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Articles I National Identity and Self-Esteem
National Identity and Self-Esteem
By Jeff Spinner-Halev and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse
Is the self-esteem of individuals tied to their nation? If so, is that a good reason to strive for a world of safe, secure nations? Many
liberal nationalists answer yes to these questions, but they do so without looking at the large social-psychology literature on
groups and self-esteem. We examine the claims of liberal nationalists in light of this literature. The good news is that self-respect1
and group identity are strongly connected and can lead people to place collective interests above individual interests. The bad
news is that the liberal-nationalist assumption that low-status groups have little self-respect and majority groups have it in abun-
dance is mistaken. Perhaps most worrisome is the competitive nature of collective self-esteem: people feel better when their group
does better than others. This competitiveness can lead to outright hostility when groups compete for resources and political
power. Self-esteem is clearly an unstable foundation for a liberal nation. Although we do not think that problems caused by
national identity and self-esteem can be fully solved, we do suggest ways in which they can be contained.
ver the last decade or so, a surprising development has
occurred within political theory: a liberal defense of nation-
alism. Though nationalism received liberal support in the
nineteenth century, its popularity declined among theorists after
World War II, when the concept became associated with violence
and aggression. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of
nationalistic politics across Europe, however, liberal theorists have
taken a renewed interest in nationalism, and the communitarian
critique of liberalism has induced many liberals to reexamine the
relationship between liberalism and community. While not endors-
ing communitarianism, many liberals defend the idea of giving
political support to national communities. They are careful not to
argue that every nation deserves a state-there are too many
nations and too many places where there are mixed populations-
but the idea of granting some sort of autonomy, which may or may
not include statehood, to national groups is increasingly popular.
The attempt to fashion a liberal theory of nationalism is important,
since such a theory would provide a framework for people to
satisfy national aspirations in a nonviolent way.
Jeff Spinner-Halev is the Schlesinger Professor of Political Science at
the University of Nebraska-Lincoln jspinner@unl.edu). He is the
author of Surviving Diversity: Religion and Democratic
Citizenship and The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity
and Nationality in the Liberal State. Elizabeth Theiss-Morse is
professor ofpolitical science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln
(etheissmorse@unl.edu). She is the coauthor of two award-winning
books (With Malice Toward Some and Congress as Public
Enemy). Her most recent book, with John Hibbing, is Stealth
Democracy: Americans' Beliefs about How Government Should
Work. The authors thank Tali Mendelberg, Jennifer Hochschild,
Patrice McMahon, and three anonymous reviewers for comments
on an earlier draft of this essay. Elizabeth Theiss-Morse gratefully
acknowledges the financial support of the National Science
Foundation (SES-0111887) for her work on national identity.
Liberals give a number of reasons for granting autonomy to
national groups, but recently the most prominent has been the
idea that people's self-respect is tied to their national community.
Nationality is a crucial aspect of people's identity, the argument
goes. If one's nation is demeaned or weakened, then one's self-
respect will be as well. Self-respect theorists support autonomy for
nations, even if the individual rights of their members are fully
secure.
The self-esteem argument departs from the nineteenth-century
liberal defense of nationalism in two related ways. First, it assumes
that a just world is a world of nations. Many earlier liberals, even
if they supported some national movements, thought that eventu-
ally the nation would fade away as more global forms of gover-
nance arose. Nationalist movements were seen, as Isaiah Berlin
noted, as a "passing phase."2 Second, and more important for our
purposes, the self-respect argument applies to all nations, not just
oppressed ones. There is a long liberal tradition of supporting
nationalist movements that aim to throw off the yoke of oppres-
sion. We too find arguments for the "remedial right to secede" per-
suasive and will have little to say about them.3 We are interested
here in the relatively new liberal attempt to justify nationalism on
the grounds of low self-esteem where there may be no individual
oppression.4
The self-respect argument is invoked by the most prominent
defenders of national autonomy, including Charles Taylor, Will
Kymlicka, Kai Nielsen, Neil MacCormick, Yael Tamir, Avishai
Margalit and Joseph Raz, and (in slightly different forms) Isaiah
Berlin and John Rawls. But the evidence supplied for the con-
nection between self-respect and national identity is paltry. This
is surprising since for the last half century social psychologists
have studied self-respect and group identity with great insight
and have published mounds of studies on the psychology of
groups. Instead of assuming the connection between self-respect
and national identity, we think that a review of the evidence is in
order. In this article, we examine the self-respect argument
offered by liberal nationalists. We also review the psychological
www.apsanet.org 515