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Old May 25th, 2017 #1
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Post Civic Nationalism is Globalism

There are so many inherent contradictions in the concept of civic nationalism that it’s hard to know where to even begin. It is described by political philosophers as a “non-xenophobic form of nationalism based on shared values such as freedom, equality, tolerance and individual rights”. The fact that very few citizens of modern liberal democracies could even define it is hardly proof of its irrelevance in terms of political discourse; civic nationalism, or citizenship by social contract as opposed to a shared ethnicity or heritage, was the very ideological basis of post-revolutionary France and America and came to be viewed as the most civilized form of Statehood in the post-racial era after WWII.

The fact that Canadian civic nationalists are actually liberals in the classical sense is exemplified by their crusades against Sharia law, and in favour of absolute free speech. They view the encroachment of islam into the public sphere as a violation of secularism, and the recent trends towards the criminalization of blasphemy as an assault on freedom of expression; both of these principles being at the core of the liberal democratic philosophy.

Those who view personal freedom as paramount reject the idea that there is such a thing as a “common good” – they would argue that there are as many conceptions of the good as there are individuals, and that said individuals are free to articulate their lives according to this personal definition of good as long as it doesn’t inconvenience their neighbour. According to Canadian professor and philosopher George Grant (1918-1988):

This moral relativism is built into civic nationalism’s emphasis on a personal definition of the good, and this is why most of its proponents would also tend towards the non-assimilation model of multiculturalism; according to their logic, each racial group is free to pursue their own particular version of the good life as long as they subscribe to the superficial political culture, which is itself far from fixed. They would certainly agree with Frankfurt School philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1929-), who argued that immigrants' only responsibility is to “assent to the principles of the constitution within the scope of interpretation determined at a particular time” [ii] .

Pierre Trudeau’s deconstruction of Canadian identity in favor of feel-good pluralism — which few civic nationalists would object to — seemed to foreshadow Habermas's later statement that “in many countries the majority culture is fused with the general political culture. . . this fusion must be dissolved. . . the level of the shared political culture must be uncoupled from the level of subcultures and their prepolitical identities” [iii].

The Canadian civic nationalist demand for mere surface-level assimilation by newcomers explains why their only real issue with mass immigration is the threat of islamification. They correctly identify the unlikelihood of "radical" muslim communities abiding by the minimal st

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read full article at source: http://www.eurocanadian.ca/2017/05/c...globalism.html
 
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