Constitutional Patriotism

INTRODUCTION
"CONSTITUTIONAL PATRIOTISM": the expression will sound in many ears like a contradiction in terms. Constitutions serve, by definition, to limit political power and to render power impersonal; patriotism is about mobilizing men and women for personal political sacrifice. Constitutions are, for the most part, settlements that emerged from interest-based bargains, they are the "autobiography of power";1 while patriotism, on the other hand, makes an appeal to transcend self-interest. Constitutions, ideally, articulate not just norms and wider social aspirations, they also protect individual rights; patriotism, however, tempts citizens with illiberal forms of "group-meaningfulness" (George Kateb) and can make them ride roughshod over civil rights and liberties.2 Perhaps it's true that patriotism, as Alasdair MacIntyre once put it, "turns out to be a permanent source of moral danger." Or it might even be the case that, as Kateb has claimed, "patriotism is inherently disposed to disregard morality."3
"Constitutional patriotism"--as understood by those who originally put forward the idea and as understood in this essay--designates the idea that political attachment ought to center on the norms, the values and, more indirectly, the procedures of a liberal democratic constitution. Put differently, political allegiance is owed primarily neither to a national culture, as proponents of liberal nationalism have claimed, nor to "the worldwide community of human beings," as, for instance, Martha Nussbaum's conception of cosmopolitanism has it.4 Constitutional patriotism offers a vision distinct from both nationalism and cosmopolitanism, but also from republican patriotism as traditionally understood in, broadly speaking, the history of Euro-American political thought.
The idea of constitutional patriotism has enjoyed very varying fortunes so far. It was born in post-war, divided Germany and has often been seen as a poor substitute for a "proper" national identity--a substitute that was to become redundant after the country's unification. Yet constitutional patriotism has experienced a major renaissance since the mid-1990s when observers both inside and outside Germany began to view it as a normatively attractive form of civic, non-national (or perhaps even post-national) attachment for increasingly multicultural societies.
In recent years, the idea has also been advanced as a way of conceptualizing "civic identification" at the supranational level, with some scholars explicitly calling for a "European constitutional patriotism."5 Why would such a thing be necessary? A common response goes like this: the process of European integration has remarkably sped up during the 1980s and especially the 1990s; this rapid "deepening," together with the continuous enlargement of the European Union (EU), has led to much agonized thinking about what could "hold Europe together." While politicians, scholars and citizens continue widely to disagree about the exact nature of what a former President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, once called an "unidentified political object," only few dispute that the EU now faces an increasing gap between what Michael Walzer terms "moral" and "legal communities."6 The legal community of the Union is stretching from the Canary Islands to the Eastern border of Poland; from Malta to Lapland; and Europeans--as citizens and consumers--are ever more frequently affected by decisions taken in Brussels. Yet for only a minority of citizens does the EU seem like a genuine moral community, an entity that inspires attachment, "care," or even just meaningful political concern. In short, this supranational, unidentified entity lacks what some philosophers have described as an "identification mechanism for the civic body as a whole."7
It's against this background--the perceived lack of identification and attachment--that the concept of constitutional patriotism has been increasingly debated across Europe, even if its exact relevance has not always been fully spelled out by its proponents. In fact, in many ways, visions of a European constitutional patriotism might seem decidedly absurd. Edmund Burke put it bluntly: "men are not tied to one another by papers and seals. They are led to associate by resemblances, by conformities, by sympathies. It is with nations"--and, one might presume, with Europe--"as with individuals."
Yet even if papers and seals could tie men (and women) together--about which constitution are Europe's citizens supposed to be patriotic? The more than 80,000 pages of the European Union's rules and regulations, the acquis communautaire?