How diversity challenges the nation state
by Will Jones, Rebel Priest:
Did you know that the Republic of Ireland has a Minister of State for the Irish Diaspora? Thought to number up to 80 million, the Irish Diaspora consists of anyone with Irish ancestry who lives outside of Ireland. The Irish are proud of their diaspora and their achievements. Under Irish law, people of Irish nationality, wherever they live or are born, are deemed to be Irish citizens up to the third generation.
This idea of a diaspora reflects the traditional concept of a nation. Under this idea a nation is an ethnic (from the Greek ethnos for people or nation, or, if you prefer, ethno-cultural) group with a (relatively) distinctive ancestry and culture. People of this nation might be born or live anywhere where they or their ancestors have migrated. But they will usually identify with a national homeland somewhere.
Where this homeland is free from foreign subjugation it typically takes the form of a nation state. A nation state, on this understanding, is the political expression of a nation, where its ethnic group predominates and enjoys self-determination, living under its own laws and customs, peaceably within its borders.
Despite the continuing legacy of this traditional concept of the nation and the jus sanguinis or ‘right of blood’ that underpins it, the kind of nationalism which emphasises it is largely verboten in modern politics, marginalised as nativist and racist. Instead the politically correct form of nationalism is civic nationalism, under which the connection with the dominant ethnic group is downplayed or denied altogether.
The Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru both claim to be civic nationalist parties, though their special concern to promote Scottish and Welsh culture casts doubt over whether they fully understand what that means.
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