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)
| Type of Nationalism | Basis of National Identity | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Civic nationalism | Citizenship and shared political values | French republicanism; US civic creed |
| Ethnic nationalism | Shared ancestry, language, culture | German Volksnation; Serbian nationalism |
| Cultural nationalism | Shared language, history, and tradition | Czech national revival; Irish nationalism |
| Religious nationalism | Faith as defining national identity | Hindu nationalism; Jewish Zionism |
| Anti-colonial nationalism | Resistance to colonial rule | Indian independence; African liberation movements |
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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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, and that the institutions of distributive justice and democratic accountability that liberals value are practically dependent on the bounded solidarities that national communities provide. 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. 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. 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. 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?
References
- Gellner, E. (1983). Nations and Nationalism. Blackwell.
- Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso.
- Hobsbawm, E., & Ranger, T. (Eds.). (1983). The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge University Press.
- Hobsbawm, E. J. (1990). Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge University Press.
- Smith, A. D. (1986). The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Blackwell.
- Miller, D. (1995). On Nationality. Oxford University Press.
- Tamir, Y. (1993). Liberal Nationalism. Princeton University Press.
- Mann, M. (2005). The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. Cambridge University Press.
- Eatwell, R., & Goodwin, M. (2018). National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy. Penguin.
- Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge University Press.
- Mounk, Y. (2018). The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It. Harvard University Press.
- Clark, C. (2012). The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Allen Lane.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between nationalism and patriotism?
The distinction carries genuine analytic weight even though the two concepts are often conflated in everyday speech. Patriotism typically denotes an emotional attachment to one's country — love of place, culture, and fellow citizens — that does not necessarily entail political claims or hostility toward others. Nationalism, by contrast, is a political doctrine asserting that the national unit and the political unit should be congruent: each nation deserves its own state, and each state should embody one nation. Ernest Gellner defined nationalism precisely in these terms in 'Nations and Nationalism' (1983), arguing that nationalism is a principle that generates political anger when violated. George Orwell drew the distinction memorably in his 1945 essay 'Notes on Nationalism': patriotism is defensive attachment to a particular place and way of life, while nationalism is inseparable from the desire for power and prestige, requiring the nation to be exalted and its rivals diminished. Maurizio Viroli argued in 'For Love of Country' (1995) that civic patriotism in the republican tradition is perfectly compatible with cosmopolitan openness, while nationalism tends structurally toward exclusion. In practice, the boundary blurs: politicians invoke patriotism to legitimate nationalist policies, and critics of nationalism deploy patriotic language to contest exclusionary versions of national identity. The stakes of the distinction are real — whether a movement is called patriotic or nationalist often determines whether it is regarded as legitimate democratic expression or dangerous chauvinism.
Did nations exist before nationalism, or did nationalism create nations?
This question divides scholars into two broad camps. Primordialists hold that national or proto-national ethnic communities are ancient and persistent features of human social organization. Anthony Smith's ethno-symbolism, the most influential version of this position, does not claim nations are eternal but argues that modern nationalist movements build on pre-existing ethnic cores — what Smith calls 'ethnies' — with shared myths, memories, symbols, and territorial attachments. Without this ethnic raw material, nationalism cannot generate the emotional resonance that makes it politically powerful. Modernists argue instead that nations are distinctly modern constructs. Ernest Gellner contended in 'Nations and Nationalism' (1983) that industrial capitalism required culturally homogeneous workforces that could be trained in standardized high cultures, and nationalism provides the ideological apparatus that creates this homogeneity. Gellner's most famous sentence captures the implication: 'It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.' Benedict Anderson showed how print capitalism, by creating vernacular reading publics who consumed the same texts simultaneously, fostered a sense of shared belonging. Eric Hobsbawm demonstrated that many 'ancient traditions' on which nations draw were invented in the 19th century. The consensus among historians is broadly modernist: nations as political communities claiming sovereign rights are products of the modern era, even if they draw on older ethnic materials. The practical implication is significant: if nations are constructed, they can be constructed differently, and their boundaries are not natural but politically contested.
What is civic nationalism and how does it differ from ethnic nationalism?
Civic nationalism defines membership in the nation through shared political values, legal citizenship, and commitment to common institutions, rather than through descent, ethnicity, or religion. The French revolutionary model is the paradigmatic example: a citizen (citoyen) was defined by allegiance to the Republic and its principles — liberty, equality, fraternity — regardless of ethnic or religious origin. Jürgen Habermas developed the concept of 'constitutional patriotism' as a post-nationalist form of civic attachment: citizens identify with the universal principles embedded in a democratic constitution rather than with ethnic particularity, which he argued was the appropriate political attachment after the catastrophes ethnic nationalism had produced in the 20th century. Ethnic nationalism defines the nation through shared ancestry, language, culture, or religion, making membership ascriptive — determined by birth rather than choice. Johann Gottlieb Fichte's 'Addresses to the German Nation' (1808) articulated this position: each people has a unique cultural character expressed in its language and customs, and political boundaries should follow cultural ones. The distinction matters morally and practically: civic nationalism is theoretically inclusive while ethnic nationalism tends structurally toward exclusion. In practice, however, the boundary blurs. France's civic universalism has historically been tied to pressure for cultural assimilation, effectively privileging French cultural norms. David Miller's 'On Nationality' (1995) and Yael Tamir's 'Liberal Nationalism' (1993) both argue for liberal versions of nationalism that combine civic membership with recognition of cultural particularity, seeking a middle ground.
How did nationalism contribute to the First World War?
The traditional interpretation held nationalism to be a primary cause: ethnic tensions in the multi-ethnic Habsburg and Ottoman empires, Serbian nationalism threatening Austro-Hungarian stability, Pan-Slavism, and competitive German nationalism combined to produce a conflict that could not be contained. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist affiliated with the Black Hand society, provided the trigger. The mobilization of mass armies required nationalist sentiment: soldiers fought for 'king and country,' and governments deployed nationalist propaganda to sustain support through years of industrial slaughter. Christopher Clark's 'The Sleepwalkers' (2012) complicated the nationalist explanation by emphasizing the role of miscalculation, bureaucratic momentum, and the alliance system, arguing that nationalist sentiment was one factor among many rather than a sufficient cause. Michael Mann's 'The Dark Side of Democracy' (2005) provides the most systematic account linking nationalism to mass violence more broadly, showing that ethnic cleansing and genocide are characteristically modern phenomena produced when states define themselves in ethnic terms and minorities become suspect — a dynamic visible in Ottoman Armenia (1915), the inter-war period, and the 20th century's genocides. The post-war Wilsonian framework of national self-determination, intended to resolve the tensions that produced the war, created new problems: in Europe's ethnically mixed territories, no boundary could satisfy all national claims simultaneously, generating irredentism and minority conflicts that persisted for decades.
What is anti-colonial nationalism and how does it differ from European nationalism?
Anti-colonial nationalism emerged across Asia and Africa in the 20th century as colonized peoples mobilized against European imperial rule, using the very language of national self-determination that European powers had championed at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 while explicitly denying it to non-European peoples. Frantz Fanon's 'The Wretched of the Earth' (1961) provided the most radical analysis: colonial nationalism was necessarily a violent process of psychological and political liberation, because colonial domination had not merely occupied territory but deformed the consciousness of the colonized, making the assertion of national identity an act of self-reconstitution. Jawaharlal Nehru articulated a different version — pan-Asian solidarity combined with Indian national identity forged through the independence struggle — while Kwame Nkrumah championed pan-African nationalism as the path to African dignity and development. The Bandung Conference of 1955 gathered 29 newly independent Asian and African nations to articulate a third-way nationalism rejecting both American and Soviet imperialism. Anti-colonial nationalism differed from its European counterpart in important ways: it was necessarily civic in aspiration, since colonized territories encompassed many ethnicities and languages, and it drew on the colonial experience of shared oppression rather than shared ancestry. It was also, paradoxically, shaped by the European education many nationalist leaders received: Nehru at Cambridge, Ho Chi Minh in Paris, Nkrumah at Lincoln University. Post-independence, anti-colonial nationalism often fractured along ethnic and regional lines, as the civic unity of the liberation movement gave way to the competing interests of different groups within the newly sovereign state.
What is populist nationalism and why has it surged in recent decades?
Populist nationalism combines the nationalist claim that political power should belong to the nation with the populist claim that genuine democracy requires the 'real people' to be represented against corrupt elites. The result is a politics that simultaneously attacks globalism as an elite betrayal of national sovereignty and defines the political community in exclusionary terms — immigrants, minorities, and cosmopolitan professionals as threats to the authentic people. Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin's 'National Populism' (2018) identified four drivers: distrust of mainstream institutions and parties; destruction of traditional communities through economic and social change; deprivation — both material and relative status anxiety; and dealignment from established party loyalties. Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart's 'Cultural Backlash' (2019) proposed a complementary explanation: the post-materialist values revolution since the 1970s — feminism, LGBTQ rights, multiculturalism — produced a backlash among older, less-educated, predominantly rural citizens who felt that the culture was changing without their consent or acknowledgment. Yascha Mounk's 'The People vs Democracy' (2018) added that populist nationalism is genuinely anti-liberal, threatening constitutional constraints and minority rights in the name of majoritarian will. The debate between economic and cultural explanations remains unresolved: survey evidence suggests that status anxiety and cultural threat often outweigh pure material deprivation in predicting support for populist nationalism, but economic insecurity creates the conditions in which cultural resentment takes root and grows.
Can nationalism be compatible with cosmopolitan values and globalization?
The tension between nationalism and cosmopolitanism is one of the defining intellectual debates of the contemporary era. Cosmopolitan philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah argue that ultimate moral obligations extend to all human beings regardless of national membership. Appiah's 'Cosmopolitanism' (2006) argues for a version that values cultural difference without treating cultures as bounded, separable wholes — people can be attached to their particular communities while recognizing universal obligations. Liberal nationalists like David Miller and Yael Tamir counter that national communities are legitimate frameworks for solidarity, and that the institutions of the welfare state, democratic accountability, and cultural flourishing all depend on the kind of thick social trust that only nationally bounded communities currently sustain. Dani Rodrik's globalization trilemma states the structural dilemma precisely: deep economic integration, national sovereignty, and democratic politics cannot all be maximized simultaneously — maximizing any two requires compromising the third. The global financial order maximized integration and technocratic governance at the expense of democratic sovereignty, producing the backlash that drives contemporary populist nationalism. David Goodhart's 'The Road to Somewhere' (2017) identified a sociological version: mobile 'anywheres' embrace openness and extract value from globalization, while rooted 'somewheres' depend on stable local communities and experience globalization as a threat. The challenge for democratic theory is whether national solidarity can be constructed in forms that are genuinely civic, compatible with minority rights, and open enough to sustain international cooperation on shared challenges including climate change and pandemic preparedness.