Nationalism

Nationalism is a set of beliefs in the distinctiveness of a group (a nation) and its right to practice self-determination. The group in question need not share any observable ethnic, linguistic, religious, or racial traits, merely a collective sense of itself as a national political community. As Benedict Anderson puts it, nationalism is the sense of belonging to a community where many of its members may never come into contact with one another. Nationalism creates concepts of nationality or national identity—belonging and owing loyalty to the nation. For these reasons, nationalism is a key source of social integration as a well as disintegration. It provides an important foundation for social and political solidarity and mobilization. The rise of French nationalism in the nineteenth century enabled Napoleon to revolutionize militaries and overrun Europe, as he replaced mercenaries with citizen armies inspired by nationalism. Without nationalism as a sort of social glue, large integrated states could not survive or mobilize their inhabitants. Examples of nationalism as an integrating force include the creation of new nation-states arising out of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the unifications of Germany and Italy. More recently, nationalism is associated with disintegrative processes, such as violent conflicts between minority and majority groups and the collapse of multinational states. Examples include Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia along national lines.

Nationalism is often thought of in reference to the rise of the modern state, when theories of popular sovereignty began to replace monarchical divine right as the basis for political rule. This conception of nationalism as popular government guided the American and then the French in their eighteenth-century revolutions, and American President Woodrow Wilson in his call for national self-determination as a principle of the post–World War I international order. Nationalism is thus something that is peculiarly modern and demarcates the modern era from the premodern.

Nationalism is distinct from and broader than the concepts of ethnicity or ethnonationalism. Ethnonationalism refers to an ethnic group within a state or crossing state borders that seeks a greater degree of political self-government, for example Chechens in Russia or Hungarians in Romania and Slovakia. Nationalism refers to a sense of belonging to a nation that may include many different ethnic, religious, linguistic, and other minority groups. Rather, nationalism may encompass all these groups. For example, American nationalism refers to a set of [Page 590]beliefs that Americans (including Native Americans, African Americans, Irish Americans, Arab Americans, Asian Americans) constitute a distinctive group, and that the group has the right to govern itself. Nationalism is contrasted with cosmopolitanism, a set of beliefs that individuals make up a global rather than a national community.