Universality and Rights: the Challenges to Nationalism

Abstract

It is conventional in much current discussion to approach the question of human rights and nationalism by questioning the assumptions underlying human rights.¹ In this chapter I would like to do the opposite, to interrogate nationalism in the light of the assumptions of universality and reason that underpin the modern conception of rights, individual and group. In essence what I want to suggest is that it is time, after two centuries of nationalism, and of the prospect of many more decades when this ideology will hold sway, to conduct an assessment of the record of nationalism, in effect an audit, in the light of general rights criteria. Such a broad form of audit has been conducted with regard to other forms of collective human endeavour — war on the one hand, democracy on the other. Nationalism recognizes no higher authority than the nation and the claims of those who are said to speak for the nation. But that is nationalism’s problem, not ours. Our challenge is to place on record, in a necessarily imperfect but unyielding way, what the record of nationalism has been with regard to rights and to identify where elements of complementarity, and also of contradiction, may lie. Nationalism need not, and should not, be exempt from such an assessment.