The final chapter brings us back to the contemporary political dilemmas we face today and discusses how the recovery of premodern conceptions of the nation helps us think through the challenge of national pluralism and resurging nationalist sentiment. It encourages openness to some virtues of empire as a multinational form of politics, considers the merits of a pluralistic political order, and suggests new avenues for cultivating democratic solidarity in diverse polities. In particular, the chapter engages with liberal multiculturalist arguments to illustrate the advantages of medieval approaches to national diversity. In place of self-government rights, the book suggests legal pluralism and policies of recognitions as more fruitful arrangements for multinational polities. Moreover, the chapter applies the insights of the study to the European Union and the United States, respectively. It concludes by responding to a number of liberal nationalist concerns, especially the need for pre-political partnership to undergird democratic politics.

The first chapter introduces and outlines the project of the book. As a point of departure, it discusses the logic of the nation-state and explains why this ideal is fundamentally unrealistic and, therefore, inadequate as a principle for political organization. Contra liberal nationalists, it argues that even where the “standard liberal package” is granted to all citizens, the nation-state remains intrinsically exclusionary and unjust. Moreover, the chapter discusses the limitations of existing approaches to national pluralism, including liberal multiculturalism and constitutional patriotism before laying out the ensuing research agenda. In order to recover an alternative to the nation-state, the book proposes to examine the theoretical relationship between nations and political organization prior to the rise of the nation-state in the early modern period. The chapter addresses both methodology and source selection.

Faced with the challenge of accommodating diversity, liberal justice and human rights promise to provide an adequate normative framework for securing equal liberties and rights for all. However, despite great advancements in theory and law, discrimination endures, and these promises have not been fulfilled for enduring minorities, especially in places of ethno-national conflict. The problem this chapter aims to highlight is that while liberal democracy and human rights frameworks provide us with a desirable ideal, they fail to provide useful guidance for progress, from a situation of ethno-national conflict – which often involves political exclusion, sharp inequalities, low mutual trust, and high animosity – to more just and peaceful societies that respect the human rights of all. Self-determination is currently blocked as a legal remedy; states are reluctant to grant minority rights, especially in cases where majority–minority relations are in conflict; and scholars of equality law, asserting that any real advancement is blocked because of the individualist orientation of the law, send us back to collective measures.

Many responses to the resurgence of “majority nationalism” assume that that there is nothing normatively significant to the claims of national majorities. They accordingly seek to blunt the force those claims – or simply redescribe them in ways that do not account for majority nationalists’ central commitments or concerns. The very arguments used to ground minority rights in Kymlicka’s works appear to equally justify at least some majority cultural rights. Where a group possesses majority status by reasonably benign means and yet faces threats to its culture through the operation of, for example, globalization, Kymlickean arguments for minority rights grounded in cultural vulnerability equally justify majority cultural rights. In “Nationhood, Multiculturalism, and the Ethics of Membership,” Kymlicka presents justice-based reasons to think that majority rights claims should nonetheless be neutralized. Yet his arguments assume that majority and minority rights claims will only be made within the boundaries of a nation-state and that rights recognition in those circumstances will be a “zero sum” game. This assumption too is unwarranted in a globalized world. The issue of majority rights claims is at least more complicated than what Kymlicka allows.

Chapter 4 considers a perspective that encourages citizens to develop a preliminary culture of trust on top of something other than a shared commitment to liberal democracy. According to “liberal nationalists” like David Miller and Yael Tamir, citizens should develop a sense of “bounded solidarity” on the basis of their shared nationality. Although nationality can assume exclusivist, illiberal, and anti-democratic forms, liberal nationalists maintain that it can evolve in inclusive and liberal democratic directions. This chapter shows that liberal nationalism is an incomplete perspective. Although liberal nationalism can help overcome the problem of initiation, it cannot adequately ensure that nationality will shed itself of exclusivist racial or ethnic components. Moreover, liberal nationalism does not provide citizens with the resources and capacities necessary to deepen any preliminary sense of trust which might have emerged; liberal nationalism only helps citizens better tolerate their differences and disagreements. So, this chapter paves the way for the rest of the book’s discussion of role-based constitutional fellowship. The chapter also considers constitutional patriotism.

Political theorists and social scientists alike agree that passions matter for politics, but disagree about which passions matter most and how they contribute to political flourishing. I make the case that resentment, contrary to its traditional associations with violence and injustice, in fact makes us alive to the suffering of others and leads us to aid them in seeking restitution. When we adopt the resentments of others by sympathizing with them, we implicitly recognize their equal moral and political status, too, key commitments of liberalism. I argue that liberals of all stripes should embrace sympathetic resentment as a proper moral motive for justice.

Chapter 3 revisits explanations for contradictory US policy via the ideological typology to develop a model of competing conceptions of the international rule of law. Opposition to US legal policy has converged on forms of ‘legalism’, as a set of beliefs that law consists of non-instrumental rules and that the international legal system should be developed by analogy with municipal law. The four ideal types, as well as legalism, are applied to reinterpret the classic Anglo-American conception of the rule of law composed of three elements that, when translated to the global level, are concerned with: how to develop non-arbitrary global governance; how to define equality under IL defined; and how to determine the integrity of international judicial power. Each element of the rule of law has been interpreted in a distinctive form by the competing ideologies, thus establishing a structured contest over principles for designing and developing global legal institutions. The meaning of ‘coherence’ becomes that a legal policymaker’s interpretation of any one of the three elements is a reliable indicator of positions taken on remaining elements.