What nation, whose interests? | Max Lacour

Some weeks ago, éminence grise-turned-éminence grise-for-hire Dominic Cummings stood behind a lectern in an overwarm Sheldonian theatre and delivered a lecture entitled “What Is To Be Done?” (see if you notice the subtle Lenin reference). Addressing an audience of those most invested in his opinions (aggrieved perma-remainers and sinister right-wing twinks), Cummings opened with a laundry-list of crises that he considers symptomatic of the British state’s systemic failure including the cover-up of Pakistani and Somali rape gangs, the prospect of blasphemy laws, mass migration, the broken housing market, our phthisic NHS, etc. He was then a bit vague about what makes each of these symptoms of the same failure but appeared to say that the problem is essentially one of elite disconnection. Our political elite, he explained in seemingly Turchinian terms, is terminally disconnected from reality and the people it governs:

It’s visible to people outside; if you talk to normal voters, they see these problems. But inside Westminster, the fake story is the real story. And the reason why I think this is happening, I’ll put it in a broader context is, I think we’re going through a normal cycle of history: slow rot, elites blind and then fragmenting, sudden crisis, fast collapse and then regime change and a new elite with new ideas. I think the core reason for this is that, over a period of a few generations, over and over again, we see a similar story play out; the ideas and institutions of the ruling elites become pulled away from reality. They struggle to adapt to reality. And then, eventually, this gap between the stories that they tell themselves, and what’s actually happening in the real world, this gap falls apart and they fall down into the crack of it.  

This also gives us a sense of Dr Cummings MD’s preferred course of treatment for his ailing, aging patient: radical change in elite ideas, institutions, and, well, membership: “Asking the old people to change the institutions will fail. Just putting new people in the old institutions will also fail. You have to change the people, the ideas, the institutions and the tools altogether.” What we need, he continued, portentously gazing at his audience of wannabe wonks and politicos, is a movement of people — a counter-elite, if you will — ready to earnestly and decisively exercise their political authority rather than merely defer it to senior civil servants and quangos as has become the norm.   

Striking in its absence from Cummings’ diagnoses and prescriptions, however? Democracy! Though he expressed some concern about the distance between Whitehall and the everyman, all of his proposals focussed on the former’s composition and power-balance and none of them considers how this distance might concretely be reduced. In this way, Cummings’ talk provides a useful foil for Philip Cunliffe’s most recent book, The National Interest: Politics After Globalisation. In it Cunliffe, a professor of international relations at UCL, an avowed democrat, and, incidentally, another admirer of Lenin’s oeuvre, broadly aligns with Cummings’s assessment that our state and political elite are failing. His emphasis, however, is quite different. 

For Cunliffe, the distance between rulers and ruled — what, following Peter Mair, he calls “the void” (p.66) — lies at the heart of the British state’s afflictions and curing the latter depends on eliminating the former. He traces the roots of this dysfunction back to the ‘70s and ‘80s when the so-called neoliberals realised that implementing their reforms required breaking organised labour and tearing the locus of political authority away from democratically-constrained representatives and handing it to markets or organisations like the European Union (pp.62-68). So total was their victory that even the Labour left was converted, quickly becoming the loudest champions of European integration (p.64). And it is because of this collective turn away from the electorate and towards the supranational and the global, Cunliffe continues, that political elites have been able to pursue policies that have hollowed out the British state’s capacity and popular legitimacy, such as service privatisation (pp.65-66) and levels of immigration “world-historic in [their] epic scale” (p.93). Accordingly his book goes beyond Cummings’ focus on the SW1 navel and proposes a way of retethering elite decision-making to “the people’s” will: framing each and every political discussion, at all levels of society, in terms of this thing called the “national interest” (p.19).  

• The Argument: The National Interest ↔ Mass Democracy

At first glance, the “national interest” seems unhelpfully vague — but that, Cunliffe tells us, is very much the point. It is what he calls an organising principle (p.17). This means that while it lacks a fixed referent (that is, it does not designate a fixed entity in the way that “cat” or “Keir Starmer” do), it presupposes and/or implies a particular form of social organisation through which that referent has to be determined, in this case mass democracy. In other words, Cunliffe does not provide the reader with a list of actionable policies but with a framing for debates about those policies. Turning all such debates, be they over our “orientation to the conflicts over Ukraine, Taiwan or Israel, energy transition, energy decarbonization, electoral reform, free speech or educational reform” (p.19), into debates over what is or isn’t in the national interest will, he argues, foster the mass democratic renewal that this country so badly needs.

He makes his case in essentially historical terms. Having largely dismissed international relations theory with droll brutality (chapter 2), he turns to the actual role played by a concern for the national interest in constituting the modern mass democratic state, beginning with an examination of the national interest’s immediate ancestor, la raison d’état. Famously developed by men like Nicolo Machiavelli and Cardinal Richelieu, La raison d’état emerged in Renaissance Europe as a secular understanding of politics and political power distinct from those associated with empire, the church, or individual monarchs (p.40). For la raison d’état’s exponents, the exercise of political power’s proper basis was not Heaven’s demands, Rome’s orders, or ties of loyalty to individual noblemen but a duty to defend a newer entity like “the realm” (p.40). This introduced to practical political thought the idea of a worldly collective whose interest needed articulation and protection, thus laying the preconditions for the national interest (p43). 

Over the following centuries, this collective was gradually concretised by a series of revolutions, the English (1639-51), the American (1775-83), and French (1789-99) (p.45). The first defined it around propertied men who, the revolutionaries felt, could be trusted to understand and protect the national interest; the second reaffirmed its significance. However, the defining break towards democratisation came with the third, which effectively birthed the modern nation, “a single people, sharing a common territory, united through the medium of representation in a single national assembly” (p.46). With 1789, la raison d’état’s woolly collective crystalised into “the people” of modern mass democracy; in its wake, state power could only be exercised by them (or by their representatives), in their collective (that is, national) interest. For Cunliffe, this democratisation reached its massifying zenith with the emergence of labour unions, mutual societies, and other civil society organisations (those later smashed by Thatcher) that organised the working classes and gave them an active role in articulating the national interest (p.49). 

In this way, Cunliffe concludes, history demonstrates the positive feedback loop between collectively thinking and speaking in terms of the national interest—one that he hopes to unlock in contemporary Britain (p.8). “To talk in terms of the national interest,” he says,   

… is to talk in the rhetoric of collective political accountability that can be imposed not only on political leaders but also, crucially, on ourselves—the citizenry [or ‘The People’]. The national interest has a ready-made object in as much as it refers to a concrete, legally constituted group—the citizens of a given nation-state and the legal and political apparatus of rule in a given territory. (p.19) 

The national interest, then, promises to rejuvenate our democracy by refocussing us all — elites and layfolk alike — on a shared project of self-determination and filling the void that made possible our state’s many and wide-ranging failures. So while Cunliffe and Cummings agree that Britain is in a bad way, and agree that this has something to do with elite disinterest, they disagree on what is to be done. Whereas Cummings prescribes for the elite, Cunliffe prescribes for our polity as a whole. 

• Evaluating the Argument. 

For clarity, Cunliffe’s argument can be summarised as follows:

1. Britain desperately needs mass democratisation.
2. History shows that a positive feedback loop exists between collectively talking and thinking in terms of the “national interest” and mass democratisation. 
3. Therefore, we should be collectively talking and thinking in terms of the “national interest”.

Each of these can, I think, be fairly challenged. For instance, even if we accept his account of Britain’s road to failure, why should we share his contention in (1) that mass democratisation is the way out? Why should we not, say, see it as a political project that failed like so many others, revealing itself to be ill-suited to modernity’s exigencies and dynamism? However, given space constraints, I will focus instead on raising a worry about (2), i.e. the premise that history demonstrates a positive feedback loop between the national interest and mass democratisation. This, after all, lies at the book’s heart and is its main contribution to our ongoing political debates. 

Cunliffe claims that because a collective concern for the national interest was historically enmeshed with a process of mass democratisation, it will be so again in future. The problem is this is based on what seems to be a selectively teleological gloss on the historical narrative summarised above. If we step back and set aside Cunliffe’s editorialising, it becomes clear that he shows that a concern for the national interest has at different times, under different historical conditions, been associated with various forms of social organisation, only few of which could be rightfully described as mass democratic. It is unclear, then, why mass democracy should be considered the national interest’s “zenith”. Why, in other words, should we take it for granted that reigniting a collective concern for the national interest will bring us back to the mass democracy of labour unions and working men’s clubs, rather than any of the other forms of social organisation mentioned in his book like suffrage of the propertied (p.45), constitutional monarchy (p.47), or Stalinist terror (p.49)? Why should we believe that under our contemporary conditions, a concern for the national interest will not foster some newer and less democratic form of social organisation?      

It is feasible (all too feasible!) that, contra Cunliffe, a concern for the national interest could … foster a technocratic rather than democratic form of social organisation

Let’s flesh this worry out by considering an alternative form of social organisation that a concern for the “national interest” risks promoting. Per Cunliffe, the national interest implies some collective whose interest needs articulating and defending and he takes it for granted that since the 19th century or so, this collective has been “the people” of mass democracy and that it will continue to be so in future. However, this misses the competing way of conceptualising the collective that emerged at around the same time: “the population”. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, governments, intellectuals, and citizens themselves, came to see nations as composed of “populations” with population-level properties in need of regulation like economic productivity, morbidity rates, disease incidence, etc. This, of course, invites forms of government and self-government that differ from mass democracy’s ideal: rather than acting as representatives of a sovereign, self-determining people, governments intervene according to indicators and aggregates produced by experts, and citizens internalise a duty to meet inflation targets, boost Gross National Product, flatten the curve, etc. and behave accordingly. Consequently, it is feasible (all too feasible!) that, contra Cunliffe, a concern for the national interest could mobilise “the population” rather than “the people” and so foster a technocratic rather than democratic form of social organisation. Indeed, I see no reason to expect anything else from our number-saturated polity. 

Joined to my earlier worry about premise (1), this calls into question the overall strength of Cunliffe’s argument: he says that mass democracy is desirable, even necessary, and that the national interest is a good way of fostering it, but then neither explicitly argues for the former nor firmly demonstrates the latter. The National Interest would be more persuasive if it had more clearly made the case for mass democracy’s necessity and more convincingly laid out our route there. Luckily however, Cunliffe has already co-written a book that does both! The excellent, albeit much longer, Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy after Brexit. As such, here is my counsel to any readers curious about the Cunliffean alternative to Dominic Cummings: The National Interest is a punchy polemic with plenty of substance, but one that ultimately needs to be read as an elaboration on, or supplement to, the earlier Taking Control.