Shared Membership Beyond National Identity: Deservingness and Solidarity in Diverse Societies
| Author | Allison Harell,Keith Banting,Will Kymlicka,Rebecca Wallace |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032321721996939 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321721996939
Political Studies
2022, Vol. 70(4) 983 –1005
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321721996939
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Shared Membership
Beyond National Identity:
Deservingness and Solidarity
in Diverse Societies
Allison Harell1, Keith Banting2,
Will Kymlicka3 and Rebecca Wallace4
Abstract
Liberal nationalists argue that identification with the nation promotes feelings of mutual obligation,
including support for redistribution. Existing attempts to test this hypothesis have focused on
whether the higher sense of national identity among the majority increases support redistribution.
We argue for a twofold shift in focus. First, beyond the majority’s own national identity, we need
to explore their perceptions of whether minorities share this identity. Second, we need to shift
from one-dimensional ideals of ‘identity’ to more complex ideas of attachment and commitment.
Do members of the majority view minorities as committed to the nation and willing to make
sacrifices for it? Drawing on a custom-designed online survey in Canada, we show that three
salient out-groups (Aboriginal peoples, French-speaking Canadians and immigrants) are seen
by majority respondents as less committed to Canada, and that this is a powerful predictor of
support for general and inclusive redistribution.
Keywords
redistribution, ethnocultural diversity, membership, liberal nationalism, social solidarity
Accepted: 29 January 2021
What are the wellsprings of social solidarity? What conditions nurture the willingness of
individuals to support redistributive social programmes that help the poor and the vulner-
able? The most common answer to this question is that solidarity is ultimately sustained
by an ethic of social membership, a sense of belonging to a shared community. In the
oft-quoted words of T.H. Marshall (1950: 96), the welfare state rests on ‘a direct sense of
community membership based on loyalty to a civilization that is a common possession’.
Historically, this sense of community membership has been tied to ideas of nationhood: a
1Department of Political Science, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada
2Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada
3Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada
4Department of Political Science, University of Toronto, Mississauga, Toronto, ON, Canada
Corresponding author:
Allison Harell, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, QC H3C 3P8, Canada.
Email: harell.allison@uqam.ca
996939PSX0010.1177/0032321721996939Political StudiesHarell et al.
research-article2021
Article
984 Political Studies 70(4)
nation marks the boundaries of membership, defining the community within which soli-
darity is expected and nurturing the emotional sense of obligation to support each other in
times of need.
This linking of solidarity to nationhood has come under scrutiny, due in part to immi-
gration and ethnic and religious diversity. Anxiety about the impact of diversity on soli-
darity and support for the welfare state has been a recurring theme in both academic
scholarship and public debates around immigration and multiculturalism. Ethnic ideas of
nationhood – ‘blood and soil’ nationhood – tend to exclude newcomers and ethnic minori-
ties and cannot generate the inclusive sense of ‘us’ that is needed in the context of con-
temporary diversity. However, liberal nationalists argue that a thinner form of nationalism
– one animated not by a historic ethnicity but by a shared political culture – can sustain a
sense of community and mutual obligation. This thinner form of nationalism, in this inter-
pretation, can sustain a generous welfare state in a diverse society.1
In our view, the question of whether nationhood can continue to provide the basis for
social solidarity is of fundamental importance. Critics argue that efforts to create inclu-
sive conceptions of nationalism have continually faltered (Antonsich and Petrillo, 2019),
and that the dream of a truly diversity-respecting nationalism may be a mirage. Defenders
of liberal nationalism respond that efforts to create post-national forms of solidarity have
equally faltered, that the dream of a post-national future has been revealed as an illusion,
and that we have no choice but to keep working towards inclusive nationalisms (Nodia,
2017).
Our aim in this article is not to definitively resolve this controversy, but to refine the
terms of the debate, and to improve our tools for measuring the prospects and limits of
inclusive nationalism. As we shall see, previous research on the liberal nationalism
hypothesis has focused on the national identity of the majority population, measuring the
nature and/or intensity of respondents’ own sense of identification with the nation, and
asking whether those with a stronger sense of national identity or national pride support
redistribution. This article argues, however, that such tests are inadequate because we
need to pay attention not only to the majority’s own relationship to the nation, but also to
how the majority population perceives newcomers’ and minorities’ relationship to the
nation. Moreover, in exploring these perceptions, we need to move beyond a narrow
focus on ‘identity’ to explore more complex and morally loaded ideas of ‘attachment’,
‘commitment’, or in Marshall’s own words, ‘loyalty’. The liberal nationalism hypothesis
argues that nationhood can be a source of mutual obligation, and both terms – ‘mutual’
and ‘obligation’ – matter. The prospects for an inclusive national solidarity in diverse
societies, we believe, depend in part on whether citizens (can come to) see each other as
having a mutual moral commitment to a national ‘we’.
If this is right, then a crucial methodological challenge is to explore majority percep-
tions of minorities’ commitment to the nation, or what we will call ‘membership percep-
tions’. This is a surprisingly under-studied field. However, we believe that the growing
literature on deservingness judgements offers a helpful starting point. There is now a
substantial international literature documenting that certain groups are seen as less deserv-
ing of welfare support than others, and as we will see, it is a virtually universal finding
that immigrants are at the bottom of the ‘deservingness hierarchy’ in Europe, while Black
Americans tend to be viewed most harshly in the American context. The usual explana-
tion for these findings is that immigrants and racialized minorities are seen as lazy or as
economic burdens, driven in part by prejudicial stereotypes. The liberal nationalism the-
sis, however, offers a different possibility: judgements of undeservingness may reflect, at
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