Nationalism
The nation is the primary political community, and a government’s first duty is to its own people, culture and sovereignty.
What does this mean?
Nationalism holds that humanity is divided into nations, that each nation is entitled to govern itself, and that a government owes its primary obligations to its own people. The nation may be defined by shared descent, language, religion, history or simply by a common political project — which definition is used matters a great deal, and separates very different kinds of nationalism from one another.
It is not inherently either good or bad, and it has done both. Nationalism was the organising force of anti-colonial independence movements across Asia and Africa, including India’s, where it was explicitly built to include many languages and religions. It has also been used to justify expulsions, wars of expansion and the exclusion of minorities from full citizenship. What the nationalism in question does depends almost entirely on how it answers a single question: who counts as a full member of the nation, and on what terms.
Where did it come from?
Emerged in Europe after the French Revolution and spread worldwide, becoming the dominant political form of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It powered both European unification and empire, and then the anti-colonial movements that dismantled those empires. India’s independence movement was among the largest nationalist movements in history.
Major thinkers
- Johann Gottfried Herder
- Giuseppe Mazzini
- Ernest Gellner
- Benedict Anderson
- David Miller
Historical figures
- Giuseppe Garibaldi
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
- Mahatma Gandhi
- Sukarno
- Charles de Gaulle
What it looks like today
- Sovereigntist and border-focused parties across Europe
- Economic self-reliance programmes and strategic autonomy doctrines
- National independence and self-determination movements worldwide
Where it sits on each dimension
Wealth and inequality
Genuinely unfixed. Nationalist movements have been socialist, liberal and market-oriented in roughly equal measure.
The state in the economy
Personal liberty
Tradition and change
Nation and the world
At the nationalist pole by definition: sovereignty and national interest outrank obligations beyond the border.
Religion and the state
Power and its limits
Environment and growth
Crime and punishment
Its strongest arguments
- Shared national identity has proved to be one of the few reliable foundations for the solidarity that welfare states and mass democracies require.
- Self-government by a people in their own territory is the principle that ended colonial rule.
- A government accountable to a defined citizenry can be held to account in a way that diffuse global authority cannot.
Its strongest criticisms
- Defining who belongs necessarily defines who does not, and minorities usually bear the cost of that line.
- Treating obligations as stopping at the border is hard to defend when the people on the other side are in desperate need.
- National rivalry has been a principal cause of the largest wars in history.
Common misconceptions
- That nationalism is the same as fascism. Fascism is nationalist, but nationalism has also been democratic, liberal and anti-colonial; most nationalist movements have not been fascist.
- That it is inherently hostile to minorities. That depends entirely on whether the nation is defined by descent or by shared citizenship.
- That it is right-wing by nature. Anti-colonial nationalism was frequently socialist, and many left movements have been strongly nationalist.
A caveat
This entry covers nationalism in general. Civic nationalism is listed separately because the difference between defining the nation by descent and defining it by shared citizenship is one of the most consequential distinctions in this whole model.
Sources
- Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism · 1983
- Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities · 1983
- David Miller, On Nationality · Oxford University Press · 1995