Between Kin and Cosmopolis. Nigel Biggar
qualification of its affirmation of nations means that it is alert to their historical mutability. While outgrowths of a natural love for human goods and of a consequent natural loyalty to their customary and institutional incarnations, particular nations are also human constructions whose culture and ethnic composition are always changing.46 National myths of racial or ethnic or cultural purity, therefore, are immediately suspect; in which case, foreign ways and foreign immigrants can be regarded, not just as challenges or threats, but also as resources.
Christianity’s view of the nation implies that its borders should be patrolled so as to control immigration, but that they should be open to foreign immigrants on certain conditions, and therefore that they should contain cultural diversity. The Christian view also implies that the autonomy a nation enjoys within its borders is not absolute. It does not have the right simply to do with its resources whatever it pleases, but only to manage them responsibly; and where it has resources surplus to its own needs, it has a duty to devote them to the good of others—by welcoming refugees, for example, or by donating aid to foreign countries.47 This concept of a morally limited right to autonomy over material and social assets contradicts the libertarian view that one has an absolute right of disposal over whatever one has acquired legally; and it does so partly on the ground that all creaturely owners are also dependents and beneficiaries. How much we own is invariably due to benefactions and good fortune as well as to skill and entrepreneurial flair. Even where our property was genuinely virgin when we first came into possession of it, the fact that we had the power to discover it at all probably owed something to what we had inherited, and ultimately to what our ancestors had been given and the good fortune that had attended the development of their resources. As we have received, so should we give. Therefore, even de iure—ius being natural before it is contractual, given before it is made—national sovereignty is not absolute. Its exercise is subject to the moral claims of the common good, and when it fails to acknowledge those claims, other nations might have the moral right to intervene—if the requirements of prudence can be met (for example, if it seems that an intervention is likely to achieve what it intends and to do so without risking an escalating conflagration).
In the Christian view that I am commending here, national borders should be conditionally open and they may be transgressed, if national autonomy is being exercised irresponsibly. They may also be changed. Nations, as Christians should see them, are neither divine nor eternal, but human and historical. Investment in a nation is not—with all due respect to Fichte—the route to immortality; for that runs by way of service to the Creator and Sustainer of all things. As historical, nations are mutable. Therefore, the patriot should be willing to contemplate changes in his or her nation—whether in its constitution or even in its very definition—if that is what justice and prudence together require. It is not written in heaven that the United Kingdom should always encompass Scotland, nor the Canadian confederation Quebec, nor the Yugoslav federation Kosovo. Nor is it written that the United States of America must remain united, any more than it was written that the Soviet Union should. Christianity properly precludes a simply conservative view of a nation’s internal or external territorial boundaries, and withholds its support from political movements dedicated to preserve those boundaries at all costs.
On the other hand, Christians should be wary of demands for border-changes that issue from nationalist fervor fuelled by dishonest myths that idealize one’s own nation and demonize or scapegoat another—myths that picture one’s own simply as innocent victim and the other’s simply as malicious oppressor. The Christian doctrine of the universal presence of sin means that we may not fondly imagine that the line dividing virtue from vice runs with reassuring neatness between our own people on the virtuous side and another people on the vicious one. The line between virtue and vice runs right down the middle of each human community, as it runs through the heart of every individual. Accordingly, no human may stand to another simply as righteous to unrighteous, and the wronged party always shares enough in common with the wrongdoer to owe them some compassion. Nationalist myths that say otherwise tend to exaggerate the injustice suffered, demand a radical and revolutionary remedy, totally discount any moral claims that the “enemy” might have, and brook no compromise.
For example, take Northern Ireland. It is true that Catholic nationalists there used to be seriously, albeit not atrociously, oppressed by Protestant unionists; and it is therefore reasonable for Catholics to be less than fully confident in British government and to seek protection under the Irish state. One way of securing this would be for the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic to be completely erased, for the former to be incorporated into a “united” Ireland, and for British jurisdiction in the island of Ireland to be removed once and for all. This is what post-independence Irish nationalists have traditionally demanded.48 The problem with this is that there is a substantial ethnic community in Northern Ireland whose national allegiance is strongly British, and who want to become subject to the Irish state about as much as nationalists want to remain subject to the British one. An alternative solution—and one embodied in the Good Friday Agreement reached between the British and Irish Governments and the political parties in Northern Ireland in April 1998—is to thin the border without erasing it. This involves setting up certain institutions that transcend the borders between Britain and Ireland, on the one hand compromising the substance of British sovereignty over Northern Ireland, while on the other hand maintaining the province’s formal constitutional status as part of the United Kingdom. This reassures Irish nationalists by giving Dublin substantial influence over British government in Northern Ireland; and by creating bodies with specific areas of responsibility (say, for tourism), whose jurisdiction runs through the whole of the island of Ireland and is unhindered by the border. But it also reassures unionists by maintaining the border, eliciting Dublin’s formal recognition of it,49 limiting the jurisdiction of the cross-border bodies to specific areas of economic activity, and thereby securing Northern Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom. One threat to this happy compromise, however, could come from the refusal of nationalists to regard it as a permanent settlement and their insistence on viewing it as merely a step on the road to the ultimate goal of the political unification of the whole of the island of Ireland under an Irish state. Such an insistence would be fuelled by a traditional resentment of all things British and unionist—a resentment that is blind to the considerable progress in remedying the injustices suffered by Catholics that British governments are widely acknowledged to have made since the 1970s, and which doggedly refuses to acknowledge the right of unionists to maintain their British allegiance for ever.
As I see it, therefore, a Christian vision of things militates against the idealization of the self and the demonization of the other that together stifle sympathy and issue in a bitter, dogmatic nationalism that brooks no compromise in its determination to erase a national boundary. The same vision also militates against a nationalism that, enthralled by an exaggerated sense of its own victimhood, a correlative inclination to transfer its own sins onto a foreign scapegoat, and a consequent lust for independence, refuses all compromise in its determination to erect a national boundary.
Sometimes, of course, there are good reasons for a nation to seek expression in its own fully sovereign state—and so to secede from the larger multinational or imperial whole, of which it is a part. The strongest reason is seriously unjust oppression suffered by a national minority, which the majority consistently refuses to remedy. The Dutch in the mid-sixteenth century, for example, had just cause to secede from the Spanish empire, which was committed to the violent suppression of the Protestant religion; and the Kosovars in the late twentieth century had just cause to secede from the rump of the Serbian-dominated Yugoslav federation, which was engaged in the ruthless and indiscriminate ethnic cleansing of Muslims. A less strong but still sufficient reason for seeking greater autonomy (if not outright separation) is the denial to a minority of proportionate representation or the chronic overruling or neglect of its important and legitimate interests. Thus the Irish in the nineteenth century were justified, arguably, in using their representation in the imperial parliament at Westminster to press for a measure of “home rule” in Dublin, so that Irish concerns could receive the attention that they deserved.
Sometimes, then, a nationalist movement is right to demand greater autonomy, even to the point of full sovereignty. But, equally, sometimes it is wrong. Take, for example, the Scottish National Party’s campaign for independence from the United Kingdom in the run-up to the referendum