What Comes After Nationalism?

• In Event: The Uses and Disadvantages of Arendt's Concept of the Nation

Abstract

As the dangers of national identity daily erupt, we still cling to the idea that possession of a national identity lived through and affirmed by a nation state is essential to human flourishing. Arendt held fast to the nation-state too. As she reckoned with the cataclysmic horrors that nationality and nationalism produced, she could not think beyond nationalism, urging that the the identity it provides sated deep-seated social and perhaps even biological needs. This paper argues that the cultural, racial, and philosophical pluralism of modern life have rendered the mid-century nationalism Arendt thought essential obsolete and impossible to recover. This is a fact to be celebrated and seized. The reality on the ground is that national identities--especially in the rich west--are in fact thinner, more-pluralistic, and overlapping. Local and regional identities, on the other hand, have become richer, more inspiring and more programatically potent. (Think: red-state/blue state, sanctuary cities, #CalExit.) This return to regionalism suggests new, more- grounded possibilities for fulfilling human needs for community and identity, while decoupling those identities from the dangerous scope and technological capacity of the nation state.

Author

• Daniel I. Morales, University of Houston Law Center