Nationalism

The principle that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that each nation is entitled to govern itself, and that the boundaries of the state should match the boundaries of the nation.

Position on the compass: auth-right (1.0, 6.0) · 1789 – present

Key thinkers

• Johann Gottfried Herder
• Giuseppe Mazzini
• Ernest Gellner

Origins

Emerged in the late eighteenth century from Herder's cultural theory and the French Revolution's transfer of sovereignty from monarch to people. It became the dominant organising principle of the international order across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Two families

The most important distinction within nationalism is between civic and ethnic conceptions, and it determines almost everything else about a given movement.

Civic nationalism defines the nation by shared institutions, laws and political commitments. Membership is in principle open: anyone who accepts the constitutional order can belong. Ethnic nationalism defines the nation by descent, language, religion or culture. Membership is inherited and cannot be acquired.

The distinction is analytically clean and empirically messy. Civic nations almost always carry an implicit cultural core — a dominant language, a set of assumed historical reference points — and the boundary between accepting institutions and assimilating to a culture is rarely as sharp in practice as in theory.

The modernist account

The dominant scholarly explanation reverses the intuitive story. Ernest Gellner argued in Nations and Nationalism (1983) that industrial society requires a mobile, literate workforce sharing a standardised language, which demands mass education in a single medium — and that the nation is the product of this requirement rather than its cause. Nationalism does not awaken nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they did not exist.

Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983) supplied the mechanism. A nation is imagined because no member will ever meet most of the others, yet each holds an image of their communion. Print capitalism made this possible: standardised vernacular print created readerships that could conceive of themselves as simultaneous participants in a common life. Anderson's term is descriptive rather than dismissive — all large communities beyond face-to-face scale are imagined in this sense.

The ambiguous record

Nationalism resists moral summary, and any honest account has to hold both halves. It supplied the language of anti-colonial liberation across Asia and Africa, underpins the principle of self-determination in international law, and is the basis on which democratic solidarity — the willingness to fund welfare for strangers — has actually been constructed. No large-scale redistributive state exists without a shared national identity underwriting it.

It also supplied the language of ethnic cleansing, expulsion and genocide. The demand that state boundaries match national ones is unrealisable in territories where populations are mixed, and the attempt to realise it has repeatedly meant moving or eliminating people rather than moving borders.

Position on the compass

Nationalism sits high on the authoritarian axis and near the centre on the economic one, because it is compatible with almost any economic programme. It has been combined with state socialism, with market liberalism and with corporatism. Like populism, it is a claim about who belongs and who decides rather than about how resources should be allocated.

Core tenets

• Humanity is divided into distinct nations with the right to self-government.
• Political and national boundaries should coincide.
• Loyalty to the nation takes precedence over other political loyalties.
• National culture and language deserve protection and public support.
• Sovereignty resides in the people understood as a national community.

Common criticisms

• Nations are historically recent constructions, not natural or perennial units.
• The matching principle is unrealisable in mixed territories and has repeatedly justified expulsion.
• It supplies no answer to problems that cross borders, from climate to pandemics to finance.
• Ethnic variants necessarily exclude long-resident populations from full membership.
• National identity is routinely mobilised to suppress internal dissent as disloyalty.