The French Revolution lacked such modesty; it declared illegitimate every foundation of social order except those mirroring the events that transpired in France. Instead of identifying the French nation as having a peculiar title to these revolutionary claims, and urging the rest of mankind to act accordingly, the French revolutionaries ended by separating human beings rather than uniting them. The reason is that on these terms a Frenchman is no longer a Frenchman, strictly speaking. A Frenchman is merely a human being, with no more fellow feeling for his neighbor or fellow citizen than for a stranger 1,000 leagues away. There is no intrinsic, social principle by which one can argue that neighbors ought to sustain one another, apart from going through the task of establishing a social contract and constitution and committing themselves to a specific political (not social) order, whose laws are binding with all the strength called for by Rousseau’s “general will.” Which implies, further, an exaggeration of homogeneity among men. Men in such circumstances are not truly citizens and certainly not patriots. They are Hobbesian subjects, whose fate in world politics must depend either on their own power or on the opportunity to benefit as free-riders from other people who are distinctly non-Hobbesian (i.e., who defend themselves without subjecting others). Thus the Euro-American divergence is nothing other than the divergence between the original French and American revolutions. Fifteen or so years ago, I was invited to present my reflections on the subject of European integration at a conference in Treviso, Italy. I spoke on America’s transition from a loose federation to a genuine state-nation, indicating along the way the potential benchmarks that would signal Europe’s progress toward integration. At the conference, however, I learned that I had misconstrued its subject. My hosts were primarily interested in the question of how to deal with the then burgeoning numbers of mainly North African, and to some extent Asian, immigrants flowing into their countries. Specifically, they wanted to learn how to guarantee the immigrants their fundamental rights, without at all conveying title to citizenship, French, Italian, or what have you. In short, they wanted to devise humane principles of integration that, in the end, would differ little from the long-standing German post-war “guest worker” program that brought so many Turks into Germany.
https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/making-citizens/
Making Citizens
The good American and the good European.
...If we revert to the eras of the American and French Revolutions, we can detect the origins of these divergent strains of thought. They derive from the false universalism of European ideas of revolution. The French Revolution was not carried out in the name of this particular people, the French, but in the name of humanity. The revolution in the United States, by contrast, had an impact that was worldwide (as Lincoln correctly observed, the example of the United States would continue to do so) principally by structuring peoples’ expectations of political decency. Although the Declaration of Independence appeals to the “candid” judgment of the world, and the first Federalist holds that the American founding settles a question for mankind and not just for the United States, this revolution was not directed outside the immediate political sphere of the United States. To be sure, Americans had to explain themselves to the world, because in justifying their revolution they had raised the standard of reason, which in turn was attached to natural law. Thus they created a particular society, although no longer determined by blood, in the context of a general conception of humanity.
The French Revolution lacked such modesty; it declared illegitimate every foundation of social order except those mirroring the events that transpired in France. Instead of identifying the French nation as having a peculiar title to these revolutionary claims, and urging the rest of mankind to act accordingly, the French revolutionaries ended by separating human beings rather than uniting them. The reason is that on these terms a Frenchman is no longer a Frenchman, strictly speaking. A Frenchman is merely a human being, with no more fellow feeling for his neighbor or fellow citizen than for a stranger 1,000 leagues away. There is no intrinsic, social principle by which one can argue that neighbors ought to sustain one another, apart from going through the task of establishing a social contract and constitution and committing themselves to a specific political (not social) order, whose laws are binding with all the strength called for by Rousseau’s “general will.” Which implies, further, an exaggeration of homogeneity among men.
Men in such circumstances are not truly citizens and certainly not patriots. They are Hobbesian subjects, whose fate in world politics must depend either on their own power or on the opportunity to benefit as free-riders from other people who are distinctly non-Hobbesian (i.e., who defend themselves without subjecting others). Thus the Euro-American divergence is nothing other than the divergence between the original French and American revolutions.
Fifteen or so years ago, I was invited to present my reflections on the subject of European integration at a conference in Treviso, Italy. I spoke on America’s transition from a loose federation to a genuine state-nation, indicating along the way the potential benchmarks that would signal Europe’s progress toward integration. At the conference, however, I learned that I had misconstrued its subject. My hosts were primarily interested in the question of how to deal with the then burgeoning numbers of mainly North African, and to some extent Asian, immigrants flowing into their countries. Specifically, they wanted to learn how to guarantee the immigrants their fundamental rights, without at all conveying title to citizenship, French, Italian, or what have you. In short, they wanted to devise humane principles of integration that, in the end, would differ little from the long-standing German post-war “guest worker” program that brought so many Turks into Germany.
Most European states perform miserably at assimilating immigrants of diverse cultural backgrounds. They do so, I submit, precisely because they don’t conceive of their regimes in terms that confirm the general eligibility of human beings for citizenship. They think that citizens are born and not made, despite the fact that that notion is very much a feudal residue. Ironically, their notion of the postmodern regime’s carefully managed resolution of conflicts derives as much from their continuing feudalism as from any recently discovered philosophical or moral commitment.
Let me summarize my argument by quoting a few paragraphs from my essay, “The Truth About Citizenship,” published in the Cardozo Journal of International and Comparative Law (Summer 1996):
“Tribes, peoples, and nations may have members, but only regimes founded in universal principles can properly have citizens…. The paradox of citizenship properly so-called is that it cannot occur universally, is rather realizable only in particular instantiations, and nevertheless addresses the end of every human being.
“American citizenship is defined strictly in terms of those human characteristics and circumstances that manifestly apply to all human beings. Because those terms, as suggested in the Declaration of Independence, invoke human interests and ambitions as the basis of membership in a good polity, it follows that wherever persons hope for the fulfillments to which their individual interests and ambitions aspire, they will naturally regard themselves as capable of American citizenship. This premise is the novus ordo seclorum—a world in which men can imagine “marrying themselves abroad” without conceiving that to do so entails abandoning their dearest attachments. When Aristotle identified intermarriage as the fundamental condition for unity in the polis, he pointed beyond the immediate relationships among individuals to the realms of human imagination. In that realm, what counts is the good that one can imagine for oneself. Whatever offers that prospect becomes automatically the standard of decency and fulfillment.
“By holding out such a promise, the United States and every similarly constituted republic make a commitment beyond the limits of their own territories. That commitment is to recognize and reward to the extent practicable the aspirations of human beings who find in this promise cause for virtuous exertion. It is this condition of modernity that chiefly distinguishes it from the ancient world….
“It is a paradox of considerable complexity that what is held out to every human being willy-nilly can still hold forth the prospect of excellence. There are many thoughtful critics who may deny such a possibility a priori. They do so, in my view, in ignorance of the precise character of modern citizenship, which hinges on affirmation of the people’s capacity for rule despite long-standing doubts on that score.
“The truth about citizenship is not only that it elevates statehood and displaces nationhood, but that it is also the decisive condition for articulating the idea of a common good under modern sovereignty. The idea of modern sovereignty emerges from the discovery of natural rights and the resulting requirement of consent in order to establish legitimate government—a state as opposed to a nation. Nevertheless, it is not so much natural rights as the practical goal of self-government deduced therefrom which creates the moral conditions of citizenship. The [resulting] state-nation is defined more by constitutional goals, in contrast to the nation-state in which…nationhood or social histories prevail. The chief constitutional goal is that of self-government—a moral reality that is prior to and must shape the political reality, [inasmuch as it is] the fundamental condition of political legitimacy.
“Thus, even when one is skeptical of the philosophical principles of natural rights, one still must confront the reality of modern sovereignty in the form of self-government as the irreducible human claim.”
This argument trumps even the argument for peace, conducing much more surely to making and defending citizens.
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