What the Nationalism vs. Liberalism Debate Misses

Many grand ideological narratives of the present moment proclaim some tectonic collision between “nationalism” and “liberalism.” One of the things that have made this battle so hard to follow (and perhaps even so vitriolic) is that there seems to be a lack of common agreement about what these terms even mean.

Take “nationalism.” Many of the folks affiliated with the Niskanen Center are pretty staunch in their anti-“nationalist” sentiments, but what exactly constitutes “nationalism” is up for grabs. In a piece hosted at Niskanen’s website, political scientist Jeffrey Friedman defines “nationalism” to mean having any care for one’s fellow countrymen qua countrymen: “Nationalism is sympathy toward others whom one has never met based on their living inside those borders. To the nationalist, people within these arbitrary geographical boundaries deserve to have their interests protected by the national state — even at the expense of the interests of those outside those boundaries.”