Nationalism

Nationalism emerged as a modern political force in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when sovereignty increasingly came to be associated with the people rather than dynastic rulers. The American and French Revolutions helped popularize the principle that a political community could claim legitimate self-government, while expanding literacy, conscription, print culture, and centralized administration helped create broader national identities.¹

A nation is not simply a population living within one border. Nationalists typically present it as a community connected by language, historical memory, culture, territory, or political allegiance. These connections are partly inherited and partly constructed through schools, ceremonies, maps, museums, flags, and shared public narratives. Nationalism therefore combines a descriptive claim about collective identity with a normative claim about political authority.

Nationalism takes different forms depending on how membership is defined and what political objective is pursued. Civic nationalism emphasizes common laws, citizenship, and political commitment; ethnic or cultural nationalism gives greater weight to ancestry, language, religion, or supposed descent. In practice, states often combine these principles rather than embodying either in a pure form.²

National movements have supported independence, decolonization, minority-language rights, and the consolidation of representative institutions. Anti-colonial leaders used national claims to challenge imperial hierarchies and demand equal sovereignty. Nationalism can also become authoritarian when leaders equate dissent with betrayal, treat the nation as culturally homogeneous, or place collective unity above individual rights. Its political effects consequently depend on institutions, definitions of belonging, and relations with neighboring groups.

Nationalism often seeks alignment between the nation and the state, but that alignment is difficult because populations and identities overlap across borders. Multiethnic empires, borderlands, and diasporas have made competing national claims a recurring source of political conflict. The breakup of empires after the First World War created new states but did not eliminate disputes over minorities, territory, and sovereignty.

In the twentieth century, exclusive and racialized nationalisms contributed to fascism, aggressive expansion, and genocide, most catastrophically in Nazi Germany. The post-1945 international order responded partly by pairing state sovereignty with principles of human rights and self-determination, although those principles can conflict when a secessionist movement contests an established state. Contemporary nationalism may therefore appear as separatism, state centralization, populist opposition to immigration, or resistance to perceived economic and cultural globalization.

National identity is frequently produced through ordinary institutions rather than political speeches alone. Standardized time, censuses, public schooling, military service, and national statistical categories made large populations more legible to governments and helped people imagine themselves as members of a common community.

Nationalism also has a significant cultural dimension. Museums, folk traditions, historical novels, monuments, and sporting events can turn selected memories into symbols of collective continuity. Some movements deliberately revive or standardize languages that had previously existed in multiple local forms, while others define the nation through citizenship without requiring cultural uniformity. The ideology is therefore not inherently identical with patriotism, xenophobia, or racism: those concepts may overlap with nationalism, but they describe different attitudes or practices. Nor has globalization simply displaced nationalism; international institutions and cross-border markets coexist with continuing demands for national control and recognition.

Nation

A community imagined as sharing a common identity and entitled, in nationalist thought, to political recognition or self-government.

Civic nationalism

A form of nationalism that defines membership chiefly through citizenship, laws, and political participation.

Ethnic nationalism

A form that gives primary importance to ancestry, language, religion, or cultural descent.

Self-determination

The principle that a people should be able to determine its political status and pursue its development.