A Country of eir Own
 Liberalism Needs the Nation
 BY 
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
 May/June 2022
 FRANCIS FUKUYAMA is Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International
 Studies at Stanford University and the author of the forthcoming book Liberalism and Its Discontents (Farrar,
 Straus and Giroux, 2022), from which this essay is adapted.
 Liberalism is in peril. e fundamentals of liberal societies are tolerance of di erence, respect for
 individual rights, and the rule of law, and all are under threat as the world su ers what can be
 called a democratic recession or even a depression. According to Freedom House, political rights
 and civil liberties around the world have fallen each year for the last 16 years. Liberalism’s decline
 is evident in the growing strength of autocracies such as China and Russia, the erosion of liberal—
 or nominally liberal—institutions in countries such as Hungary and Turkey, and the backsliding of
 liberal democracies such as India and the United States.
 In each of these cases, nationalism has powered the rise of illiberalism. Illiberal leaders, their
 parties, and their allies have harnessed nationalist rhetoric in seeking greater control of their
 societies. 
ey denounce their opponents as out-of-touch elites, e ete cosmopolitans, and
 globalists. 
ey claim to be the authentic representatives of their country and its true guardians.
 Sometimes, illiberal politicians merely caricature their liberal counterparts as ine ectual and
 removed from the lives of the people they presume to represent. Often, however, they describe
 their liberal rivals not simply as political adversaries but as something more sinister: enemies of the
 people.
 e very nature of liberalism makes it susceptible to this line of attack. e most fundamental
 principle enshrined in liberalism is one of tolerance: the state does not prescribe beliefs, identities,
 or any other kind of dogma. Ever since its tentative emergence in the seventeenth century as an
 organizing principle for politics, liberalism deliberately lowered the sights of politics to aim not at
 “the good life” as de ned by a particular religion, moral doctrine, or cultural tradition but at the
 preservation of life itself under conditions in which populations cannot agree on what the good
 life is. 
is agnostic nature creates a spiritual vacuum, as individuals go their own ways and
 experience only a thin sense of community. Liberal political orders do require shared values, such
 as tolerance, compromise, and deliberation, but these do not foster the strong emotional bonds
 found in tightly knit religious and ethnonationalist communities. Indeed, liberal societies have
 often encouraged the aimless pursuit of material self-grati cation.
Liberalism’s most important selling point remains the pragmatic one that has existed for centuries:
 its ability to manage diversity in pluralistic societies. Yet there is a limit to the kinds of diversity
 that liberal societies can handle. If enough people reject liberal principles themselves and seek to
 restrict the fundamental rights of others, or if citizens resort to violence to get their way, then
 liberalism alone cannot maintain political order. And if diverse societies move away from liberal
 principles and try to base their national identities on race, ethnicity, religion, or some other,
 di erent substantive vision of the good life, they invite a return to potentially bloody con ict. A
 world full of such countries will invariably be more fractious, more tumultuous, and more violent.
 at is why it is all the more important for liberals not to give up on the idea of the nation. ey
 should recognize that in truth, nothing makes the universalism of liberalism incompatible with a
 world of nation-states. National identity is malleable, and it can be shaped to re ect liberal
 aspirations and to instill a sense of community and purpose among a broad public.
 For proof of the abiding importance of national identity, look no further than the trouble Russia
 has run into in attacking Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that Ukraine did not
 have an identity separate from that of Russia and that the country would collapse immediately
 once his invasion began. Instead, Ukraine has resisted Russia tenaciously precisely because its
 citizens are loyal to the idea of an independent, liberal democratic Ukraine and do not want to live
 in a corrupt dictatorship imposed from without. With their bravery, they have made clear that
 citizens are willing to die for liberal ideals, but only when those ideals are embedded in a country
 they can call their own.
 LIBERALISM’S SPIRITUAL VACUUM
 Liberal societies struggle to present a positive vision of national identity to their citizens. e
 theory behind liberalism has great di culties drawing clear boundaries around communities and
 explaining what is owed to people inside and outside those boundaries. is is because the theory
 is built on top of a claim of universalism. As asserted in the Universal Declaration of Human
 Rights, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”; further, “Everyone is
 entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any
 kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social
 origin, property, birth or other status.” Liberals are theoretically concerned with violations of
 human rights no matter where in the world they occur. Many liberals dislike the particularistic
 attachments of nationalists and imagine themselves to be “citizens of the world.”
 e claim of universalism can be hard to reconcile with the division of the world into nation
states. 
ere is no clear liberal theory, for instance, on how to draw national boundaries, a de cit
 that has led to intraliberal con icts over the separatism of regions such as Catalonia, Quebec, and
 Scotland and disagreements over the proper treatment of immigrants and refugees. Populists, such
 as former U.S. President Donald Trump, have channeled that tension between the universalist
 aspirations of liberalism and the narrower claims of nationalism to powerful e ect.
Nationalists complain that liberalism has dissolved the bonds of national community and replaced
 them with a global cosmopolitanism that cares about people in distant countries as much as it
 cares for fellow citizens. Nineteenth-century nationalists based national identity on biology and
 believed that national communities were rooted in common ancestry. is continues to be a theme
 for certain contemporary nationalists, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has
 de ned Hungarian national identity as being based on Magyar ethnicity. Other nationalists, such
 as the Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony, have sought to revise twentieth-century ethnonationalism by
 arguing that nations constitute coherent cultural units that allow their members to share thick
 traditions of food, holidays, language, and the like. e American conservative thinker Patrick
 Deneen has asserted that liberalism constitutes a form of anticulture that has dissolved all forms of
 preliberal culture, using the power of the state to insert itself into and control every aspect of
 private life.
 Signi cantly, Deneen and other conservatives have broken with economic neoliberals and have
 been vocal in blaming market capitalism for eroding the values of family, community, and
 tradition. As a result, the twentieth-century categories that de ned the political left and right in
 terms of economic ideology do not t the present reality neatly, with right-wing groups being
 willing to countenance the use of state power to regulate both social life and the economy.
 ere is considerable overlap between nationalists and religious conservatives. Among the
 traditions that contemporary nationalists want to preserve are religious ones; thus, the Law and
 Justice party in Poland has been closely aligned with the Polish Catholic Church and has taken on
 many of the latter’s cultural complaints about liberal Europe’s support for abortion and same-sex
 marriage. Similarly, religious conservatives often regard themselves as patriots; this is certainly true
 for the American evangelicals who formed the core of Trump’s “Make America Great Again”
 movement.
 e substantive conservative critique of liberalism—that liberal societies provide no strong
 common moral core around which community can be built—is true enough. is is indeed a
 feature of liberalism, not a bug. e question for conservatives is whether there is a realistic way to
 turn back the clock and reimpose a thicker moral order. Some U.S. conservatives hope to return to
 an imagined time when virtually everyone in the United States was Christian. But modern
 societies are far more diverse religiously today than at the time of Europe’s religious wars in the
 sixteenth century. e idea of restoring a shared moral tradition de ned by religious belief is a
 nonstarter. Leaders who hope to e ect this kind of restoration, such as Narendra Modi, India’s
 Hindu nationalist prime minister, are inviting oppression and communal violence. Modi knows
 this all too well: he was chief minister of the western state of Gujarat when it was racked by
 communal riots in 2002 that left thousands dead, mostly Muslims. Since 2014, when Modi
 became prime minister, he and his allies have sought to tie Indian national identity to the masts of
 Hinduism and the Hindi language, a sea change from the secular pluralism of India’s liberal
 founders.
 THE INESCAPABLE STATE
Illiberal forces around the world will continue to use appeals to nationalism as a powerful electoral
 weapon. Liberals may be tempted to dismiss this rhetoric as jingoistic and crude. But they should
 not cede the nation to their opponents.
 Liberalism, with its universalist pretensions, may sit uneasily alongside seemingly parochial
 nationalism, but the two can be reconciled. e goals of liberalism are entirely compatible with a
 world divided into nation-states. All societies need to make use of force, both to preserve internal
 order and to protect themselves from external enemies. A liberal society does this by creating a
 powerful state but then constraining the state’s power under the rule of law. e state’s power is
 based on a social contract among autonomous individuals who agree to give up some of their
 rights to do as they please in return for the state’s protection. It is legitimized by both the common
 acceptance of the law and, if it is a liberal democracy, popular elections.
 Liberal rights are meaningless if they cannot be enforced by a state, which, according to the
 German sociologist Max Weber’s famous de nition, is a legitimate monopoly of force over a
 de ned territory. e territorial jurisdiction of a state necessarily corresponds to the area occupied
 by the group of individuals who signed on to the social contract. People living outside that
 jurisdiction must have their rights respected, but not necessarily enforced, by that state.
 States with a delimited territorial jurisdiction therefore remain critical political actors, because
 they are the only ones able to exercise a legitimate use of force. In today’s globalized world, power
 is employed by a wide variety of bodies, from multinational corporations to nonpro t groups to
 terrorist organizations to supranational bodies such as the European Union and the United
 Nations. e need for international cooperation in addressing issues such as global warming and
 pandemics has never been more evident. But it remains the case that one particular form of power,
 the ability to enforce rules through the threat or the actual use of force, remains under the control
 of nation-states. Neither the European Union nor the International Air Transport Association
 deploys its own police or army to enforce the rules it sets. Such organizations still depend on the
 coercive capacity of the countries that empowered them. To be sure, there is today a large body of
 international law that in many domains displaces national-level law; think, for example, of the
 European Union’s acquis communautaire, which serves as a kind of common law to regulate
 commerce and settle disputes. But in the end, international law continues to rely on national-level
 enforcement. When EU member states disagree on important matters of policy, as they did during
 the euro crisis of 2010 and the migrant crisis of 2015, the outcome is decided not by European law
 but by the relative power of the member states. Ultimate power, in other words, continues to be
 the province of nation-states, which means that the control of power at this level remains critical.
 ere is thus no necessary contradiction between liberal universalism and the need for nation
states. Although the normative value of human rights may be universal, enforcement power is not;
 it is a scarce resource that is necessarily applied in a territorially delimited way. A liberal state is
 perfectly justi ed in granting di erent levels of rights to citizens and noncitizens, because it does
 not have the resources or the writ to protect rights universally. All people within the state’s
territory are due the equal protection of the law, but only citizens are full participants in the social
 contract, with special rights and duties, in particular the right to vote.
 e fact that states remain the locus of coercive power should inspire caution about proposals to
 create new supranational bodies and to delegate such power to them. Liberal societies have had
 several hundred years of experience learning how to constrain power at a national level through
 rule-of-law and legislative institutions and how to balance power so that its use re ects general
 interests. 
ey have no idea how to create such institutions at a global level, where, for example, a
 global court or legislature would be able to constrain the arbitrary decisions of a global executive.
 e European Union is the product of the most serious e ort to do this at a regional level; the
 result is an awkward system characterized by excessive weakness in some domains ( scal policy,
 foreign a airs) and excessive power in others (economic regulation). Europe at least has a certain
 common history and cultural identity that do not exist at the global level. International
 institutions such as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court
 continue to rely on states to enforce their writs.
 e German philosopher Immanuel Kant imagined a condition of “perpetual peace” in which a
 world populated by liberal states would regulate international relations through law rather than by
 resorting to violence. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated, unfortunately, that the world
 has not yet reached this post-historical moment and that raw military power remains the ultimate
 guarantor of peace for liberal countries. e nation-state is therefore unlikely to disappear as the
 crucial actor in global politics.
 THE GOOD LIFE
 e conservative critique of liberalism contains, at its core, a reasonable skepticism of the liberal
 emphasis on individual autonomy. Liberal societies assume an equality of human dignity, a dignity
 that is rooted in an individual’s ability to make choices. For that reason, they are dedicated to
 protecting that autonomy as a matter of basic rights. But although autonomy is a fundamental
 liberal value, it is not the sole human good that automatically trumps all other visions of the good
 life.
 e realm of what is accepted as autonomy has steadily expanded over time, broadening from the
 choice to obey rules within an existing moral framework to making up those rules for oneself. But
 respect for autonomy was meant to manage and moderate the competition of deeply held beliefs,
 not to displace those beliefs in their entirety. Not every human being thinks that maximizing his
 or her personal autonomy is the most important goal of life or that disrupting every existing form
 of authority is necessarily a good thing. Many people are happy to limit their freedom of choice by
 accepting religious and moral frameworks that connect them with other people or by living within
 inherited cultural traditions. 
e U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment was meant to protect the
 free exercise of religion, not to protect citizens from religion.
 Successful liberal societies have their own culture and their own understanding of the good life,
 even if that vision may be thinner than those o ered by societies bound by a single doctrine. ey
cannot be neutral with regard to the values that are necessary to sustain themselves as liberal
 societies. 
ey need to prioritize public-spiritedness, tolerance, open-mindedness, and active
 engagement in public a airs if they are to cohere. ey need to prize innovation, entrepreneurship,
 and risk-taking if they are to prosper economically. A society of inward-looking individuals
 interested only in maximizing their personal consumption will not be a society at all.
 States are important not just because they are the locus of legitimate power and the instruments
 for controlling violence. ey are also a singular source of community. Liberal universalism on one
 level ies in the face of the nature of human sociability. People feel the strongest bonds of a ection
 for those closest to them, such as friends and family; as the circle of acquaintance widens, their
 sense of obligation inevitably attenuates. As human societies have grown larger and more complex
 over the centuries, the boundaries of solidarity have expanded dramatically from families and
 villages and tribes to entire countries. But few people love humanity as a whole. For most people
 around the world, the country remains the largest unit of solidarity to which they feel an
 instinctive loyalty. Indeed, that loyalty becomes a critical underpinning of the state’s legitimacy and
 thus its ability to govern. In certain societies, a weak national identity can have disastrous
 consequences, as is evident in some struggling developing countries, such as Myanmar and
 Nigeria, and in some failed states, such as Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.
 THE CASE FOR LIBERAL NATIONALISM
 is argument may seem similar to ones made by Hazony, the conservative Israeli scholar, in his
 2018 book, e Virtue of Nationalism, in which he advocates a global order based on the
 sovereignty of nation-states. He makes an important point in warning against the tendency of
 liberal countries, such as the United States, to go too far in seeking to remake the rest of the world
 in their own image. But he is wrong in assuming that the existing countries are clearly demarcated
 cultural units and that a peaceful global order can be built by accepting them as they are. Today’s
 countries are social constructions that are the byproducts of historical struggles that often involved
 conquest, violence, forced assimilation, and the deliberate manipulation of cultural symbols. ere
 are better and worse forms of national identity, and societies can exercise agency in choosing
 among them.
 In particular, if national identity is based on xed characteristics such as race, ethnicity, or religious
 heritage, then it becomes a potentially exclusionary category that violates the liberal principle of
 equal dignity. Although there is no necessary contradiction between the need for national identity
 and liberal universalism, there is nonetheless a powerful potential point of tension between the
 two principles. When based on xed characteristics, national identity can turn into aggressive and
 exclusive nationalism, as it did in Europe during the rst part of the twentieth century.
 For this reason, liberal societies should not formally recognize groups based on xed identities
 such as race, ethnicity, or religious heritage. ere are times, of course, when this becomes
 inevitable, and liberal principles fail to apply. In many parts of the world, ethnic or religious groups
 have occupied the same territory for generations and have their own thick cultural and linguistic
 traditions. In the Balkans, the Middle East, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, ethnic or religious
identity is de facto an essential characteristic for most people, and assimilating them into a broader
 national culture is highly unrealistic. It is possible to organize a form of liberal politics around
 several cultural units; India, for example, recognizes multiple national languages and has in the
 past permitted its states to set their own policies with regard to education and legal systems.
 Federalism and the concomitant devolution of powers to subnational units are often necessary in
 such diverse countries. Power can be formally allocated to di erent groups de ned by their cultural
 identity in a structure that political scientists call “consociationalism.” Although this has worked
 reasonably well in the Netherlands, the practice has been disastrous in places such as Bosnia, Iraq,
 and Lebanon, where identity groups see themselves locked in a zero-sum struggle. In societies in
 which cultural groups have not yet hardened into self-regarding units, it is therefore much better
 to deal with citizens as individuals rather than as members of identity groups.
 On the other hand, there are other aspects of national identity that can be adopted voluntarily and
 therefore shared more broadly, such as literary traditions, historical narratives, and language, food,
 and sports. Catalonia, Quebec, and Scotland are all regions with distinct historical and cultural
 traditions, and they all include nationalist partisans seeking complete separation from the country
 to which they are linked. ere is little doubt that these regions would continue to be liberal
 societies respecting individual rights were they to separate, just as the Czech Republic and
 Slovakia did after they became separate countries in 1993.
 National identity represents obvious dangers but also an opportunity. It is a social construct, and it
 can be shaped to support, rather than undermine, liberal values. Many countries have historically
 been molded out of diverse populations that feel a strong sense of community based on political
 principles or ideals rather than deterministic group categories. Australia, Canada, France, India,
 and the United States are all countries that in recent decades have sought to construct national
 identities based on political principles rather than race, ethnicity, or religion. e United States has
 gone through a long and painful process of rede ning what it means to be an American,
 progressively removing barriers to citizenship based on class, race, and gender—although this
 process is still incomplete and has experienced many setbacks. In France, the construction of a
 national identity began with the French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
 Citizen, which established an ideal of citizenship based on a common language and culture. In the
 mid-twentieth century, Australia and Canada were countries with dominant white-majority
 populations and restrictive laws regarding immigration and citizenship, such as the notorious
 “White Australia” policy, which kept out immigrants from Asia. Both, however, reconstructed their
 national identities on nonracial lines after the 1960s and opened themselves up to massive
 immigration. Today, both countries have larger foreign-born populations than does the United
 States, with little of the United States’ polarization and white backlash.
 Nonetheless, the di culty of forging a common identity in sharply divided democracies should
 not be underestimated. Most contemporary liberal societies were built on top of historical nations
 whose understandings of national identity had been forged through illiberal methods. France,
 Germany, Japan, and South Korea were all nations before they became liberal democracies; the
United States, as many have noted, was a state before it became a nation. e process of de ning
 the American nation in liberal political terms has been long, arduous, and periodically violent, and
 even today that process is being challenged by people on both the left and the right with sharply
 competing narratives about the country’s origins.
 Liberalism would be in trouble if people saw it as nothing more than a mechanism for peacefully
 managing diversity, without a broader sense of national purpose. People who have experienced
 violence, war, and dictatorship generally long to live in a liberal society, as Europeans did in the
 period after 1945. But as people get used to a peaceful life under a liberal regime, they tend to take
 that peace and order for granted and start longing for a politics that will direct them to higher
 ends. In 1914, Europe had been largely free of devastating con ict for nearly a century, and masses
 of people were happy to march o to war despite the enormous material progress that had
 occurred in the interim.
 e world has perhaps arrived at a similar point in human history: it has been free from large
scale interstate war for three-quarters of a century and has, in the meantime, seen a massive
 increase in global prosperity that has produced equally massive social change. e European Union
 was created as an antidote to the nationalism that had led to the world wars and in that respect
 has been successful beyond all hopes. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine augurs more disarray and
 violence ahead.
 At this juncture, two very di erent futures present themselves. If Putin is successful in
 undermining Ukrainian independence and democracy, the world will return to an era of aggressive
 and intolerant nationalism reminiscent of the early twentieth century. e United States will not
 be immune from this trend, as populists such as Trump aspire to replicate Putin’s authoritarian
 ways. On the other hand, if Putin leads Russia into a debacle of military and economic failure, the
 chance remains to relearn the liberal lesson that power unconstrained by law leads to national
 disaster and to revive the ideals of a free and democratic world
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