6 - Equality among nations

Summary

I argued in the previous chapter that the commonly alleged incompatibility between liberal nationalism and cosmopolitanism disappears once we get clear the parameters of liberal nationalism and the scope of cosmopolitan global distributive justice. There is nothing inconsistent about endorsing liberal nationalism on the one hand, and holding, on the other, the cosmopolitan egalitarian idea that distributive principles should be impartial about nationality and are to be applied to the world taken as a single scheme.

But the fact of compatibility alone does not show that liberal nationalists must necessarily be committed to global justice. In this chapter, I want to establish the stronger claim that not only is liberal nationalism consistent with cosmopolitan justice but that liberal nationalists must also be international egalitarians. That is, liberals who take their nationalistic agenda seriously have an obligation to regulate inequalities between nations.

This is a particularly important point, not just because it will demonstrate a strong convergence with respect to global justice between liberal nationalism and cosmopolitan justice, but also because it provides a response to some self-described “liberal” nationalists who deny that there is a commitment of justice to regulate inequality as such between nations. The influential nationalist theorist David Miller, for example, denies that international justice is to be understood in terms of principles of equality because “justice assumes the form of a principle of equality only in certain contexts, and here the relationship between citizens of a nation-state is especially important as a context in which substantial forms of equal treatment can be demanded as a matter of justice” (Miller 2000, p. 174).