National Culture and Communities of Descent

Descent and nationality have never had an easy time with one another in the era of the modern nation-state. Descent and nationality generate their own solidarities, overlapping but almost never co-terminus, each making claims of contingent intensity and range upon each other and upon individuals. The tension between descent and nationality has been an especially prominent feature of the United States, where descent-communities are many in number and historically unequal in status, and where the national community is officially committed to treat individuals equally regardless of descent.

The oldest of the world’s major constitutional regimes, founded under the aegis of Enlightenment universalism, has only gradually and incompletely ceased to be “a white man’s country” with a predominantly Anglo-Protestant national culture. The principle of separation of church and state long served to address the relation of the national, civic community to what was taken to be the most potent of the nation’s subnational and transnational cultures. But this principle, which proved difficult enough to apply fairly to the religiously defined cultures for which it was designed, gave little guidance when these ostensibly consenting cultures were substantially supplemented, if not replaced, in the cultural politics of the nation by cultures associated with communities of descent. The Old Republic has faced, in the early decades of its third century, demands for public support of ethnoracially defined, diasporic cultures some of which are identified by color distinctions the diminution of which has been a goal of many liberal and radical movements in the history of the United States.

These contingent relations of civic nationality and communities of descent in the United States are now enacted on a world stage structured by two features. First, whatever capacity nation-states may have to serve as guarantors of rights, providers of welfare, and agents of democratic-egalitarian values is under severe pressure from a capitalist economy that achieves greater and greater integration and concentration on a global basis. Second, the cultural life of nation-states is increasingly subject to particularization by descent-communities, even while multinational corporations disseminate elements of a commercially functional “universal” culture flowing largely from the high-tech societies of the North Atlantic West. In this world-historical context, those who defend the nation-state are divided on the question of the “national culture” in the United States. We should try to avoid anything answering to this name, argue many critics of nationalism who view national culture as necessarily monolithic, coercive, and exclusive to a particular community of descent.

Yet national culture has been identified by David M. Potter and a number of other theorists as the most significant factor in the making and sustaining of national solidarity. ¹ And the United States possesses some political and demographic features that may neutralize the most troubling aspects of national culture in ways that theorists of nationalism have not confronted as directly as they might. ² These features of the United States can compel the attention of anyone who recognizes the centrality of nation-states to the contemporary world, who appreciates the contribution of culture to national solidarity, and who finds narrow the cultural programs associated with the most widely discussed of nationalist movements in the past and present. Three contrasts between the United States and a number of other nations and protonations are most salient.

First, this nation of immigrants—and of descendants of immigrants and of slaves and of conquered peoples—is more conspicuously diverse, ethnoracially, than are the communities on behalf of which nationalist movements of varying intensity and success have recently been launched or renewed by Basques, Croats, Flemings, Kurds, Macedonians, Quebecois, Scots, Serbs, Sikhs, Slovakians, Tamils, and Ukrainians. Second, the United States, as a nation whose population derives from a number of different European countries, as well as from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, displays a greater range of descent-communities than do most of the established, major nation-states of Europe, Asia, and Latin America to which the United States is accustomed to comparing itself, including Argentina, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Third...