Sleeping Dogs, Prowling Cats and Soaring Doves: Three Paradoxes in the Political Theory of Nationhood
| Published date | 01 June 2001 |
| Author | Margaret Canovan |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9248.00309 |
| Date | 01 June 2001 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Sleeping Dogs, Prowling Cats and
Soaring Doves: Three Paradoxes
in the Political Theory of Nationhood
Margaret Canovan
Keele University
This article examines three paradoxes concerning nationhood and nationalism in which political
theorists have become entangled. Until recently most mainstream political theorists ignored nation-
hood. In constructing their own theories, however, they tacitly relied upon it to supply the polity
with boundaries, solidarity and collective power. More recent attempts to defend national self-
determination on liberal grounds have proved self-defeating, containing perverse incentives to
illiberal actions and appearing to authorize neo-imperial tutelage. But cosmopolitan anti-nationalists
also find themselves in a paradoxical position, since nation-states provide the indispensable launching-
pad for attempts to transcend nationalism.
Is there something particularly intractable about nationalism? Many of the most
long-running political conflicts are national ones, while even in the peaceful realms
of political theory it seems to be hard to think about nationhood and nationalism
without becoming entangled in paradox. This paper is concerned with three
different paradoxes in the political theory of nationalism. For ease of reference I
shall label them the paradoxes of the sleeping dog, the prowling cat and the soaring
dove. The first refers to the long-standing contradiction whereby political phil-
osophers tacitly assumed the presence of nations to underpin theories that were
unsympathetic or hostile to national loyalties. The recent revival of nationalist
politics has brought this slumbering paradox out into the open, prompting some
theorists to try to resolve it in one of two ways, either by recognizing the importance
of nations and seeking to give them theoretical expression, or else by denying their
continuing relevance and seeking explicitly post-national solutions. My argument
is that both of these opposed strategies lead their adherents into further paradoxes.
Although the article is predominantly critical, it concludes that political theorists
may be able to learn important lessons from these frustrating encounters with
nationhood.
The Paradox of the Sleeping Dog
In the familiar Sherlock Holmes story, ‘the curious incident of the dog in the night-
time’ was that no incident occurred: the dog did not bark when it might have been
expected to. Within mainstream Western political theory in the second half of the
twentieth century, the nation was the dog that did not bark, slumbering unnoticed
all the time. Not that nationalism had ever received as much attention from
theorists as its practical impact might seem to warrant, as Isaiah Berlin pointed out
(Berlin, 1981). But for many decades after 1945, revulsion against Nazism added
disapprobation to indifference, sweeping such matters out of sight and out of mind.
© Political Studies Association, 2001.
Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
204
M A R G A R G E T C A N O V A N
If the topic was considered at all by most mainstream political theorists it was
discussed only to be dismissed as unworthy of notice (e.g. Graham, 1986, pp. 121–40;
Goodin and Pettit, 1993, p. 3).
The paradox is that those same theorists were taking nations for granted all the
time. While ignoring or dismissing nationhood, they were relying on tacit assump-
tions about the ubiquity of nations to make their theories work. Renan’s observation
on the contribution that forgetting can make to national unity has been much quoted
during the recent revival of interest in nationalism, often to counter insistence on
keeping alive the memory of ancient wrongs (Renan, 1939, p. 190). But amnesia
is still more intimately associated with nationhood, which seems to be most
influential when it has sunk so far below the threshold of social consciousness as
to be almost part of the air we breathe. Acute commentators have recently drawn
attention to some of the ways in which these hidden assumptions of nationhood
structure the very world that we perceive. In the words of Rogers Brubaker, we live
in ‘a world in which nationhood is pervasively institutionalized in the practice of
states and the workings of the state system. It is a world in which nation is widely,
if unevenly, available and resonant as a category of social vision and division.’
(Brubaker, 1996, p. 21; cf. Billig, 1995; Calhoun, 1997).
Despite their formally universalist habits of discourse, political philosophers have
shared this unconscious tendency to take nations and national boundaries for
granted, with the result that crucial questions have remained unasked. Theorists of
democracy have rarely worried about the boundaries of the ‘people’ who were to
generate representatives to act for them and accept majority decisions as binding,
because a nation with limits and unifying bonds was unconsciously taken to be the
norm (Canovan, 1996, pp. 16–26). Contested national allegiances could be invoked
to explain failed or problematic democracies, as in Northern Ireland, but the
contribution shared nationhood elsewhere might be making to the legitimacy of
democratic representation tended not to come up for discussion. Similarly eloquent
silences can in retrospect be detected within the debates on social justice that
occupied so much of the attention of political philosophers during this period.
Theorists of justice rarely stopped to ask why sharing of resources should happen
within this particular group of people, taking for granted the existence not only
of a state but (more crucially) of a political community owning collective resources
and sharing communal solidarity. Although the explicit purpose of John Rawls’
‘Original Position’ and ‘Veil of Ignorance’ was to enable him to arrive at principles
of justice undistorted by ‘the accidents of nature and social circumstance’ (such
as birth into a privileged caste or race), Rawls took for granted that these principles
applied only inside ‘a self-contained national community’ recruited primarily by
birth, an assumption shared unreflectively by almost all of those who debated the
theory over twenty years (Rawls, 1972, pp. 102, 357; Tamir, 1993, pp. 117–21).1
Rawls’ subsequent elaboration of a ‘law of peoples’ has only made this incongruous
assumption more conspicuous (Rawls, 1999).
Even consciously anti-communitarian theorists helped themselves to similar assump-
tions by taking for granted the existence of polities of a particular and unusual
kind: areas of pacified political space, enjoying sufficient generalized trust to make
possible the rule of equal law inside their borders. The more cosmopolitan liberals,
S L E E P I N G D O G S , P R O W L I N G C A T S A N D S O A R I N G D O V E S
205
fixing their eyes on the broad horizon of humanity, also took for granted that
these cohesive polities would be so good at mobilizing popular support that they
would be able to project power outside their borders in defence of human rights
(Canovan, 1998). In retrospect, political theorists’ failure to ask questions about
the sources of power is particularly striking. As they explored questions of freedom,
justice and rights, almost all contemporary political philosophers have taken for
granted that a modern polity can be expected to wield a great deal of power with
very little use of force. It is assumed that states will have enough power within
their own boundaries not only to maintain order, collect taxes and provide an
adequate infrastructure, but also to enforce equal laws, justly allocate benefits
and burdens, and protect the rights of citizens, including members of minorities.
Externally, the expectation is that the state will be able not only to defend its
borders but to support liberal causes across the world. The uses that ought to be
made of these internal and external powers are much debated among political
theorists, but concerning the power itself – its sources, its conditions and its limits
– there is a strange silence within the literature. It is assumed that a reserve of
consensual collective power is there on tap, to be used as required.
Like the boundaries of their ‘peoples’, the power of some modern liberal demo-
cratic polities may seem like part of the order of nature. But looked at in historical
or comparative perspective that view seems oddly parochial. By historical standards,
these states represent astonishing concentrations of collective power, wielding a
degree of control over their territory and receiving a level of co-operation from
their citizens that earlier despots would have envied. Even more remarkably, these
states use relatively little raw coercion: far more of their power is a matter of
mobilizing consensus and directing compliance. To say this is not of course to
discount the many forms of structural coercion and manipulation present in
such societies (Giddens, 1985, pp. 181–92). But what is at issue here is not so much
power over individuals as power to do things by mobilizing collective action.2
It is easy to suppose that the crucial factor is simply ‘modernity’ itself, with all its
technological implications for surveillance and indoctrination. But contemporary
comparisons across the world do not bear this out. A number of modern states that
make use of these technological devices are indeed powerful, though at the cost
of a great deal of coercion. A larger number are actually very weak despite ...
To continue reading
Request your trial