Politics & Power Quote by Michael Ignatieff

Ignatieff’s line works like a quiet trap: it doesn’t attack patriotism as an emotion so much as it exposes the hidden scaffolding that makes the emotion feel effortless. The key phrase is “taken for granted.” Patriotism, in this framing, is not just pride; it’s pride made possible by settled facts - borders that aren’t up for debate, legitimacy that doesn’t need to be argued for, an “ethnic composition” treated as natural rather than constructed. Once those conditions exist, love of country can masquerade as uncomplicated virtue.

The subtext is a critique of the default setting in stable nation-states: people who inherit geopolitical certainty often mistake that inheritance for moral achievement. Ignatieff is also smuggling in a warning about who gets excluded when a nation’s story is built around an assumed ethnic core. If “composition” is taken as given, then newcomers, minorities, and borderland populations become perpetual guests in their own polity - asked to perform loyalty to a national identity that was never designed with them in mind.

Context matters: Ignatieff is a liberal internationalist who has moved between academia, human-rights discourse, and electoral politics. His skepticism reflects the post-Cold War and post-9/11 moment, when nationalism returned as both rallying cry and wedge, and when multiethnic democracies faced pressure to define “real” belonging. The intent isn’t to sneer at attachment to place; it’s to insist that the warm glow of patriotism often depends on cold, contested political facts that someone, somewhere, had to fight to define.