Yael Tamir's Reading List

"I like short books, I really do. I like this book because it’s an easy read, but it’s a significant read. That’s a great combination. She’s exactly right and it’s what I’m trying to claim myself: Don’t surrender the power of nationalism only to the extremes. Take over the positive, creative, enabling power of nationalism to do something with. It’s interesting to see that in the post-coronavirus era, it is happening more and more. More people speak about bringing jobs back home, buying our products, protecting our people, giving them support, providing health services. The crisis brought back a lot of the welfare language that was common after the war. You need a big crisis and lots of people dying, unfortunately, to make people think about how important it is that they have a state that provides them with protection and services. A lot of people forget that the global market and the flat world and all these wonderful things have been beneficial only to a very small group of people. It is surprising, but even today, the percentage of people living outside the country they were born in is about 3% globally. Most of us live and die in the same state where we were born. Our chances are molded by that state and not by the global situation. To be a globetrotter is fine. I’ve been one for a while, and I’ve enjoyed it, but I know that I’m privileged and it’s not something anyone can do. I’m realizing how irritating it is for people who can’t enjoy these benefits to be left behind. The people who can play the global game enjoy the best of it. They’re doing better, but too much has been given to them. All the rest are really left behind. If you look at income increases in places like the United States, it’s shocking. Since the 1980s, nothing has happened. We’re now at the third generation of people who have seen no rise in income. They are frustrated, and it’s understandable. They are angry because they think somebody has gamed the system against them—and that’s probably true. I’m sure she’s right about American history . I think the common turning point is Francis Fukuyama’s article about the end of history. That’s where it all culminated and we came together saying, ‘We won it, we are here, it’s a global world, it’s going to be more and more liberal and democratic.’ That was the misguided assumption. It certainly had roots earlier, whether it was the 70s, or the 80s, I can’t pinpoint the exact date. In political theory it came much later, people were dealing with minority rights until the 90s. When rewriting nationalism started my first book, Liberal Nationalism , was one of the first to be published, in 1993. I got rejections from very significant publication houses. They said, ‘it’s a great book, but nationalism is of no importance anymore. You Middle Easterners are still stuck in the past.’ That was before 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then there was the process of liberation of the republics of the former Soviet Union and suddenly there was a wave of national movements. Nationalism came back. One of the claims I make in the book is that it never disappears. Sometimes it takes a front seat and sometimes it takes a back seat, but it’s there all the time. It’s a mistake not to see it when it’s in the backseat because then you miss the warning signs when it comes back."

"I’ve never met the author of this book because I’m stuck here in Tel Aviv, at the far end of the world. I love this book because Krastev explains to us the way Eastern Europeans think and this is something we don’t naturally see. A lot of the resentment in Eastern Europe to liberalism has to do with resentment to the previous process of Russification of these countries and their desire to come back and gain their autonomy, to re-identify themselves as nations. He rightly says that the celebratory mood in the 90s that ‘We’re all liberals seeking national self-determination’ was a misguided view. Eastern Europeans said, ‘We’re going back to our roots and those roots were never liberal. They were more Romantic roots and very different from the West’. The West just imposed an interpretation on the East and I think this is very important to understand why Europe is never—or not likely, or at least not at the moment, who knows, no one dares to predict anything now—going to create unity. There’s more populism in the East. He doesn’t write about it but, for me, the German case is always fascinating. East and West Germany were separated only for 45 years in history, it’s a very short period of time, but still the differences are there. You go to East Germany and, immediately, you know you’re in the East. It’s not something that has evaporated. Reading Krastev opened my mind to a new and very interesting way of thinking. I think it’s true."

"Yes, because as I said, when nationalism is sitting in the backseat, we don’t really notice it. Sometimes we don’t pay attention to it, but it’s there. I’m always a foreigner, wherever I study or work, so I always feel it because I see how people treat their nation, their flags. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter For example, no one in Israel would ever dare raise the demand for a pledge of allegiance in schools, as they do in the United States. When I came as a child to the United States, I was astonished. I had my nine year old dilemma, should I do it? Should I put my hand on my heart? Should I say Israel or America? Who am I? What am I doing here? It was like, ‘Wow, this is really a very strong commitment of national allegiance.’ Americans don’t always see it; they say it’s a pledge for liberty or a pledge for democracy —but it’s a very American thing. Americans just don’t see the national background of their everyday lives. And it happens in other countries too. This is why I love this book. It opened my eyes to see a lot things—from poetry , to hymns, to even, like you said, the way people treat their future. Are you optimistic or pessimistic? It seems a very personal question. But then you look at nations, and there are more or less pessimistic or optimistic nations, partly due to their historical background. Yes. I would go to the Proms as a student at Oxford. The audience joins in to sing a very national song on the last night, Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory . It’s not neutral. Yes. Liah Greenfeld shows in her first book, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity that, historically, the conception of identity started only when people started moving around. If you live in a village and never go out of that village and never meet anyone, you think everybody is like you. The question of identity is insignificant. The moment people start moving, and they see there are other peoples with other traditions and other languages, this becomes an issue. No, the people in the global elite gave up their national identity to enjoy the benefits of globalism. They cherish, say, English more than the national language, they send their children to study in global schools, they ski and party together, then they spread the coronavirus to the rest of the world. What I’m trying to show in my book is that if you are a globetrotter, it is more rational for you to be more global in your self-identification, and if you’re stuck in your country it’s more rational to be more nationalistic. It’s no surprise that globalists are mostly well-educated globetrotters who benefit a lot from this lifestyle, and the more nationalist people are those stuck behind and who are not likely to ever enjoy it. “Many countries like Israel, that were liberated in the postcolonial era, saw nationalism as a liberating force” I’m sure there are places in the United States where people will never meet anybody. I remember once I gave a talk in Colorado, and before I started talking, somebody said to me, ‘Beware when you say pluralism, they think you mean Catholics. This is not New York, there is more uniformity.’ But the two world wars made very clear distinctions of nations and made nations aware of themselves. Then there’s the media, immigrants, minorities. You can’t miss it now."

"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."