Constitutional patriotism has been criticized for providing too thin an identity as the ground for common citizenship. Answering this criticism, Habermas recently stressed the role of affective attachments in creating constitutional patriotic bonds. Still, an account of the type of imagination that could foster such post-national affective attachments is lacking. Drawing on Herder's conception of political culture, I argue that constitutional patriotism requires a modern form of mythology. This would include narratives that shape people's imaginative capacity to see their own (...) culture as a vulnerable and fallible part of a plural mankind and as a free and equal contributor to the global advancement toward humanity. In contrast to ideological mythology, an enlightened use of myth would engage the interactive and communicative potential of poetic images in ways that shape a common feeling of humanity. In short, Habermas’ constitutional patriotism requires supplementing the power of law to create bonds between people. This can be done through the cultivation of imaginative engagements with foreign others. Such imaginative engagements would shape good dispositions that are conducive to tolerance, peace and justice. This addition also allows Habermas’ argument for constitutional patriotism to better answer the communitarian accusation of supranationalism. (shrink)

Although he did not invent the term, Jürgen Habermas has popularised “constitutional patriotism” as a form of political unity that avoids excessive nationalism. This paper attempts to examine the link between emotivism and normativity that has otherwise been excluded from Habermas’s notion of constitutional patriotism. Beyond Habermas, political theory as a whole has not yet taken emotivism as a serious component of normativity. Rather than developing it in isolation, this paper attempts to reconcile emotivism with cognitive-normative practices found within rational (...) deliberation. Reconciling the two not only provides a better normative steering component for judging good from bad practices, but also depicts contemporary political practices more accurately. In sum, constitutional patriotism’s normativity must be sourced from a complex integration of emotion and cognition, or put another way, from the interplay between citizens’ moral sentiments and rational judgements. (shrink)