Politics & Power Quote by Michael Ignatieff

Ignatieff’s line reads like a small act of damage control, the kind politicians deploy when they want the emotional power of flag-waving without the moral baggage that often comes with it. “I distinguish” is the key phrase: it frames him as a referee of civic virtue, someone claiming the authority to sort acceptable belonging (patriotism) from dangerous belonging (nationalism). It’s less a definition than a boundary-drawing exercise.

The subtext is that public attachment to country isn’t going away, and pretending it should is politically suicidal. So the move is to launder loyalty through a respectable vocabulary. Patriotism becomes the cleaned-up version: affection for a shared civic project, compatible with pluralism and liberal democracy. Nationalism, by contrast, gets coded as possessive, exclusionary, and historically combustible. The brilliance is that he can affirm “love of country” while quietly disavowing the xenophobic or revanchist energies that so often hitch a ride on it.

Context matters because Ignatieff isn’t merely a theorist; he’s a liberal politician navigating electorates where identity can be a shortcut to power. The distinction functions as an inoculation against two attacks at once: from the right (“you don’t love your country”) and from the left (“your patriotism is a gateway drug to chauvinism”). It’s a tactical clarification meant to keep liberalism emotionally competitive.

The line works because it names a real tension in modern democracies: belonging can be a civic glue or a weapon. Ignatieff is trying to keep the glue and ban the weapon, even knowing how often the two come in the same tube.