on its face the lie that an “activist foreign policy,” which he clearly opposes, has something to do with patriotism.  Yet it is almost never the case that what we are calling an “activist foreign policy” serves the interests of our country.  Unwittingly, Kateb endorses every critique, whether expressed openly or not, that says that opposition to such a foreign policy is in some sense unpatriotic; it cedes patriotism to nationalists, ideologues and warmongers, when they have the least claim to it.  This is not simply a question of not alienating the broad patriotic majority, but it is really a question of whether we are willing to endorse the deception that imperial misadventures have something to do with the defense of the United States.  Needless to say, should opponents of such a foreign policy ever concede such a fundamental point they will deserve to lose.  The question is also whether we want to endorse this deception for the sake of defending the fiction of government by consent. 

I would argue that it is this fiction that the government owes its existence to popular consent and the system of mass democracy that encourage this fiction that represent the real threats to constitutional liberty both in theory and in practice.  Without the myth of government by consent, the argument that government represents the interests of the people or of the country would be much less persuasive, which in turn would make it much harder for patriots to identify the best interests of their country with whatever the state was doing.  Without mass democracy encouraging people to identify themselves, their country and the government, patriotism would be harder to exploit in the service of government policies, whether focused on “security” at home or “defense” overseas.  The ”danger” of patriotism, such as it is, is that citizens mistake their patriotic duty for more or less unquestioning support for unjust and/or illegal state policies and mistake criticism of those policies for attacks on their country, which they naturally resent.  Instead of combating this dangerous confusion, Kateb reinforces and endorses it, which is why he has embarked on the misguided task of discrediting the very patriotism that tells this anti-imperialist that an “activist foreign policy” advanced through unjust and illegal wars is contrary to the best interests of America, a threat to constitutional government, the cause of increased consolidation of power in fewer hands and the pretext for the violation of numerous constitutional liberties. 

Filed under: foreign policy, politics