Politics & Power Quote by Michael Ignatieff

“Civic nationalism” is a deliberately calming phrase: it wraps the charged word nationalism in the paperwork of citizenship. Ignatieff is trying to rescue national attachment from the taint of blood-and-soil politics by pointing to a model that sounds procedural, inclusive, and exportable. Britain becomes a convenient exhibit A: a state held together less by a single ethnicity than by institutions, laws, and a story of belonging you can, at least in theory, opt into.

The subtext is defensive and tactical. Ignatieff is speaking in an era when Western democracies are being tugged between cosmopolitan liberalism and resurgent populism. By insisting civic nationalism exists in “Britain and dozens of other countries,” he’s building a coalition of the normal: this isn’t a fringe experiment or a Canadian academic’s fantasy; it’s a widely used operating system. The phrase “dozens of other countries” does important political work, creating statistical plausibility without getting trapped in specifics that critics could pick apart (Scotland? Quebec? Northern Ireland?).

Context matters because Britain is also a case study in the fragility of this ideal. Its civic story is constantly stress-tested by empire’s afterlives, immigration debates, and constitutional fault lines. Ignatieff’s intent is to stake out a third position: you can affirm borders and shared obligations without sliding into ethnic hierarchy. The rhetorical gamble is that nationalism can be rebranded as a civic virtue rather than an exclusionary weapon, even when the public mood keeps trying to turn it back into one.