From world citizenship to purified patriotism: Obama’s nation-shaping in a global era

Abstract

This analysis responds to two questions in recent scholarship. The first is Ulrich Beck’s call for scholars to empirically explore how nationhood is evolving in a global context – whether and how nation-states are being cosmopolitanised. The second concerns normative debates regarding what form belonging should take in a global era – patriotic attachments or cosmopolitan ones. The rhetoric of Barack Obama provides empirical fodder for both explorations. As a leader who proclaimed and was widely noted for his cosmopolitan sensibilities, yet ultimately relied heavily on themes of patriotism and American exceptionalism, Obama’s case confirms that nationhood remains a potent form of collectivity in the contemporary era; suggests that although the conditions of globalisation may be facilitative ones with regard to cosmopolitanisation, they are not sufficient ones; and calls into question Martha Nussbaum’s recent claim that if ‘purified’, patriotism lends itself to a ‘striving for global justice and inclusive human love’.

Keywords:

• Obama
• nation
• globalisation
• cosmopolitanism
• patriotism
• belonging

Notes

1. If multiple such references were made within a single paragraph, but still spoke to the same initial point, I counted this as one reference only.

2. I used the label ‘other’, of which there were only four, when the reference was beyond the US but without any specific topical content. In his 2011 SOTU, for example, Obama declares that: ‘I know there isn’t a person here who would trade places with any other nation on Earth’.

3. The 2011 SOTU, for example, focused repeatedly on ‘what sets us apart as a nation’, and ‘how we will win the future’. One paragraph addressing global economic competition states: ‘So yes, the world has changed. The competition for jobs is real. But this shouldn’t discourage us…America still has the largest, most prosperous economy in the world’. ‘We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world…That is how we’ll win the future’.

4. For example, Obama shared this in his 2013 SOTU: ‘Above all, America must remain a beacon to all who seek freedom during this period of historic change. I saw the power of hope last year in Rangoon…when thousands of Burmese lined the streets, waving American flags’, including a man who said, ‘There is justice and law in the United States, I want our country to be like that’.

5. Examples of this perspective are few, but, in his 2010 SOTU, after discussing diplomatic efforts in North Korea and Iran, Obama states: ‘That is the leadership that we are providing – engagement that advances the common security and prosperity of all people…America takes these actions because our destiny is connected to those beyond our shores. But we also do it because it is right’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sheila Croucher

SHEILA CROUCHER is Distinguished Professor of American Studies at Miami University.