The word nationalism did not exist in the English language until around 1798, yet within a single century it would reshape the entire map of the world. Before this date, the concept of a nation was applied loosely to the inhabitants of a country or collective identities that included shared history, law, and language, but it lacked the political force to demand sovereignty. The term gained wider prominence in the 19th century, transforming from a mere descriptor of cultural identity into a revolutionary political principle. This shift was not accidental but the result of a profound intellectual and social upheaval that began in the late 18th century. The French Revolution of 1789 served as the crucible for this new ideology, where the idea that the people should rule was developed by political theorists like Rousseau and Voltaire. These thinkers were influenced by earlier constitutionalist liberation movements, such as the Corsican Republic which existed from 1755 to 1768, and the American Revolution which ran from 1775 to 1783. The template of nationalism as a method for mobilizing public opinion around a new state based on popular sovereignty went back further than 1789, but it was the French Revolution that made it a global force. The expansion of mass literacy, print culture, and civic participation strengthened the perception that political authority derived from a people conscious of its shared destiny. This period also saw the spread of movements asserting that legitimate government must reflect the historical, cultural, and social character of the population it governs, rather than being imposed by dynastic accident or external force. The Prussian scholar Johann Gottfried Herder originated the term in 1772 in his Treatise on the Origin of Language, stressing the role of a common language as the primary source of legitimate political authority. Herder attached exceptional importance to the concepts of nationality and patriotism, teaching that in a certain sense every human perfection is national. He encouraged the creation of a common cultural and language policy amongst the separate German states, laying the groundwork for a unified national identity that would eventually challenge the old order of empires.
The Blood of Empires
The 19th century witnessed the violent birth of new nations as the old multi-ethnic empires crumbled under the weight of nationalist fervor. Napoleon Bonaparte's conquests of the German and Italian states around 1800 to 1806 played a major role in stimulating nationalism and the demands for national unity. His invasion of much of Europe spread revolutionary ideas, resulting in much of the 19th-century European nationalism. In Germany, Napoleon abolished many of the old or medieval relics, such as dissolving the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, and imposed rational legal systems that demonstrated how dramatic changes were possible. His organization of the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806 promoted a feeling of nationalism that would eventually lead to unification. Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck achieved German unification through a series of highly successful short wars against Denmark, Austria, and France, which thrilled the pan-German nationalists in the smaller German states. They fought in his wars and eagerly joined the new German Empire, which Bismarck ran as a force for balance and peace in Europe after 1871. The most influential of the German nationalist historians was Heinrich von Treitschke, who had an enormous influence on elite students at Heidelberg and Berlin universities. Treitschke vehemently attacked parliamentarianism, socialism, pacifism, the English, the French, the Jews, and the internationalists. The core of his message was the need for a strong, unified state, stating that it is the highest duty of the State to increase its power. In Italy, the Risorgimento, meaning the Resurgence or Revival, was the political and intellectual movement that consolidated the different states of the Italian peninsula into the single state of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. The memory of the Risorgimento is central to Italian nationalism but it was based in the liberal middle classes and ultimately proved a bit weak. The new government treated the newly annexed South as a kind of underdeveloped province due to its backward and poverty-stricken society. The liberal government under the Sicilian Francesco Crispi sought to enlarge his political base by emulating Otto von Bismarck and firing up Italian nationalism with an aggressive foreign policy. Crispi increased military expenditure and talked cheerfully of a European conflagration, but his policies were ruinous. His lust for territory in East Africa was thwarted when on the 1st of March 1896, the armies of Ethiopian Emperor Menelik routed Italian forces at Adowa in what has been defined as an unparalleled disaster for a modern army. Crispi, whose private life and personal finances were objects of perennial scandal, went into dishonorable retirement. The political development of nationalism and the push for popular sovereignty culminated with the ethnic and national revolutions of Europe and in the Ottoman Empire. During the 19th century nationalism became one of the most significant political and social forces in history, typically listed among the top causes of World War I. European culture had been enriched by the new vernacular contributions of little-known or forgotten peoples, but at the same time such unity as it had was imperiled by fragmentation. The antagonisms fostered by nationalism had made not only for wars, insurrections, and local hatreds, but had also accentuated or created new spiritual divisions in a nominally Christian Europe.
The catastrophic human cost of the 20th century profoundly tested the assumptions of nationalism, revealing its capacity to destroy as well as to build. The twentieth century, a time of profound disillusionment with nationalism, was also the great age of globalism. While the language of popular sovereignty was widely invoked, it was also systematically distorted by regimes that claimed to act in the name of the people while abolishing political pluralism, suppressing civil society, and subordinating national traditions to rigid, centralized doctrines. In several cases, historical identities were re-engineered or erased altogether, replaced by abstract social categories enforced through state coercion. The catastrophic human cost of such experiments, marked by mass repression, forced collectivization, and the elimination of independent institutions, contributed to growing skepticism toward any political model that dissolves national communities into ideological abstractions. German nationalism, expressed through the ideology of Nazism, may also be understood as trans-national in nature. This aspect was primarily advocated by Adolf Hitler, who later became the leader of the Nazi Party. This party was devoted to what they identified as an Aryan race, residing in various European countries, but sometimes mixed with alien elements such as Jews. Meanwhile, the Nazis rejected many of the well-established citizens within those same countries, such as the Romani and Jews, whom they did not identify as Aryan. A key Nazi doctrine was Lebensraum, which was a vast undertaking to transplant Aryans throughout Poland, much of Eastern Europe and the Baltic nations, and all of western Russia and Ukraine. Lebensraum was thus a vast project for advancing the Aryan race far outside of any particular nation or national borders. Nazi goals were focused on advancing the Aryan race as they perceived it, the modification of the human race via eugenics, and the eradication of human beings that they deemed inferior. But their goals were trans-national and intended to spread across as much of the world as they could achieve. Although Nazism glorified German history, it also embraced the supposed virtues and achievements of the Aryan race in other countries, including India. The Nazis' Aryanism longed for now-extinct species of superior bulls once used as livestock by Aryans and other features of Aryan history that never resided within the borders of Germany as a nation. The word nation was also applied before 1800 in Europe in reference to the inhabitants of a country as well as to collective identities that could include shared history, law, language, political rights, religion and traditions, in a sense more akin to the modern conception. By the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the language surrounding nations and sovereignty became increasingly prominent in public discourse, legal documents, and popular mobilization. The expansion of mass literacy, print culture, and civic participation strengthened the perception that political authority derived from a people conscious of its shared destiny. This period also saw the spread of movements asserting that legitimate government must reflect the historical, cultural, and social character of the population it governs, rather than being imposed by dynastic accident or external force. The twentieth century profoundly tested these assumptions. While the language of popular sovereignty was widely invoked, it was also systematically distorted by regimes that claimed to act in the name of the people while abolishing political pluralism, suppressing civil society, and subordinating national traditions to rigid, centralized doctrines. In several cases, historical identities were re-engineered or erased altogether, replaced by abstract social categories enforced through state coercion. The catastrophic human cost of such experiments, marked by mass repression, forced collectivization, and the elimination of independent institutions, contributed to growing skepticism toward any political model that dissolves national communities into ideological abstractions. Nationalism as derived from the noun designating nations is a newer word, in the English language, dating to around 1798. The term gained wider prominence in the 19th century. The term increasingly became negative in its connotations after 1914. Glenda Sluga notes that the twentieth century, a time of profound disillusionment with nationalism, was also the great age of globalism.
The Awakening of the East
The awakening of nationalism across Asia helped shape the history of the continent, driven by the decisive defeat of Russia by Japan in 1905, which demonstrated the military advancement of non-Europeans in a modern war. The defeat quickly led to manifestations of a new interest in nationalism in China, as well as Turkey and Persia. In China, Sun Yat-sen launched his new party the Kuomintang, or National People's Party, in defiance of the decrepit Empire, which was run by outsiders. The Kuomintang recruits pledged to destroy the old and build the new, and fight for the self-determination of the people, applying all their strength to the support of the Chinese Republic and the realization of democracy through the Three Principles. The Kuomintang largely ran China until the Communists took over in 1949, but the latter had also been strongly influenced by Sun's nationalism as well as by the May Fourth Movement in 1919. It was a nationwide protest movement about the domestic backwardness of China and has often been depicted as the intellectual foundation for Chinese Communism. The New Culture Movement stimulated by the May Fourth Movement waxed strong throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Historian Patricia Ebrey says that nationalism, patriotism, progress, science, democracy, and freedom were the goals, while imperialism, feudalism, warlordism, autocracy, patriarchy, and blind adherence to tradition were the enemies. Intellectuals struggled with how to be strong and modern and yet Chinese, how to preserve China as a political entity in the world of competing nations. In 1911, following the Xinhai Revolution, Sun's multicultural form of Chinese nationalism manifested as Zhonghua minzu, a concept that promoted the idea of Five Races Under One Union, that sidelined Han Chinese supremacy in favor of coexistence alongside Manchus, Mongols, Chinese Muslims, and Tibetans, all of which were supposedly equal branches of the Chinese nation. The rhetorical move, as China historian Joseph Esherick points out, was based on practical concerns about imperial threats from the international environment and conflicts on the Chinese frontiers. In the 1880s the European powers divided up almost all of Africa, with only Ethiopia and Liberia remaining independent. They ruled until after World War II when forces of nationalism grew much stronger. In the 1950s and the 1960s, colonial holdings became independent states. The process was usually peaceful but there were several long bitter bloody civil wars, as in Algeria, Kenya, and elsewhere. Across Africa, nationalism drew upon the organizational skills that natives had learned in the British and French, and other armies during the world wars. It led to organizations that were not controlled by or endorsed by either the colonial powers or the traditional local power structures that had been collaborating with the colonial powers. Nationalistic organizations began to challenge both the traditional and the new colonial structures and finally displaced them. Leaders of nationalist movements took control when the European authorities exited, many ruling for decades or until they died off. These structures included political, educational, religious, and other social organizations. In recent decades, many African countries have undergone the triumph and defeat of nationalistic fervor, changing in the process the loci of the centralizing state power and patrimonial state. South Africa, a British colony, was exceptional in that it became virtually independent by 1931. From 1948, it was controlled by white Afrikaner nationalists, who focused on racial segregation and white minority rule, known as apartheid. It lasted until 1994, when multiracial elections were held. The international anti-apartheid movement supported black nationalists until success was achieved, and Nelson Mandela was elected president.
The Fragile State
The breakup of Yugoslavia demonstrated how the collapse of communism could trigger a rise in extreme nationalism, leaving many people with no identity. The people under communist rule had to integrate, but they now found themselves free to choose. That made long-dormant conflicts rise and create sources of serious conflict. When communism fell in Yugoslavia, serious conflict arose, which led to a rise in extreme nationalism. The academic Steven Berg felt that the root of nationalist conflicts was the demand for autonomy and a separate existence. That nationalism can give rise to strong emotions, which may lead to a group fighting to survive, especially as after the fall of communism, political boundaries did not match ethnic boundaries. Serious conflicts often arose and escalated very easily, as individuals and groups acted upon their beliefs and caused death and destruction. In the Middle East, Arab nationalism, a movement toward liberating and empowering the Arab peoples of the Middle East, emerged during the late 19th century, inspired by other independence movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. As the Ottoman Empire declined and the Middle East was carved up by the Great Powers of Europe, Arabs sought to establish their own independent nations ruled by Arabs, rather than foreigners. Syria was established in 1920, Transjordan gradually gained independence between 1921 and 1946, Saudi Arabia was established in 1932, and Egypt achieved gradually gained independence between 1922 and 1952. The Arab League was established in 1945 to promote Arab interests and cooperation between the new Arab states. The Zionist movement emerged among European Jews in the 19th century. In 1882, Jews from Europe began to emigrate to Ottoman Palestine with the goal of establishing a new Jewish homeland. The majority and local population in Palestine, Palestinian Arabs were demanding independence from the British Mandate. Political theorists state that there are four key elements necessary for a group to suffice as a nationality: a shared territory, a shared culture, a shared economy, and a shared language. Many of these attributes were heavily debated as Zionism increased in popularity. The official language of Israel was originally debated between Hebrew and Yiddish. However, many Eastern European Jews had already begun teaching Hebrew as the official language of Israel and completely rejected Yiddish. Eventually Hebrew would become the official language of the state of Israel. While some Jews had begun settling in Palestine, they had not officially claimed the territory as their own as it remained in possession of the British Mandate. Furthermore, some Zionists debated the exact location of a potential Jewish state, with many possible locations being proposed. In 1948, Israel was officially declared and recognized as the official Jewish state, solving the territorial question. From the beginning the economic question was brought into play as labour Zionists hoped to create a socialist state, while religious Zionists came to Israel for varying reasons and with holding different economic beliefs. In the early 20th century the Jewish socialist movement of Bundism sought to increase the number of Jews speaking Yiddish, on top of pursuing Marxist economics, across Europe. However, the movement would dissipate after World War 2 as the Nazis targeted and murdered Bundists. After Israel's founding in 1948, it was uncertain where they would side in the cold war, with both the United States and the USSR supporting Israel. Meanwhile right-wing revisionists had gained mainstream attraction in opposition to the socialist movements that were predominant in the early years of the Zionist state. By the 1960s, the USSR had cut off relations with Israel who had begun liberalizing their economy. Thus, Israel finally achieved a shared language, economy, culture, and territory, allowing for Jewish nationalism to be achieved.
The Populist Tide
The rise of globalism in the late 20th century led to a rise in nationalism and populism in Europe and North America. That trend was further fueled by increased terrorism in the West, the September 11 attacks in the United States being a prime example, increasing unrest and civil wars in the Middle East, and waves of Muslim refugees, especially from the Syrian Civil War, flooding into Europe. Nationalist groups like Germany's Pegida, France's National Front and the UK Independence Party gained prominence in their respective nations advocating restrictions on immigration to protect the local populations. Since 2010, Catalan nationalists have led a renewed Catalan independence movement and declared Catalan independence. The movement has been opposed by Spanish nationalists. In the 2010s, the Greek economic crisis and waves of immigration have led to a significant rise of Fascism and Greek nationalism across Greece, especially among the youth. In Russia, exploitation of nationalist sentiments allowed Vladimir Putin to consolidate power. This nationalist sentiment was used in Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and other actions in Ukraine. Nationalist movements gradually began to rise in Central Europe as well, particularly Poland, under the influence of the ruling party, Law and Justice, led by Jarosław Kaczyński. In Hungary, the anti-immigration rhetoric and stance against foreign influence is a powerful national glue promoted the ruling Fidesz party, led by Viktor Orbán. Nationalist parties have also joined governing coalitions in Bulgaria, Slovakia, Latvia and Ukraine. In India, Hindu nationalism has grown in popularity with the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, a right-wing party which has been ruling India at the national level since 2014. The rise in religious nationalism comes with the rise of right-wing populism in India, with the election and re-election of populist leader Narendra Modi as Prime Minister, who promised economic prosperity for all and an end to corruption. Militant Buddhist nationalism is also on the rise in Myanmar, Thailand and Sri Lanka. In Japan, nationalist influences in the government developed over the course of the early 21st century, largely from the far-right ultra-conservative Nippon Kaigi organization. The new movement has advocated re-establishing Japan as a military power and pushed revisionist historical narratives denying events such as the Nanking Massacre. The 2014 Scottish independence referendum was held on the 18th of September. The proposal was defeated, with 55.3% voting against independence. In a 2016 referendum, the British populace unexpectedly voted to withdraw the United Kingdom from the European Union, known as Brexit. As the promise of continued European Union membership was a core feature of the anti-independence campaign during the Scottish referendum, there have been calls for a second referendum on Scottish independence. The 2016 United States presidential election campaign saw the unprecedented rise of Donald Trump, a businessman with no political experience who ran on a populist nationalist platform and struggled to gain endorsements from mainstream political figures, even within his own party. Trump's slogans Make America Great Again and America First exemplified his campaign's repudiation of globalism and its staunchly nationalistic outlook. His unexpected victory in the election was seen as part of the same trend that had brought about the Brexit vote. On the 22nd of October 2018, two weeks before the mid-term elections President Trump openly proclaimed that he was a nationalist to a cheering crowd at a rally in Texas in support of re-electing Senator Ted Cruz who was once an adversary. On the 29th of October 2018 Trump equated nationalism to patriotism, saying I'm proud of this country and I call that nationalism. In 2016, Rodrigo Duterte became president of the Philippines running a distinctly nationalist campaign. Contrary to the policies of his recent predecessors, he distanced the country from the Philippines' former ruler, the United States, and sought closer ties with China as well as Russia. In 2017, Turkish nationalism propelled President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to gain unprecedented power in a national referendum. Reactions from world leaders were mixed, with Western European leaders generally expressing concern, while the leaders of many of the more authoritarian regimes as well as President Trump offered their congratulations.