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The rising tide of nationalism around the world has left the old-standing liberal order in a precarious position. Today, competing geopolitical powers China, Russia and the US all have nationalist leaders who share a healthy disregard for the multilateral system, allowing trade wars to rage and supranational bodies to crumble. Similarly, in an increasingly divided Europe, once a bastion of liberal-internationalist values, leaders are now proudly identifying themselves as nationalists, which others describe as “a betrayal of patriotism”.
This clash of worldviews has thrust the ‘open versus closed’ debate into the spotlight, but perhaps no face-off has been quite so fiery as the one between Bret Stephens, a New York Times columnist and Yoram Hazony, author of The Virtue of Nationalism. In a debate at Princeton University, Stephens describes nationalism as a “dangerous” ideology that bleeds into darker forms of authoritarianism and ethnonationalism, whereas Hazony, who featured on Giles Fraser’s Confessions last year, calls Stephens’s worldview “smug and condescending”. Instead, he argues that the world is governed best when nations pursue their own independent interests. Video above…
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