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Nationalism

Nationalism is one of the most difficult and contested concepts in social science. There are fundamental disagreements on its definition, origins, historical location, and normative status. This entry examines the concept of nationalism and explores these disagreements on how it should be understood.

Definition

In a very general sense, nationalism implies a strong attachment to the nation as a human collective. In the social sciences, however, it tends to be defined more strictly as the belief that the nation should form the basis for political order. At one time, it was common to define it as a movement in search of its own state or to extend the reach and power of an existing state. In recent years, it has been recognized that nationalists may pursue other forms of polity, including that of their own decentralized or federal region. Attention has also extended from nationalisms seeking to change the political order to nationalism as an everyday mechanism for sustaining the existing political order of the nation-state, as in Michael Billig's “banal nationalism.”

This still leaves the question of how the nation itself is defined. For some, the nation is a politicized ethnicity, but this merely begs the equally difficult question of what an ethnic group is. Besides, whatever definition of ethnic group we use, many of them are not organized as nations nor would their members recognize them as such. There appears to be no one single characteristic that would qualify a group as a nation, be it culture, institutions, territory, or history. In many cases, indeed, the idea that a particular group is a nation is contested. There are various ways out of this conundrum. One is to divide nationalisms into different types qualified with prefixes or adjectives, but this risks losing the central concept altogether. A second is to treat the nation as bearing resemblance to a family rather than one with a single core meaning. This allows us to cope with the complexity and variety of nationalisms and to compare aspects of each, rather than forcing them into the same mold. A third way is to see the nation as a subjective category, so that if people feel they are a nation, then, they are. A fourth is to treat nationhood as a claim made both as to the existence of a group and to a set of rights that pertain to nationality, rather than as a sociological category. These central definitional problems have made it impossible to arrive at a general theory of nationalism applicable in all contexts and at all times. Most of the literature therefore looks at particular nationalisms or tries to generalize from specific cases, with decidedly mixed results.

Origins

The origins and causes of nationalism are equally disputed. It is common to place primordialists and perennialists at one extreme and constructivists and modernists at the other. A primordialist would believe that nations have their origins in essential features of humanity that are difficult if not impossible to change. Some nationalists themselves have subscribed to this view, especially in the late 19th century when biological theories of race were developing. Nationality is presented here as an essential characteristic bred into individuals. Very few nationalists and fewer social scientists nowadays would admit to being primordialists, although some sociobiologists seek to derive the nation from the human need for collectivities and the instinct for territory and mutual protection. Whatever the merits of this as a theory of human behavior, however, it can scarcely explain why communities should take the form of nations in general or of specific nations in particular. It thus fails as a theory of nationalism. Perennialists are not primordialists, in that they do not believe that nations are part of the hardwiring of the human being and rather emphasize culture and deeply ingrained social habits. They insist that nations go back a long way in time and are not as easily manipulated or rebuilt as constructivists and, especially, instrumentalists would think. They will cite the existence of things looking very like nations in antiquity and locate the origins of European nations in premodern times.

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