LE3 .A278 2022

2022

Viriasova, Inna

Acadia University

Master of Arts

Masters

Political Science

Politics

This thesis looks at the role that nationalism ought to perform in Western liberal democracies, given the increasingly expanding pluralisation of Western societies. This thesis looks at the nexus of public culture shared between nationalism studies and deliberative democratic theory to create a normative foundation to evaluate and critique Habermasian theory on efforts to transition to postnational democracy. To do this, this thesis considers literature of the two fields and how they benefit one another in an assessment of Habermasian theory through a normative approach. I argue that the historiographical-descriptive approach of national studies benefits the prescriptive approach of deliberative democratic theory by offering an objective macro-level understanding of the ‘when’ and ‘where’ nations can come to exist and by what universalist criteria a nationalism doctrine can be considered. Nationalism is understood to be a form of cultural and educational reproduction of the nation’s history, myth, traditions and values. I further argue that the deliberative-prescriptive approach offers a normative ideological movement to fill in the normative gaps of historiographical nationalism, such that it offers the micro-level understanding of the ‘how’ and ‘why’ legitimacy can be obtained and how the public sphere acts to self-contain unwanted normative behavior. Adopting this descriptive-prescriptive methodology, I evaluate Jürgen Habermas’ assemblage of sociocultural, legal, and political theories designed to further his efforts to restructure society according to the ideal of communicative rationality. I argue that Habermas is unable to escape the historical link between prepolitical origins that embed national consciousness into the modern state despite attempting to argue for a purely voluntarist civic constitutional state. Consequently, I make a positive argument for nationalism using Habermasian lifeworld theory. Both lifeworld theory and nationalism are informed by the cultural and educational reproduction of symbolic bonds, and both offer a homogenizing force that allows for social integration within multicultural societies. By combining the normative elements of Habermasian theory with the explanatory elements of nationalism, I argue that nationalism and national consciousness is a solution to, not a problem of, fragmentation and instability in Western liberal democracies.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:3890