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PARTISAN REVIEW
to confront and revise the justification of traditional patterns, ranging
from marriage and child-rearing to leadership in scouting, participation
in athletics, or the obligations of military service. Thus, the replacement
of a negative or positive concept of liberty by the third concept supports
an alternative interpretation of equality.
(2) New Patterns in Nationalist Movements
With each of the three concepts of liberty, there is a parallel justifica–
tion of modern and contemporary nationalist movements. Excepting the
conceptual perspective of negative liberty, the individual sovereign state
assumes the role of the individual person whose integrity is to be pro–
tected from external coercion. In the theories of political sovereignty
that emerged with the beginnings of the modern nation-state, a sover–
eign state was identified as an integral and inviolable member of an
international system of recognized states. Each state had a fundamental
right of self-defense against an aggressor. The fundamental duty of the
sovereign state was defined in terms of the exercise of this right of self–
defense and the protection of the national interest. This exercise was
considered
to
be sufficient reason for the abrogation of the liberties of
many citizens and individuals . Accordingly, the primacy of political
freedom was identified with the preservation of the independence of the
sovereign state from external acts of incursion or aggression. Within the
international system, the idea of negative liberty is expressed in the for–
mulation of non-aggression pacts among all established states whose
sovereignty is absolute.
The shift from a negative to a positive concept of liberty can be traced
in the changing political visions of the nature of the sovereign state. The
seventeenth-century Enlightenment ideal was the achievement of a bal–
ance-of-power system among integral sovereign states . This rationalist
idea was replaced by the nineteenth-century Romantic vision of the
nation-state as the embodiment of the aspiration for self-determination
of a historic People. The focus shifts from the protection of the existing
sovereign states to the development of new states from their embryonic
nationhood as derived from a common language or shared collective
experience and memory. The processes which give birth to the new
nation-state may involve acts of secession from the established political
order, particularly against the traditional European multiethnic or
multinational empires . The ideal of positive liberty is invoked in the jus–
tification of wars of national liberation and may be used to legitimate
territorial transgression against established sovereignties. The justifica-
t
