Liberalism and nationalism mean different things to different people, depending on who is speaking and who is listening. The two concepts do not necessarily blend well together, and are often mutually exclusive. Seventy years after Indian independence, it is worth recalling that the British claimed that their empire rested on liberal foundations and the transfer of power to nationalist movements justified this claim. In fact, liberalism often clashed with anti-colonial nationalism; the greatest material support to anti-colonial movements came from the Soviet Union, which had its own illiberal empire.
Ever since the rise of the nation state, wars were attributed to the power and expansionist policies of nations. In Europe, nations were in perpetual conflict and Japanese nationalism led to repeated wars, especially with China. The nation state and associated nationalism were regarded in the early 20th century as the root cause of wars, but this was an oversimplification since many - and certainly the Marxists - would argue that capitalism, which led to colonialism, was equally if not mainly responsible. In Europe, as the national idea spread east and south, it became ethnicized and increasingly illiberal, with Giuseppe Mazzini's liberal ethnic nationalism being the exception that proved the rule.
This was why, before Independence, nationalism was regarded with suspicion by Indian intellectuals led by Rabindranath Tagore, the leading exponent of accusing nationalism of being a malign ideology. He made a subtle distinction between the Nation of the West, which he critiqued as mechanical and soulless, and the Spirit of the West representing Enlightenment values such as internationalism and universalism. This was the inspiration that Jawaharlal Nehru drew from Tagore. Around the same time, there were alternative strands of thinking; Vinayak Damodar Savarkar contrasted his version of Hindutva nationalism with the Buddha's universalism, the latter's non-violence being considered by him as contributing to weakening Indian patriotism. Savarkar claimed that "Buddhism had its centre of gravity nowhere".
Nehru saw merit in nationalism because this was the focus of the Independence movement. In mid-1930s, he wrote that the world was divided into bad and good camps - the imperialist/fascists were bad and the socialist/nationalists were good, although he feared that the nationalism of colonized and subject peoples sometimes could degenerate into fascism. He denounced the Indian communists for their failure to identify with nationalists, and thought nationalism was a curse only when it became narrow and fanatical, expansionist and superior. In 1950, he asserted that "the strongest urge in Asia... is the anti-colonial urge and the positive side of it is nationalism", and in 1953, "let us take nationalism which has been and is a very good thing. It has been a great liberating force in certain stages of a country's history. In our country it was a great liberating force".
Narendra Modi's government is a throwback to the ideas of Savarkar and Madhav Sadashiv Golwalkar, representing Indian cultural nationalism and attempting an uneasy balance between the projection of power as opposed to non-violence, and the promotion of peace. Nationalism may take many forms but essentially it is about collective identity, whereas liberalism is about the defence of individual freedom and individual self-determination, the State's role being to protect the private sphere. At the level of practice, liberalism has both advantages and disadvantages, although its vocal partisans will never acknowledge the latter. On the positive side, it can generate social and economic policies and, on the negative side, it is a top-down ideology. Although it talks the language of universal rights and the natural law of economics, its appeal is to the elites, the professional and intellectual classes, and it lacks visceral and emotional appeal, which are the specific attributes provided by nationalism.
Anti-colonial nationalism centred around ridding India of imperialism, but ethnic and religious identity questions surfaced immediately after Independence, and ethnic competition took place in a struggle for resources. Decolonization coincided with the Cold War, when international socialism was available as an alternative to liberalism. In some newly independent countries, this had its obvious attractions; it was anti-Western, and an easy route to external patronage and access to aid on attractive terms.
In Asia, domestic politics is politically conservative when economy is booming, leading to lengthy autocratic governments as in China, Singapore, and Vietnam. The opposite is equally true; the Asian financial crisis of 1997 led to the democratic impulse in Indonesia, South Korea, and temporarily in Thailand. In other words, democracy in Asia is not always shaped by liberalism as in the West. The centrality of civil and political rights is less fundamental, while more State intervention is considered acceptable when it comes to what is regarded in the West as the primacy of individual choice and individual autonomy.
The liberal tradition comprises the platform of ideas that underpinned the post-World War II international system, meaning democracy, free trade, international law, multilateralism, environmental protection and human rights, with the United States of America as the self-styled guarantor of this liberal world order. The problem arose when this ideology became a missionary dogma of nation-building to be introduced throughout the world irrespective of context or condition, with the notorious examples of Western intervention in the third world with totally negative consequences. The US, Europe and Japan brought this liberal order into multilateral institutions which was used to justify illegal wars that caused devastation across continents, and inspired the rise of Islamist extremism and terror. India never subscribed to the view that liberal democracy and nation-building should be exported and Nehru best summed it up when he said "we have to accept the fact that different countries have different political, economic and social systems and they should have perfect liberty to adopt and maintain their own systems".
Liberalism now has become vulnerable in the West from both Right and Left - from far Right populism with the example of Donald Trump, and from the Left represented by spokesmen like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, who regard the present global situation as the neo-liberal preserve of the rich and powerful. The fact is that in spite of all the fine rhetoric from the West, there never has been a community of mutually supporting liberal democracies when it comes to the third world. That is why liberal democratic India never received sufficient support from the industrialized world against the 70-year covert campaign against it by illiberal Pakistan, and will similarly receive insufficient support against undemocratic China if ever that need arises.
International relations are conducted at the meeting point of an egalitarian order of law and a hierarchical order of power. The United Nations represents this mutual tension in the differing principles on which the security council and general assembly are based. This is why the reform of the UN to include India, Japan, Germany and other countries as permanent members of the security council has proved so difficult to achieve.
How will nationalism and liberalism be reflected in a future Asian Century? Both India and China were at the receiving end of Western imperialism and have emerged as supporters of the core principles of international society as reflected in Panchsheel, namely sovereignty, territorial integrity and non-interference. This implies a rejection of Western efforts to qualify sovereignty by making it dependent on human rights protection, and more so to use this pretext to justify the right of intervention. The Non-Aligned Movement and ideas of an Afro-Asian bloc were an attempt to project soft power, but as soon as they were in a position to do so, they joined the nuclear weapons club of hard power. Both countries consolidated their territorial integrity by use of force where necessary and have become major players in the world economy. They used the present world order to chart their rise, though chafing against the inequity of the system in the UN, the world financial institutions and the Western-dominated values-based liberal system, but are yet to adumbrate any alternative based on values guided by Asian nationalism.
The author is a former foreign secretary of India
