Nationalism is the belief that each nation has both the right and the duty to constitute itself as a state. There are many difficulties in specifying what a nation is—in Europe, for example, the candidates range from the Welsh and the Basques to Occitanians and Northumbrians—but some common culture is indispensable and a shared language highly desirable. The Swiss have so far got by without a common language, but its lack has sorely tried the rulers of Belgium. Nationalist theory usually attributes conflict to cross-national oppression, and thus offers a promise of world peace when self-determination has become a global reality.
Nationalism emerged in the hatred of cosmopolitanism which registered the resentment of Germans and other Europeans who were coming to feel marginal in terms of the universalistic rationalism of the French Enlightenment. The romantic idea that true humanity must be mediated by a deep involvement in one’s own unique culture led to an admiration for songs, poems, stories, plays and other creations understood as emanations of the national soul. The language of a people was accorded a unique value, no less as the medium of cultural self-expression than as a practical rule of thumb about how far the boundaries of a putative nation might stretch. The conquests of Napoleon turned these particularistic passions in a practical direction, and Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation delivered at Berlin in 1807 8 struck a responsive chord throughout Germany. Italy and Germany were both plausible candidates for state creation and both duly became states, though Italy remains imperfectly national to this day, while German unity owed more to Bismarck than to popular passion for nationhood.
The spread of nationalist ideas to Eastern Europe and beyond, where very different peoples were inextricably intertwined, was bound to create difficulties. Doctrinal diffusion was facilitated by the growth of industry, and of cities. Teachers, journalists, clergy and other intellectuals found in nationalist ideas an identity for the present and a vision for the future. Some set to work writing down languages previously purely oral; others constructed a literature and elicited a suitable history. Opera and the novel were favourite vehicles of nationalist feeling. The politics of these endeavours triumphed with the Treaty of Versailles in 1918, which settled Europe in terms of the principle of national self-determination.
Throughout Africa and Asia, nationalist ideas fuelled the campaigns to replace the old European empires with home-grown rulers, but since there were few plausible nations in this area, successor states which had been constructed on a variety of principles claimed freedom in order to begin the process of cultural homogenization which might lead to nationhood. Pakistan, based upon the religious identity of Islam, attempted to hold together two separated areas inherited from the British Raj, and could not be sustained in that form; the eastern region broke off as Bangladesh in 1971. The artificial boundaries of imperial Africa have, however, been a surprisingly successful container of the often chaotic mixture of tribes they contained, though virtually all have had to compensate for lack of homogeneity by centralizing and frequently tyrannizing governments.
Political scientists often find in nationalism an attractive form of explanation because it promises to explain the hidden causes of conflict between different ethnic groups. In this usage, nationalism is not a belief, but rather a force supposed to move people to both action and belief. Such a concept provokes a search for the conditions under which the force is triggered. The promise of this research programme, like many another in political science, far exceeds the performance. Nationalism is better treated as a complex of ideas and sentiments which respond flexibly, decade by decade, to new situations, usually situations of grievance, in which peoples may find themselves.
Kenneth Minogue
London School of Economics and Political Science
Further reading
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities, London.
Gellner, E. (1983) Nations and Nationalism, Oxford.
Hertz, F. (1944) Nationality in History and Politics, London.
Kedourie, E. (1970) Nationalism in Asia and Africa, London.
Smith, A.D. (1971) Theories of Nationalism, London.
