LAUSR

Following the terrorist attacks in France in 2015, President Hollande proposed adopting the so-called law of “deprivation of nationality” for persons who had committed actions against the “fundamental interests of the Nation,” or for those who evaded “obligations related to the code of national service”. Although this idea petered out in the end, one cannot help asking what the vague notion “interests of the Nation” means. Is it about defending security in the strict sense – and in this case, the Nation is understood simply as being a composite of individuals – or is it about defending the values of the Nation, which would imply defining the latter quite differently? But in this case, in what way would breaching these values justify a withdrawal of nationality? In this example, it is understood that what is hiding behind a security initiative is in fact an initiative about identity. This event reminds us that belonging to an “imagined community”, that of the Nation, a social construction imagined by the persons taking part in it, when fully adhered to, leads to allegiance to a certain number of shared and respected “values” that shape society. In a liberal democracy, these are freedom of expression, of association, recognition of minorities, etc. However, this allegiance becomes more complex as society becomes increasingly plural and multicultural, fragmenting into local, regional, ethnic and religious communities. Indeed, the individual must then be able to hold together multiple loyalties from different spheres. The question asked by Luke Bretherton can then be framed as the following: how should the individual co-ordinate his spheres of loyalty so that a multicultural nation can preserve its cultural coherence? From the outset, the threat of being deprived of one’s nationality suggests an obvious answer to this question: civic loyalty to a nation which recognizes us as its citizens oversees and commands the overall structure of the various loyalties of the individual. The contemporary configuration of citizenship in democracy, which is built into the framework of the nation-state and pervaded by the pluralism of society, compels us to reappraise secular liberal logic so that it allows the free development of each individual within a political framework that is habitable for all. By so doing, Bretherton’s reflections propose a more subtle and broader understanding of citizenship that takes into account a wider spectrum of positions. He thus justifies including in public life fragments and entities which the liberal political system usually relegates to the private life of individuals.