The Ten Principles of the Orthodox Conservatives - 5. That the Nation Is the Upper Limit of Political Community.

The Fifth Principle of Conservatism, from the Orthodox Conservative website. 

From Orthodox Conservatives

5. That the nation is the upper limit of political community. (Love of country shows love of community and shared history with one’s neighbour.)

5. That the nation is the upper limit of political community

Conservatives are not the only ones that defend the nation – liberals have made use of the nation, and history has shown us that the recognition of national loyalty was the finest method of self-determination for those states that suffered under colonial rule – but the liberal defence of the nation and national loyalty often comes from an instrumental approach. Consider, for instance, David Miller’s On Nationality: the nation, Miller argues, is a only method for binding people together and encouraging a liberal set of values, and not a truth of the development of loyalty and identity in the West. 

The origins of the nation are often traced back to 1648, with the Peace of Westphalia and the emergence of what was called the ‘Westphalian System’ of national identity: it was this peace treaty that sought to end the religious wars of central Europe, and solidified the nation-state as the central body capable of demanding the loyalty of each individual within that nation, holding priority over the Catholic Church in Rome, or the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna (at the time). But this ‘origin’ is often misconstrued as the beginning of the loyalties that nationhood came to represent; instead, it was more of the formalisation of the local loyalties and identities that had been fermenting in Europe for centuries, such as local religious practices that had often accommodated Christianity and blended with it.

Moreover, the nation exists to provide the legal stability and security necessary for the cultivation of freedom that we defined in principle one; but rather than being the freedom of the individual, here it is the freedom of the community that the nation is built on and around, to realise its own corporate identity, and expression of liberty most consistent with the internal identity of that community. To that end, the nation provides the community within it the most important liberty it can have: the freedom to continue to exist.  

This upper limit at the height of the Renaissance revealed the truth of over-extended systems of government that were built on weak ties of loyalty, but it is a lesson that seems to have been ignored mostly since. The grand empires of the high colonial period were never destined to last, because they were built on flawed ideas of loyalty, oppression and exploitation – even the British Empire, that managed to inspire loyalty even within colonies such as Jamaica and India to the extent that thousands of men travelled to the “Mother Country” to fight for her in the dreadful wars of the twentieth century, collapsed in the end. Of course, the European Union is the most recent attempt at this loyalty, but the weakness of association felt amongst the European peoples has already begun to fray the bonds of this project. 

None of this is to say that the nation is the inevitable or determined expression of society, but it is the one that the West has found to be the most stable, welcoming and inclusive form of association to have ever existed. This is because it makes demands of its members based entirely on behaviour, and not on creed, colour or class, as in the totalitarian regimes of the past (and present), and this relation of behaviour has found its clearest expression in citizenship through the web of the rule of law that has been so central to the Western tradition. This web of law is so special because it makes the same demands of the ruled – that the laws are obeyed – as it does of the rulers. As Roger Scruton says, “the law, even if it depends on the sovereign to impose it, can also depose the sovereign if he tries to defy it” – such as when the British Parliamentarians sought to put King Charles I on trial for abuse of his powers as sovereign (even if they did not mean to put the monarchy as an institution on trial). 

Ultimately, the nation is the finest form of loyalty and stability that the West has ever experienced, because it makes such minimal demands on its citizens, and remains essentially porous – members can leave, just as much as they can join, the community that underpins it.