ABSTRACT
This chapter describes whether a satisfactory account of national obligations can be given in terms of political ones, or, if not, what one can make of the notion that they depend upon sentiment. Civic voluntarism takes an oversimplified view of nationality and national obligation, making it hard to see how people could plausibly go wrong about them. Civic republicanism provides a much more promising account of national obligation than does voluntarism. The point of classifying people into nations is a specific political one, and one that becomes possible only with the emergence of the modern state. The civic approach insists on the necessity of political organization for effective social life and emphasizes either the voluntariness of civic association, or formal equality and fraternity within a republic. The culturalist approach attends to the boundaries of cultures supposedly demarcated by modern historical scholarship or scientific methods of ethnography.
