Beyond the Ontological Question: Liberal Nationalism and the Task of Constitution‐Building

• Author: Stephen Tierney
• Published date: 01 January 2008
• Date: 01 January 2008
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0386.2007.00406.x

REVIEW ARTICLE

Negotiating Nationalism: Nation-Building, Federalism, and Secession in the

Multinational State. By Wayne Norman. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006.

xxi +250pp. Hb. £47.00.

Beyond the Ontological Question: Liberal Nationalism and

the Task of Constitution-Building

Stephen Tierney*

Introduction

One of the most interesting stories of the past 20 years has been the extent to which

nationalism has been the focus of intense debate by liberal political philosophers. As

Wayne Norman suggests in Negotiating Nationalism, it is now useful to take stock and

assess where this flurry of activity has taken us, and in doing so we can set his book

in the context of two waves of work. The first involved philosophers in challenging

complacent misconceptions concerning the nature of the state and of national identity

that had been allowed to embed themselves in liberal democratic theory. As Norman

puts it: ‘Philosophers in the “first wave” were faced with the burden of proving that it

was not impossible to be a liberal and a nationalist at the same time’.1In this respect the

first part of Norman’s book is largely a retrospective account setting his ideas in the

context of those scholars of nationalism whose work has come to be known as ‘Liber-

alism II’.2This school emerged in response to developments in political practice, in

particular the emergence of strong nationalist movements in what have come to be

known as ‘multinational’ or ‘plurinational’ states such as Belgium, Spain, the UK and

Canada.3Indeed it is no surprise that many of the theorists of the new school of

liberalism—including Norman himself—are Canadian, with their theoretical work

developing in an environment of intense political dispute between Quebec and the rest

of Canada.

Negotiating Nationalism, however, is not simply an exercise in exegesis, mapping the

existing philosophical terrain. After reviewing how scholars such as Kymlicka have

* School of Law, University of Edinburgh.

1Negotiating Nationalism, at 1 (original emphasis).

2Characterised by C. Taylor, ‘The Politics of Recognition’, in A. Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism and the

Politics of Recognition (Princeton University Press, 1992). Other seminal works in this new tradition

include W. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 1995); J. Tully, Strange Multi-

plicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge University Press, 1995); and M. Moore, Ethics

of Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2001).

3M. Keating, Plurinational Democracy: Stateless Nations in a Post-Sovereignty Era (Oxford University

Press, 2001).

European Law Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1, January 2008, pp. 128–137.

© 2008 The Author

Journal compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK

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