The Cultural Defense of Nations: A Liberal Theory of Majority Rights

"This book is interesting because of its groundbreaking concept of majority rights. After so many years of talking about minority rights, Liav jumps over to majority rights and asks, ‘Why is it now emerging and is it justified?’ This is, I think, a big conflict for nationalists. On the one hand, we are trained to say you have to mellow down your nationalism in order to allow minorities to become freer and more engaged in the social arena. Here’s a book that asks, ‘What if this becomes a threat? What if it’s not only the minority who are under threat, but the majority feels threatened? And what is a majority?’ This is something we ask a lot in Israel—Liav is Israeli. Are we a majority in Israel? If we annex the territories, we would not be, it would be 50/50. We’re certainly a minority in the region. So who are we? A minority or a majority or in between? These are very, very interesting and important questions. At the end of the day, he holds a view which is not very politically correct but is becoming more and more common. Kamala Harris went to Guatemala recently and said, ‘Don’t come because we’re not going to allow you in.’ That’s a majority saying, ‘We can’t open our borders altogether, because we want to remain who we are.’ In an age where lots of people are tempted to move, it becomes an interesting question. People seem to change their mind according to their perspective. For example, in Israel, the debate goes, ‘Everybody should be allowed to live wherever they want. There should be freedom to choose where you live’. Then you have five very orthodox families moving into a secular neighborhood, and everybody says, ‘This is a secular neighborhood, we don’t want it to change, we want to keep it secular.’ Then people start asking, ‘are they legally allowed to live here?’ Well, of course they are: they are Israeli citizens, they can buy apartments wherever they want. OK, then we won’t provide them with a school because we don’t want them to come in, because we want to retain the nature of our environment. Similarly, secular people will never move to an ultra-orthodox community because if they did move there en masse , there would be resentment. So, on the one hand, people feel freedom is important, on the other hand, they say their identity and their environment are important. It’s always a balancing act and it’s never perfectly right. This is what happens in Europe. Now, many of them will be second- and third-generation immigrants, the figure includes migrants and further generations. But something happened because we used to assume that third-generation immigrants would integrate. Now it is quite clear, especially with Muslims in Europe, that the third generation isn’t integrated. That, I think, is part of the source of the debate. What is happening in the Nordic countries now is that people say, ‘Okay, it’s fine for them to come, we have to provide work, but they also have to integrate. And then Muslims say, ‘What do you mean, we have to integrate? Do you think we should convert?’ This is where the debate becomes really, really difficult. Why Nationalism came out of a new perspective that I gained when taking more economic issues into account. My first book was very much ideological, it’s about the national/liberal tension and the way you can maybe settle that tension. It was mostly theoretical. With time, I’ve understood better the sociological-economical aspects of this process which, I think, have also became more prominent in recent years. In a way, this book complements the first book, with was really going more into human nature and human needs and psychology. The second one goes into sociology, economics, maybe international relations, and looks at the same issue from a different angle. It’s like asking whether it’s possible to have a just state. It’s a worthy cause we should work to achieve, but I don’t think we’re going to get there. That’s why I always joke and say political theorists will never be out of a job. We’re just going to struggle. But struggling is important. It’s not like giving it up. The big mistake is to give up. The struggling has value and it’s what gives meaning to our freedom, to our decision-making, to our political action. It’s not that we reach a solution and say ‘Okay, that’s done. Let’s do something else.’ There is a Jewish joke about a guy who lives in a very small town in Poland. He has no job, so he goes to the rabbi and says ‘Rabbi, I have no job. I have a family to support. Give me something to do.’ So the rabbi says, ‘You can go to the main road and sit there and wait for the Messiah, so if the Messiah comes he will know there are Jews in our little town, and he won’t skip us over’. And the guy says, ‘Okay, but how much will I earn?’ The rabbi replies, ‘the pay is very modest, but the job is permanent’. That’s what we do."