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Every collective identity, also a postnational one, is much more concrete than the ensemble of moral, legal and political principles around which it crystallizes.
Jürgen Habermas'Man' is really 'the German' .
Marx, The German Ideology
British and American political theorists tend to dismiss the concept of constitutional patriotism for two main reasons.1 On the one hand, constitutional patriotism -- understood as a post-national, universalist form of democratic political allegiance -- is rejected on account of its abstract or, as an especially inappropriate metaphor goes, 'bloodless' quality. Given the universalist morality at the heart of constitutional patriotism, so the critics argue, there is no reason to identify with any particular polity. In other words, constitutional patriotism is said to be a kind of aspirational oxymoron, in which the universalist part -- indicated by the concept of constitutionalism -- will always drive out the idea of loyalty -- indicated by the concept of patriotism.
However, a second criticism -- much more muted in writing, but often voiced in direct confrontation with the advocates of constitutional patriotism -- holds almost exactly the opposite from the first. Here it is argued that constitutional patriotism, while appearing universalist, is in fact particular through and through. According to what one might call a genealogical critique, it is held that constitutional patriotism might have been appropriate in the context where it originated -- namely West Germany, a 'half-nation' with a sense of deeply compromised nationality on account of the Nazi past. But, so the argument goes, other countries do not have a comparably difficult past, and therefore are better served by forms of liberal nationalism. A further argument holds that other countries either have no (written) constitutions, or that they simply do not venerate the constitution as a focal point of democratic loyalty in the way Germans (and Americans, for that matter) might do. Constitutional patriotism, in short, is a sort of particularism in universalist disguise -- and one that might be foisted on Europe as a whole, if the advocates of a 'European constitutional patriotism' have their way. In a strange fashion, Thomas Mann's nightmare -- a German Europe, rather than a European Germany -- might come true, after all.
In this essay, I shall argue that what has...