Nationalism, Neo-Nationalism

Nationalism is a political ideology undergirding the idea of the nation-state that has been dominant in global political thought since the mid-20th century. The nationalist imagination can be fed only in transnational space, and hence, a frequent misunderstanding of nationalism is that it is national. Perhaps it is not a misunderstanding in toto because nationalism haunts the nation-state. However, Marc Bloch's dictum that “all history is comparative history” hints at the transnationality of the nationalist imagination, since comparison throws into relief alleged national peculiarities and thus essentializes the national.

Nationalism articulates its transnationality distinctly not only in the realm of imagination but also in Realpolitik. The nation-state's strategies for organizing and controlling the inner space of the nation, mobilizing population, and generating the popular support for its national projects cannot be fully understood without taking into consideration the transnational and global forces impinging and imbricating upon the state since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Thus, nationalism is unthinkable without transnational or global perspectives. The transnational study of nationalism is not an oxymoron at all.

Transnational perspectives cast doubts on the authenticity of nationalism as a fixed entity and thus enable us to decompose the appearance of a canonical text inherent to the encyclopedia form. Once shifted from an idée fixe to a relational concept, any essentialist description of nationalism does not seem plausible, especially in the context of a reference work. The global study of nationalism helps to map the genealogy of nationalism on a worldwide scale, which exposes nationalism as the ideological tool of the nation-state. This narrative strategy calls for a shift in the ways of questioning from the essentialist, “what nationalism?” to the constructivist, “whose nationalism?” The constructivist stance throws a skeptical gaze on the more than century-long controversy over the essence of nationalism. The essentialist debate, due to its long history, may look rich. However, responses to the question of what is nationalism have been bound to a dichotomy, be it primordialist or modernist.

Despite its proclaimed diversity, the essentialist explanation has been contained in the trajectory of a pendulum movement between two poles: pri-mordialism versus modernism, perennialism versus instrumentalism, the ethnic versus the civic, the objective versus the subjective, Kulturnation versus Staatsnation (cultural nationalism versus political nationalism), and the Eastern type versus the Western type. Across innumerable historical diversities, this dichotomy of primordialism and modernism has been the taxonomical container of historical nationalisms. Inclined toward either the former or the latter, most of the essentialist discourses on nationalism stand eclectically in between. But the demarcating line between pri-mordialism and modernism blurs at a “fictive ethnicity.” According to the constructivist view to see “nation” and “people” as historical constructs, the choice between the primordialist and modernist discourse would depend on the context of who needs the nation, who manufactures that need, and whose interests it serves.