The Arranged Marriage of Liberalism and Nationalism
Every marriage has an origin story that its constituents enjoy telling at dinner parties. Liberalism and nationalism, for example, have been married for over two centuries. If you ask either one how they met, they’ll tell you it was the French Revolution. But these two ideas should have never worked.
Liberalism claims each person has rights simply by virtue of being a person. These are rights that have existed prior to and are independent of any government. The job of the state is to protect those rights impartially, without asking who you are, or how long your ancestors have lived on the land under your feet. It is by definition a universalist project. The rights cannot stop at a border. Nationalism on the other hand says there exists a bounded, particular “we”, which is stipulated by a shared history, language, culture, or descent. “We” has a right to govern itself, as itself, on terms it chooses for itself and, implicitly, not for everyone else. Opposing its lover, it is a particularist project. The whole point is that it stops somewhere. Put those two commitments in the same government and you get a question that must be answered in urgency: who decides who counts as “the people” whose universal rights the liberal state is supposed to protect impartially? To let liberalism function, you need an answer to that. You cannot issue a passport without first defining a membership. Funnily enough, the only available answer has been that of nationalism’s. This is what John Stuart Mill made his point on in 1861. A representative government needs a shared public opinion to work, which in turn requires people who read and speak the same language and feel bound to one another, which is just a description of nationalism. So liberalism, to get off the ground, borrows its guest list from nationalism. And then, it spends the rest of the marriage complaining about who’s on it.
Hannah Arendt in her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, traced how the Declaration of the Rights of Man had from the very beginning made “the rights of Man” dependent on “the rights of peoples”. A person’s inalienable, universal rights could only be guaranteed by their national government. The loophole meant that a person with no nation had no rights at all. When millions of people were denationalised and made stateless between the wars, they discovered that inalienable rights vanished the instant no state was obligated to enforce them. Arendt called the thing they’d lost the “right to have rights”, which was the deepest right of all. It turned out to have been secretly nationalist the whole time.
There have always been two competing answers as to what “we” in nationalism refers to. Civic nationalism says the nation is whoever accepts its laws and institutions, regardless of ancestry. France’s revolutionary universalism, in theory, works this way. Then there’s ethnic nationalism that says the nation is a people defined by descent, blood, or historic culture. Citizenship without that descent is a legal fiction. Liberalism can, awkwardly, coexist with civic nationalism, because its membership test (“do you accept the constitution?”) is at least open to anyone. It cannot coexist with ethnic nationalism at all, because that is closed by definition, no matter what the constitution says about equal rights. Ernest Renan actually tried to dodge this by defining the nation as a daily plebiscite, meaning, a matter of ongoing consent rather than blood. He was writing in 1882, in a France that had just lost Alsace-Lorraine to a newly unified Germany that had gone the other way. He defined nationhood by language and blood rather than choice. Renan lost that argument in the long run. Most of twentieth-century Europe did not build nations on the daily plebiscite.
In May 2025, Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, formally classified the ‘Alternative for Germany’ party (AfD) as confirmed right-wing extremist because the agency concluded the party’s prevailing ethnic and descent-based understanding of the people is not compatible with the free democratic basic order. Apparently, it treats German citizens with a Muslim migration background as something less than equal members of the German people. The liberal order’s own security service concluded that the civic and ethnic definitions of a nation cannot both be true at once. The AfD sued them and called the classification an abuse of power and “tyranny in disguise”. A court initially blocked the harshest label pending a full hearing, while the party continued polling as Germany’s second-strongest force. Whatever the courts eventually decide, the fight itself is split by the inside machinery of a single state.
In Britain, the Conservative Party’s October 2025 commitment to leave the European Convention on Human Rights is a decision to stop being bound by a body of law built to protect people regardless of nationality. Specifically because that law has been used to stop deportations of people the nationalist priority would rather not have to protect. Kemi Badenoch was explicit that “our country, and our Parliament, must be sovereign”, wherein sovereignty is the nationalist half of the sentence, human rights the liberal half. The Liberal Democrats’ retort, that this leaves Britain alongside Russia as the only country to have left the ECHR, is meant as an insult. But in a way, it is also just a description of what leaving a universal rights regime looks like from the outside.
Since 2022, the European Union (EU) has frozen tens of billions of euros meant for Hungary, arguing that Viktor Orbán’s government had captured its own courts and media to the point where they could no longer certify that public money would be spent honestly rather than routed to allies. The EU, a liberal institution, refused to fund a nationalist government it no longer trusted to police itself. Orbán called this “money that is ours” being taken from Hungarians by “a variety of means.” But for years, neither Hungary quit the EU, nor did the EU expel Hungary.
Unexpectedly, this particular love song gets a chorus you can actually sing along to. On 12 April 2026, Hungarians turned out in record numbers, nearly 79% of eligible voters, the highest turnout since the end of communism in the nation, and voted Orbán out after sixteen years. There was a two-thirds supermajority to Péter Magyar’s Tisza party. Magyar, once an Orbán insider, told the crowds gathered along the Danube that truth prevailed over lies and that Hungarians had asked not what their homeland could do for them, but what they could do for it. Remarkably, it is both a nationalist (duty and belonging) and liberal (a free election, whose result the loser accepted without contest) sentence in the same breath. Orbán had spent over a decade testing exactly how far an ethnically-defined, illiberal nationalism could stretch inside a formally liberal constitutional order. He called his rival to concede and said the result was painful and clear. He gave a somber concession speech and went to sit in opposition. The frozen billions are now expected to thaw.
Israeli political theorist Yael Tamir wrote the couple’s actual, sensible prenup back in 1993, in a book literally called Liberal Nationalism, arguing that liberals shouldn’t hand the whole concept of national belonging over to chauvinists by default. Her case was that liberalism’s respect for individual autonomy and nationalism’s need for loyalty and solidarity aren’t actually incompatible so long as membership stays civic rather than ethnic. Nationalism gives liberalism the “we” it needs to function as more than an abstraction, and liberalism gives nationalism the guardrails that stop belonging from curdling into exclusion. Isaiah Berlin, who supervised the doctoral thesis this book grew out of, called it “a most timely, intelligent, well-written, and absorbing essay on a central and painful social and political problem of our time” which, more than thirty years later, still undersells just how relevant it remains. Of course, this doesn’t negate the fact that Tamir has been an outspoken Zionist and a former Israeli Labor Party minister, which sits uneasily with her theories. But the point that liberalism and national belonging aren’t inherently at odds doesn’t depend on her being reconcilable.
Liberalism and nationalism were an arranged marriage between two people who each needed something built into the other, who have spent two centuries fighting over custody of the phrase “the people”. and who. Every so often, they remember why they said yes in the first place. Renan called it a daily plebiscite. He probably didn’t expect that, about two hundred and forty-four years later, it would occasionally still come down to an actual ballot box and a slightly teary-eyed man agreeing, that yes, the country he thought he understood had, in fact, chosen someone else, and leaving, because that was always the deal.
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