Nationalism

• 1. Introduction

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  Nationalism holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. Yet the word itself is surprisingly young. In English it dates to around 1798, long after the loyalties it describes had begun to stir in human hearts. The Prussian scholar Johann Gottfried Herder coined a related sense of it in 1772, in his Treatise on the Origin of Language, insisting on the role of a shared tongue. Herder went further than vocabulary. He wrote that a man who has lost his patriotic spirit has lost himself and the whole world about himself. From that conviction grew an idea that would build empires and shatter them. How does a feeling of belonging become a claim to rule? Why did the nineteenth century make it one of the most significant political and social forces in history? And why, after 1914, did the word turn dark? The answers run from the print shops of Europe to the battlefields of two world wars, and into ballot boxes still being counted today.

• 2. Imagined Communities

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  Benedict Anderson argued that nations are socially constructed communities, imagined by people who perceive themselves as part of a group. His 1983 book Imagined Communities tied the rise of nationalism to print capitalism and the spread of printed media in vernacular languages. When ordinary readers could share a language on the page, they could imagine a destiny shared with strangers they would never meet.

  Modernization theory, the most commonly accepted account of nationalism today, takes a constructivist approach. It proposes that nationalism emerged from industrialization, urbanization, and mass education, the very processes that made national consciousness possible. In this view, nations are imagined communities and nationalism an invented tradition. Shared sentiment becomes a form of collective identity that binds individuals in political solidarity.

  Not every theorist agrees on the timing. Primordialism, which developed alongside nationalism during the Romantic era, held that there have always been nations. Most scholars have since rejected that view, treating nations as historically contingent. A softer version, perennialism, accepts that nations are modern but with long historical roots, and remains under academic debate. A fourth strand, ethnosymbolism, explains nationalism through symbols, myths, and traditions, and is associated with Anthony D. Smith. Smith credited intellectuals with a seminal position in generating the concepts, myths, and symbols of nationalism, a role visible wherever one turns in Europe.

• 3. Two Kinds Of Nation

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  Civic and ethnic. Since at least the 1930s, historians, sociologists, and anthropologists have sorted nationalist movements into those two broad families. Hans Kohn popularized the split in the 1950s, casting civic nationalism as Western and more democratic, and ethnic nationalism as Eastern and undemocratic. Since the 1980s, scholars have pointed out the flaws in so rigid a division and proposed more specific classifications.

  The definition of a nation itself decides which kind you get. Joseph Stalin, writing in Marxism and the National Question in 1913, insisted a nation is not a racial or tribal but a historically constituted community of people. He called it a stable community formed through lengthy and systematic intercourse, generation after generation, on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up. By contrast, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had declared in The Communist Manifesto of 1848 that the working men have no country.

  Gellner's theory holds that nationalism combines one culture or ethnicity in one state, and that state political parties should reflect the ethnic majority. Edward Said saw nationalism as ethnic at least in part, arguing its narratives often go hand in hand with racism, as communities define themselves against the other. The same logic that unites can also exclude.

• 4. Forging Europe

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  In 1793, France's revolutionary government declared a levée en masse, a mass conscription. Henceforth, the decree read, all the French are in permanent requisition for army service. The young men would go to battle, the married men would forge arms, the children would turn old linen to lint, and the old men would repair to the public places to preach the unity of the Republic and the hatred of kings. This was the nation in arms.

  Napoleon Bonaparte carried that energy across the continent. He dissolved the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and organized the Confederation of the Rhine, which promoted a feeling of nationalism in the German states. His conquests of German and Italian states around 1800 to 1806 stimulated demands for national unity. It was Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck who delivered that unity, through short wars against Denmark, Austria, and France that thrilled pan-German nationalists, who eagerly joined the new German Empire after 1871.

  Defeat could fuel nationalism as surely as victory. After Germany defeated France in 1871, the demand for the return of Alsace-Lorraine became a powerful force for a quarter century, a famous case of Revanchism, the demand for revenge and the return of lost territory. Bismarck's Germany produced its own celebrants. The historian Heinrich von Treitschke, who taught at Heidelberg and Berlin, attacked parliamentarianism, socialism, the English, the French, and the Jews. It is the highest duty of the State to increase its power, he declared, calling himself a thousand times more the patriot than a professor.

• 5. The Nation Makes The State, Or The State The Nation

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  In 1835, the politician Antonio Alcalà Galiano stood in the Cortes del Estatuto Real and defended an extraordinary aim. He wanted to make the Spanish nation a nation that neither is nor has been until now. His words capture a paradox at the heart of European nation-building. In Spain, as in France, the state created the nation, not the other way around.

  The assimilation of the Crown of Aragon by the Castilian Crown, through the Decrees of Nova Planta after the War of the Spanish Succession, was the first step in forging the Spanish nation-state. It worked not on a uniform ethnic basis but by imposing the political and cultural traits of the Castilians over Basques, Galicians, and Catalan-speaking territories, who became national minorities to be assimilated. Two centuries later the socialist Josep Borrell echoed the same logic. A strong State, he said, which imposes its language, culture, education, makes the nation.

  Italy took the opposite emotional route, naming its unification the Risorgimento, the Resurgence. That movement consolidated the peninsula into the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, yet it rested on the liberal middle classes and proved a bit weak. The new government treated the annexed South as a backward province. The liberal Francesco Crispi tried to fire up Italian nationalism by emulating Bismarck, but on the 1st of March 1896 the armies of Ethiopian Emperor Menelik routed Italian forces at Adowa, in what the historian R. J. B. Bosworth called an unparalleled disaster for a modern army.

• 6. Faith, Empire, And Awakening

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  Saint Paisius of Hilendar wrote a history to revive a nation. His Istoriya Slavyanobolgarskaya, the History of the Slav-Bulgarians, appeared in 1762 and stands as the first work of Bulgarian historiography. He opposed Greek domination of Bulgaria's culture and religion, interpreting medieval history to reawaken his people's spirit. From such labors the Bulgarian national revival grew, leading to an autonomous Bulgarian Exarchate in 1870 to 1872 and the re-establishment of Bulgaria in 1878.

  The Russian Empire answered nationalism with a state doctrine. Count Sergey Uvarov coined the motto Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality, adopted by Emperor Nicholas I. Its third term, Narodnost, recognized the state-founding role of Russian nationality. By the 1860s a pan-Slavic movement had emerged, fueling and fueled by Russia's wars against the Ottoman Empire to liberate Orthodox peoples such as Bulgarians, Serbs, and Greeks.

  Further east, the decisive defeat of Russia by Japan in 1905 demonstrated the military advancement of non-Europeans in a modern war. That defeat sparked new interest in nationalism in China, Turkey, and Persia. Sun Yat-sen launched the Kuomintang in defiance of an empire run by outsiders. After the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, his multicultural Zhonghua minzu promoted Five Races Under One Union, placing Han Chinese alongside Manchus, Mongols, Hui, Uyghurs, and Tibetans as supposedly equal branches of one Chinese nation.

• 7. Land Without Rulers

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  In the 1880s the European powers divided up almost all of Africa, leaving only Ethiopia and Liberia independent. They ruled until after the Second World War, when forces of nationalism grew much stronger and colonial holdings became independent states across the 1950s and 1960s. The process was usually peaceful, but long and bitter civil wars erupted in places such as Algeria and Kenya. African nationalism drew on organizational skills that natives had learned in the British and French armies during the world wars.

  Adria Lawrence has argued that nationalism in the colonial world was spurred by the failures of colonial powers to extend equal political rights to their subjects, prompting them to pursue independence. Benedict Anderson pointed to the New World as the site that originally conceived nationalism, an identity that negates colonialism by definition. Nationalist mobilization in French colonial Africa and British colonial India, he noted, developed when colonial regimes refused to cede rights to their increasingly well-educated subjects.

  India showed how contested such identities could be. Mahatma Gandhi and his allies argued for a composite nationalism, refusing to define an independent Indian nation by religion. The Muslim League under separatist pressure pushed the other way. In 1947 the subcontinent was partitioned along religious lines into the Muslim-majority Dominion of Pakistan and the Hindu-majority Dominion of India. Because colonialism drew its borders across ethnic, religious, and linguistic lines, anti-colonial nationalism remained, above all, about land.

• 8. The Age Of Disillusion

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  The twentieth century, the historian Glenda Sluga observed, was a time of profound disillusionment with nationalism, and also the great age of globalism. After 1914 the word's connotations had already darkened. German nationalism, expressed through Nazism, reached beyond any single border. Adolf Hitler's doctrine of lebensraum, or living space, planned to transplant an Aryan race across Poland, Eastern Europe, the Baltic nations, and all of western Russia and Ukraine, a project aimed far outside Germany's frontiers.

  The late twentieth century brought a return of intense forms. After the Revolutions of 1989 toppled communism, extreme nationalism rose, and when communism fell in Yugoslavia serious conflict followed. The academic Steven Berg traced its root to the demand for autonomy and a separate existence, made worse because political boundaries did not match ethnic ones. Globalism then provoked its own backlash. Groups such as Germany's Pegida, France's National Front, and the UK Independence Party gained prominence advocating restrictions on immigration.

  The pattern reached ballot boxes worldwide. On the 18th of September 2014, Scotland voted 55.3 percent against independence. In 2016 the British populace voted for Brexit, and Donald Trump won the United States presidency on the slogans Make America Great Again and America First. On the 29th of October 2018 Trump equated nationalism to patriotism, saying he was proud of his country and called that nationalism. The same young word Herder shaped in 1772 was still being argued over, in Catalonia, in India under Narendra Modi, and in Russia, where nationalist sentiment was used in the annexation of Crimea in 2014.