What Is Nationalism? Its Historical Roots and Influence

Nationalism is one of the most consequential political forces in modern history, yet it remains among the most poorly understood.

Ask a hundred people what nationalism means and you will receive a hundred different answers: pride in one's country, the demand for political independence, dangerous xenophobia, the natural expression of cultural identity, or the modern world's most destructive ideology.

All of these answers capture something true.

The difficulty is that nationalism is not a single thing but a family of related doctrines, movements, and psychological orientations that have taken radically different forms across two centuries of modern history.

At its most precise, nationalism is a political doctrine: the claim that the national unit and the political unit should be congruent, that every nation deserves its own state and every state should embody one nation.

Ernest Gellner, whose 1983 work "Nations and Nationalism" remains the most rigorous theoretical account, defined nationalism as a principle that holds that political and national boundaries should coincide - and that generates political anger when they do not.

This definition places nationalism in the realm of political ideology rather than mere sentiment: it is not simply the love of one's country but the claim that this love entitles a people to self-governance.

The French revolutionaries who declared in 1789 that "the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation" were articulating exactly this doctrine, and they changed the world by doing so.

What makes nationalism peculiar, and peculiarly powerful, is the question it raises about the nation itself. If nationalism is the demand that nations govern themselves, everything hinges on what a nation is - and who constitutes one.

For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, nationalists answered this question confidently: nations were natural, ancient communities whose members shared blood, language, culture, and destiny. The nationalist task was merely to recognize and liberate what already existed.

Scholars have spent the past half-century demonstrating that this self-understanding is largely a myth, and that nations are in fact modern constructs produced by specific historical conditions and sustained by ideological work.

Understanding why this matters - and why the myth nonetheless retains its power - is essential to understanding nationalism as a historical and contemporary force.

"It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round." - Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (1983)

Key Definitions

Nationalism: A political doctrine holding that the national unit and the political unit should be congruent - each nation should have its own state, and each state should be the state of a single nation. Also denotes the ideological movements that mobilize national identity for political ends.

Nation: An imagined political community defined by some combination of shared territory, history, culture, language, and descent, whose members feel a bond of solidarity as co-members.

Civic nationalism: A form of nationalism defining membership through shared political values, legal citizenship, and civic commitment - in principle open to anyone regardless of ethnic origin.

Ethnic nationalism: A form of nationalism defining membership through ancestry, ethnicity, language, religion, or culture - national belonging as inherited rather than chosen.

Volksgeist: The Romantic concept, associated with Johann Gottfried Herder, of a people's collective spirit expressed through language, folklore, and cultural practices.

Imagined community: Benedict Anderson's term for a nation as a community whose members will never know most other members but maintain a shared image of their communion, sustained through common cultural practices such as reading shared texts.

Invented tradition: Eric Hobsbawm's term for national practices presented as ancient that are in fact recent constructs designed to legitimate political projects through an aura of historical continuity.^[4]

Irredentism: The claim that territories outside a state's borders rightfully belong to the national homeland because they are inhabited by co-nationals.

Self-determination: Woodrow Wilson's principle that each people should have the right to govern itself - potentially the most transformative and the most problematic doctrine of the 20th century.

Were Nations Invented? The Modernist Revolution in Scholarship

For most of the 19th century, nations' own self-understanding was broadly primordialist: nations were ancient, natural communities, and the nationalist task was merely to recognize and express what already existed.

This self-understanding served nationalist movements' political purposes well - a claim to statehood was stronger if it could point to historical depth and natural unity.

The scholarly revolution that overturned this assumption came in a burst of intellectual productivity concentrated in the early 1980s.

Ernest Gellner's "Nations and Nationalism," Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities," and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's "The Invention of Tradition" all appeared in 1983, and together they established what is now called the modernist or constructivist consensus: nations are modern political constructs produced by specific historical conditions, not natural expressions of ancient communities.

Gellner's Structural Argument

Gellner's argument was sociological and structural.^[1] He proposed that nationalism is a product of the specific social conditions created by industrial modernity.

Pre-industrial agrarian societies were compatible with enormous cultural diversity - local dialects, customs, and practices varied enormously across short distances - because most people's lives were locally bounded and did not require participation in shared centralized systems.

Industrial societies require something different: labor mobility across long distances, mass literacy for participation in complex economies and bureaucracies, and a common cultural medium through which strangers can communicate and cooperate.

Nationalism provides this medium by homogenizing culture around a single shared language and identity.

The profound implication: nationalism does not recognize pre-existing nations, it constructs them.

German national unity in 1871 was not the political expression of an already-existing German nation; the German nation was produced, culturally and institutionally, through the nationalist project that Bismarck consummated politically.

"It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round."

Anderson's Print Capitalism and Imagined Communities

Anderson approached the same problem through the history of print culture and colonial nationalism.^[2] His central question was the cultural mechanism: how does it become possible to feel deep sacrificial solidarity with millions of strangers one will never meet?

His answer centers on print capitalism. Before the printing press, educated elites communicated transnationally in Latin while peasant communities were confined to local oral worlds.

The commercial publication of books and periodicals in vernacular languages - driven by the economics of the print trade, which needed mass markets - created unified reading publics who consumed the same language, the same news, and the same narratives simultaneously.

The newspaper was central: every morning, people across a territory read the same text at the same time, knowing that millions of others were performing the same ceremony simultaneously. This simultaneity - the sense of a shared "meanwhile" - creates the imagined community of the nation.

Members have never met, but they inhabit a common world constituted by shared language, shared news, and the shared act of reading.

Anderson also showed that nationalist consciousness emerged first not in Europe but in the Americas, among Creole populations separated from the European metropole by administrative boundaries and common economic interests.

Nationalism was not a European export but a logic that could emerge wherever print capitalism created bounded reading communities - a finding that gave his argument global reach.

Hobsbawm and the Invention of Tradition

Hobsbawm and Ranger's "The Invention of Tradition" (1983) documented how nations construct their sense of historical continuity through practices that appear ancient but are often recent fabrications.^[3]

The elaborate system of Scottish Highland clan tartans, now treated as an expression of ancestral identity, was largely a 19th-century invention, partly orchestrated through the Romantic revival of Highland culture.

Many European royal ceremonies presented as ancient actually date from the late 19th century.

National holidays, monuments, and histories were assembled from available historical materials to construct usable pasts that supported the unity and legitimacy of new nation-states.

The important qualification is that invented traditions are not simply lies. They work - they genuinely create feelings of identity and solidarity - because they are built from real historical materials meaningful to the populations who adopt them.

The point is not that national cultures are wholly fabricated, but that the "ancient and continuous" framing is constructed.

Anthony Smith's Ethno-Symbolist Counter-Argument

The modernist consensus has not gone unchallenged from within serious scholarship. Anthony Smith's ethno-symbolism provides the most rigorous scholarly alternative, arguing that modernism understates the historical depth of ethnic communities and therefore cannot fully account for nationalism's emotional power.^[5]

Smith's key concept is the ethnie - a pre-modern ethnic community with a collective name, shared myths of origin and descent, shared historical memories, elements of common culture, an association with a specific homeland, and a sense of solidarity among at least sections of its population.

These ethnies are widespread across history, not modern constructs, and they provide the raw cultural material from which nationalist movements construct nations.

The difference between a successful nationalist movement and a failed one often comes down to the richness and resonance of the ethnic symbolic resources available: why did Italian and German nationalism succeed while earlier attempts at pan-Slavic or pan-Scandinavian nationalism faltered?

Smith's framework implies that nations are neither ancient nor purely modern - they are modern political projects built on genuinely older cultural foundations.

This has the practical implication of explaining why nationalism's emotional power has persisted far beyond what structural theories would predict: if nations were purely instrumental constructs required by industrial economics, they should wither when their functional purposes change.

The persistent affective power of national symbols suggests something more durable than pure construction.

Origins: The French Revolution and Romantic Nationalism

Nationalism as a modern political doctrine has recognizable origins in the French Revolution of 1789. The Revolution replaced loyalty to a monarch with loyalty to the Nation - an abstract collective entity defined by common citizenship and shared principles rather than dynastic allegiance.

The revolutionary citoyen was a new kind of political subject, and the concept of national sovereignty - that legitimate authority derives from the nation, not from God or hereditary right - was an explosive innovation.

It meant, among other things, that peoples under foreign rule had not merely a grievance but a right: the right to self-determination.

Napoleon's conquests paradoxically spread this principle even as they violated it. By imposing French dominion across Europe, Napoleon provoked nationalist reactions that drew on the revolutionary vocabulary while turning it against France itself.

German Romanticism responded to French occupation with a cultural nationalism shaped by Johann Gottfried Herder's concept of the Volksgeist - the unique spirit of each people expressed through its language, folklore, and cultural practices.

Johann Gottlieb Fichte's "Addresses to the German Nation" (1808), delivered in occupied Berlin, argued that each people constituted by shared language forms a natural political unit with the right to independence. Language, not legal status, was the true bond of community.

The "Spring of Nations" in 1848 brought these ideas to political crisis across Europe, as nationalist movements in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bohemia, and Poland simultaneously rose against dynastic empires.

Most were suppressed, but the Italian case eventually succeeded: the Risorgimento, driven by the idealism of Giuseppe Mazzini (who argued that each nation had a divine mission), the military campaigns of Giuseppe Garibaldi, and the realpolitik of Count Cavour, produced a unified Italian kingdom in 1861.

German unification followed in 1871, achieved through Bismarck's wars rather than liberal revolution - a model that would prove fateful.

Self-Determination and Its Contradictions

Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points (1918) and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 elevated national self-determination to the organizing principle of international order. Each people, Wilson declared, should have the right to choose its own form of government.

This principle, applied to the ruins of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires, produced the map of interwar Europe.

The principle immediately encountered its inherent contradiction: Europe's populations were not neatly sorted by ethnicity into distinct territories. German-speakers lived across Central and Eastern Europe in communities separated from each other and from Germany.

Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Serbs, and Croats were geographically intermingled in ways that made any national boundary a source of grievance for someone.

Wilson himself had not fully thought through who constitutes a "nation" and therefore who has a right to self-determination - every attempt to draw boundaries on national lines left substantial minorities on the "wrong" side, generating irredentist claims that destabilized the interwar order.

The Paris Peace Conference created a system of minority-protection treaties for the new states of Central and Eastern Europe, but these were largely ineffective.

The minorities remained, and their presence was used by revisionist states - most fatally Nazi Germany - to justify territorial claims that set the stage for the Second World War.

The Wilsonian framework had attempted to defuse the political tension between nations and states by making them coincide; the result was to raise the stakes of national boundary-drawing to catastrophic levels.

Nationalism and War: The Dark Side

Michael Mann's "The Dark Side of Democracy" (2005) provides the most systematic argument linking nationalism to mass violence.^[8] Mann's central claim is that ethnic cleansing and genocide are distinctly modern phenomena, products of the democratic era rather than atavistic survivals of pre-modern savagery.

The logic runs as follows: democratic nationalism claims that political power belongs to "the people," but defines "the people" in ethnic terms.

When ethnic minorities become significant enough in number or political power to challenge the majority's claim to represent "the nation," the democratic logic of nationalist majority rule generates pressure to resolve the contradiction through exclusion, expulsion, or elimination of the minority.

The empirical record supports this structural argument. The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 occurred in the context of the Ottoman Empire's crisis and Young Turk nationalism that had transformed a multiethnic empire into a Turkish national project.

The Holocaust was the murderous extreme of a German ethnic nationalism that defined Jews as aliens within the national body. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 was organized along ethnic nationalist lines within a competitive democratic framework.

The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s - the Bosnian War and the Kosovo conflict - followed patterns of elite ethnic outbidding in newly competitive political systems with weak institutional constraints.

The violence of partition is a related phenomenon. When British India was divided in 1947 into India and Pakistan, the drawing of borders through mixed populations produced one of the largest forced migrations in history - approximately 10 million people displaced - and communal violence that killed between 200,000 and 2 million people.

The logic was nationalist: the two-nation theory holding that Hindus and Muslims constituted separate nations requiring separate states. The violence was the consequence of applying that theory to a geography that did not conform to it.

Varieties of Nationalism

Liberal Nationalism

Liberal nationalism, developed theoretically by David Miller in "On Nationality" (1995) and Yael Tamir in "Liberal Nationalism" (1993), argues that national communities are legitimate frameworks for solidarity and that the obligations they generate are compatible with liberal individualism.^[6]

Both Miller and Tamir argue against cosmopolitan universalism not on the grounds that the nation is inherently superior to all other communities but on the grounds that the particular cultural attachments that constitute national identity are important to individual flourishing.

They also argue that the institutions of distributive justice and democratic accountability that liberals value are practically dependent on the bounded solidarities that national communities provide.^[7]

Liberal nationalism insists, however, that national identity is not the only legitimate identity, that nations do not justify violations of individual rights, and that the obligations of nationality are compatible with - indeed require - concern for justice beyond national borders.

Anti-Colonial Nationalism

The anti-colonial nationalisms of the 20th century used the vocabulary of national self-determination against the colonial powers that had championed it.

Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" (1961) argued that the colonized must violently reclaim their national identity because colonial domination had systematically degraded it - the colonized person has internalized the colonizer's contempt, and only the struggle for national liberation can reverse this psychological deformation.

Jawaharlal Nehru's vision for India was more liberal: a secular, pluralist national state that transcended the ethnic and religious divisions the British had exploited, founding national identity on shared constitutional principles and the shared experience of the independence struggle.

Kwame Nkrumah's pan-Africanism sought to extend the principle to the continental level, arguing that individual African states were too small and too economically fragile to achieve genuine independence from the former colonial powers.

Religious Nationalism

The combination of nationalist and religious identity has produced some of the most powerful and intractable contemporary movements.

Hindu nationalism in India, embodied politically by the Bharatiya Janata Party and ideologically by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, defines the Indian nation through Hindu cultural identity in ways that structurally marginalize India's Muslim minority.

Christian nationalism in the United States conflates American national identity with Protestant Christian values in ways that challenge the constitutional separation of church and state.

Islamic nationalism has taken diverse forms from Iranian revolutionary politics to Pakistani national identity. What these movements share is the claim that true national belonging requires religious belonging - a claim that excludes minorities from full citizenship by definition.

Contemporary Nationalism: Populism and Globalization

The revival of nationalist politics across Western democracies in the 2010s - Donald Trump's "America First," Viktor Orbán's Hungary, Brexit, Marine Le Pen's National Rally, Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy, Jair Bolsonaro's Brazil - demanded and generated a substantial explanatory literature.

Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin's "National Populism" (2018) argued against the prevailing dismissal of these movements as mere xenophobia or economic panic.^[9]

They identified four structural drivers: distrust of mainstream political institutions and elites; destruction of traditional communities through deindustrialization and cultural change; deprivation in both absolute and relative terms; and dealignment - the collapse of stable party loyalties that had anchored voters to mainstream parties for decades.

Their argument is that national populism is a rational response to genuine experiences of dispossession, not a pathological irruption of irrationality.

Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart's "Cultural Backlash" (2019) provided the most comprehensive empirical account, drawing on decades of World Values Survey data.^[10]

Their argument distinguishes sharply between economic and cultural explanations: while economic anxiety contributes, the primary driver of support for populist nationalism is cultural threat - the reaction of traditional-values populations to the progressive cultural revolution that has reshaped Western societies since the 1970s.

Older, less-educated, more rural, more religious populations experience the advances of feminism, LGBTQ rights, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism as a status challenge, a demotion in the social hierarchy, and a loss of the cultural world that gave their lives meaning and dignity.

Yascha Mounk's "The People vs Democracy" (2018) focused on the institutional threat: populist nationalism is not merely an expression of cultural grievance but an anti-liberal political project that challenges the constraints on majority power that liberal democracy requires.^[11]

The combination of "illiberal democracy" and "undemocratic liberalism" - the double erosion of both democratic accountability and liberal rights protections - that characterizes the contemporary crisis of democratic governance.

David Goodhart's "The Road to Somewhere" (2017) added a sociological dimension to these political analyses.

The core cleavage of contemporary politics, Goodhart argued, is not left versus right but "anywheres" versus "somewheres": mobile, university-educated people who have "portable" identities and can make themselves at home wherever economic opportunity takes them, versus people whose identities are rooted in specific places and communities and who experience the disruption of those places and communities as an existential loss.

The Globalization Paradox and Nationalism's Future

Dani Rodrik's globalization trilemma frames the structural contradiction at the heart of contemporary politics: it is impossible to simultaneously maximize deep economic integration, democratic governance, and national sovereignty.

The post-Cold War order maximized economic integration and managerial technocracy at the expense of democratic self-determination, generating the backlash that drives contemporary nationalist politics.

Recovering democratic sovereignty requires either accepting constraints on economic integration or delegating democratic authority to supranational institutions - neither of which is politically easy.

The cosmopolitan critique of nationalism, represented by Martha Nussbaum's "For Love of Country?" (1996) and Kwame Anthony Appiah's "Cosmopolitanism" (2006), argues that ultimate moral obligations extend to all human beings regardless of national membership, and that the accidents of birth should not determine the scope of our moral concern.

Appiah's version is pragmatic rather than utopian: he is not arguing for the abolition of national identity but for a "contaminated cosmopolitanism" that values particular cultural attachments while refusing to treat them as absolute moral boundaries.

The separatist nationalisms of Scotland, Catalonia, and Quebec represent a different kind of challenge to the existing state order: not populist reaction against globalization but claims of distinct national identity by sub-state communities that feel their particular character inadequately represented within larger states.

The Kurdish national movement, spread across Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, represents perhaps the most dramatic case of a nation without a state still seeking political recognition.

Taiwan's contested national status and the question of Chinese reunification may prove to be among the most consequential nationalist disputes of the 21st century.

See also: What Is Populism?, Why Democracies Fail, What Is Globalization?

Sources & Further Reading

1. Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Blackwell.
2. Anderson, B. (1983). "Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism." Verso.
3. Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, T. (Eds.). (1983). "The Invention of Tradition." Cambridge University Press.
4. Hobsbawm, E. J. (1990). Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge University Press.
5. Smith, A. D. (1986). The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Blackwell.
6. Miller, D. (1995). On Nationality. Oxford University Press.
7. Tamir, Y. (1993). Liberal Nationalism. Princeton University Press.
8. Mann, M. (2005). The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge University Press.
9. Eatwell, R., & Goodwin, M. (2018). "National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy." Penguin.
10. Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge University Press.
11. Mounk, Y. (2018). The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It. Harvard University Press.

Further Reading

• Clark, C. (2012). "The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914." Allen Lane.