Critical Perspectives: Marxist and Anarchist Approaches

Abstract

In modern political discourse, appeals to the national interest are usually made in contrast to claims by sectional interests — the greater national good rather than the domestic group interest. The nation’s interest is commonly regarded as the highest political value beyond which there can be no claim: the sum total is considered greater than the individual parts. Appealing to the national interest is also designed to confer legitimacy upon public policy, invoking a sense of patriotism and group loyalty which should not be challenged.

One of the devices used to obscure plain facts is the concept of the ‘national interest’, a mystification that serves to conceal the ways in which state policy is formed and executed. Within the nation, there are individuals and groups who have interests, often conflicting ones; furthermore, such groups do not observe national boundaries. Within a particular nation-state, some groups are sufficiently powerful to exert a major, perhaps dominant interest over state policy and the ideological system. Their special interests then become, in effect, ‘the national interest’.

(Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics)

The pretense is that there really is such a thing as ‘the United States’, subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a ‘national interest’, represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media. … [But] nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any one country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex.

(Howard Zinn, The Twentieth Century: A People’s History)