He says that, as with the SNP in Scotland or Podemos in Spain, patriotic sentiment can be dynamic and go hand in hand with a commitment to European internationalism.
Thus the bank has dollars in hand and a commitment to pay them out in, say, three months.
A budget, on the other hand, involves a commitment to a forecast to make an agreed-on outcome happen.
Public schools, on the other hand, have a commitment to educating every child who lives in the district.
IOC president Thomas Bach dismissed the idea out of hand, saying "a commitment to non-discrimination" would be mandatory for all future Olympics hosts.
Buhari, a former military leader elected in 2015 in the nation's first peaceful transfer of power, campaigned on maintaining "continuity" — not a particularly catchy platform, but after years of violent political transitions, one appealing to Nigerians who view the president as having a steady hand and a commitment to fighting corruption.
A retained commitment to national targets and regional planning on the one hand, a new commitment to local-led development and an end to targets on the other.
Whereas he had formally been torn between, on the one hand, a practical commitment to the moral improvement of humanity and, on the other, a theoretical commitment to "intelligible fatalism," he found in the Critical philosophy a way of reconciling his "head" and "heart" in a system that could meet the highest intellectual standards without requiring him to sacrifice his belief in human freedom.
All that matters is that the defendant is torn between, on the one hand, a deontological commitment to treat all suspects humanely, and on the other, a consequentialist concern with the deaths of many innocent victims.
With the issue of the leaders' debates still unresolved, appearing on The Andrew Marr Show, Mr Balls encouraged his Conservative counterpart to shake hands on a commitment to participate in a one-to-one debate with him.
Without firm answers to them, no one should reject perfectionist ethics out of hand because of a commitment to egalitarian values.
