Abstract
In these pages, I address the utility and shortcomings of "constitutional patriotism" 1 as a basis for politics of solidarity and redistribution in immigrant societies. In particular, I want to figure out if an historical-cultural principle may be added to the abstract and formal-legal demands of constitutionalism. Of course, the Left has more than once sought to speak for "the nation" as a concrete historical entity while at the same time holding fast to a universalist, constitutionalist principle. 2 If "constitutional patriotism" is to mean something more than or different from "civic nationalism," and if verfassungspatriotismus 3 is to signify more than the specific legal-political life of the liberal-socialist phase of the German Bonn Republic, it must offer something more than just resonance with different specific nation-state histories. 4 It must somehow both accommodate and integrate national histories with a set of capacious liberal and democratic principles. To begin with, one cannot dismiss the matter of solidarity and collective identity. Even the hippest pre-9/11 post-nationalists, like Arjun Appadurai, had to claim that countries were "one node in a post-national network of diasporas." 5 In this posited transnational world, belonging is multiple and variously institutionalized. Riva Kastoryano claims, for example, that "the country of origin becomes a source of identity, the country of residence a source of rights, and the emerging transnational space, a space of political action combining the two or more countries." 6 If these claims are even partly true, we have to ask what ...