short essay on nationalism

Nationalism Essay for Students and Children

400 words essay on nationalism.

First of all, Nationalism is the concept of loyalty towards a nation. In Nationalism, this sentiment of loyalty must be present in every citizen. This ideology certainly has been present in humanity since time immemorial. Above all, it’s a concept that unites the people of a nation. It is also characterized by love for one’s nation. Nationalism is probably the most important factor in international politics.

Why Nationalism Is Important?

Nationalism happens because of common factors. The people of a nation share these common factors. These common factors are common language, history , culture, traditions, mentality, and territory. Thus a sense of belonging would certainly come in people. It would inevitably happen, whether you like it or not. Therefore, a feeling of unity and love would happen among national citizens. In this way, Nationalism gives strength to the people of the nation.

Nationalism has an inverse relationship with crime. It seems like crime rates are significantly lower in countries with strong Nationalism. This happens because Nationalism puts feelings of love towards fellow countrymen. Therefore, many people avoid committing a crime against their own countrymen. Similarly, corruption is also low in such countries. Individuals in whose heart is Nationalism, avoid corruption . This is because they feel guilty to harm their country.

Nationalism certainly increases the resolve of a nation to defend itself. There probably is a huge support for strengthening the military among nationalistic people. A strong military is certainly the best way of defending against foreign enemies. Countries with low Nationalism, probably don’t invest heavily in the military. This is because people with low Nationalism don’t favor strong militaries . Hence, these countries which don’t take Nationalism seriously are vulnerable.

Nationalism encourages environmental protection as well. People with high national pride would feel ashamed to pollute their nation. Therefore, such people would intentionally work for environment protection even without rules. In contrast, an individual with low Nationalism would throw garbage carelessly.

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Contemporary Nationalism

Nationalism took an ugly turn in the 20th century with the emergence of Fascism and Nazism. However, that was a negative side of Nationalism. Since then, many nations gave up the idea of aggressive Nationalism. This certainly did not mean that Nationalism in contemporary times got weak. People saw strong Nationalism in the United States and former USSR. There was a merger of Nationalism with economic ideologies like Capitalism and Socialism.

In the 21st century, there has been no shortage of Nationalism. The popular election of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is proof. Both these leaders strongly propagate Nationalism. Similarly, the election victory of other nationalistic leaders is more evidence.

Nationalism is a strong force in the world that is here to say. Nationalism has a negative side. However, this negative side certainly cannot undermine the significance of Nationalism. Without Nationalism, there would have been no advancement of Human Civilization.

500 Words Essay on Nationalism

Nationalism is an ideology which shows an individual’s love & devotion towards his nation.  It is actually people’s feelings for their nation as superior to all other nations. The concept of nationalism in India developed at the time of the Independence movement. This was the phase when people from all the areas/caste/religion etc collectively fought against British Raj for independence. Hence nationalism can be called as collective devotion of all the nationals towards their country.

Introduction of Nationalism in India:

The first world war (1919) had far-reaching consequences on the entire world. After the first world war, some major movements broke out in India like Satyagrah & Non-co-operation movement. This has sown the seeds of nationalism in Indians.  This era developed new social groups along with new modes of struggle. The major events like Jalianwala Bagh massacre & Khilafat movement had a strong impact on the people of India.

Thus, their collective struggle against colonialism brought them together and they have collectively developed a strong feeling of responsibility, accountability, love, and devotion for their country. This collective feeling of the Indian people was the start of the development of Nationalism.  Foundation of Indian National Congress in 1885 was the first organized expression of nationalism in India.

Basis of Rising of Nationalism in India

There could be several basis of rising of nationalism in India:

• The Britishers came to India as traders but slowly became rulers and started neglecting the interests of the Indians. This led to the feeling of oneness amongst Indians and hence slowly led to nationalism.
• India developed as a unified country in the 19 th & 20 th century due to well-structured governance system of Britishers. This has led to interlinking of the economic life of people, and hence nationalism.
• The spread of western education, especially the English language amongst educated Indians have helped the knowledgeable population of different linguistic origin to interact on a common platform and hence share their nationalist opinions.
• The researches by Indian and European scholars led to the rediscovery of the Indian past. The Indian scholars like Swami Vivekanand & European scholars like Max Mueller had done historical researched & had glorified India’s past in such a manner that Indian peoples developed a strong sense of nationalism & patriotism.
• The emergence of the press in the 19 th century has helped in the mobilization of people’s opinion thereby giving them a common platform to interact for independence motion and also to promote nationalism.
• Various reforms and social movements had helped Indian society to remove the social evils which were withholding the societal development and hence led to rejoining of society.
• The development of well-led railway network in India was a major boost in the transportation sector. Hence making it easy for the Indian population to connect with each other.
• The international events like the French revolution, Unification of Italy & Germany, etc.have  awakened the feelings of national consciousness amongst Indian people.

Though a lot of factors had led to rising of nationalism in India, the major role was played by First world war, Rowlatt act and Jaliawala bagh massacre. These major incidences have had a deep-down impact on the mind of Indians. These motivated them to fight against Britishers with a  strong feeling of Nationalism.  This feeling of nationalism was the main driving force for the independence struggle in India.

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Nationalism Essay: Topics, Examples, & Tips

A nationalism essay is focused on the idea of devotion and loyalty to one’s country and its sovereignty. In your paper, you can elaborate on its various aspects. For example, you might want to describe the phenomenon’s meaning or compare the types of nationalism. You might also be interested in exploring nationalism examples: in various countries (South Africa, for instance), in international relations, in government, in world history, or even in everyday life.

Our specialists will write a custom essay specially for you!

This article by our custom-writing experts will help you succeed with your assignment. Here, you will find:

• Definitions and comparisons of different types of nationalism;
• A step-by-step nationalism essay writing guide;
• A number of nationalism examples;
• A list of 44 nationalism essay topics.
• 🔝 Top 10 Topics
• ❓ Definition
• ✔️ Pros & Cons
• 📜 Nationalism Essay Structure
• 🌐 44 Nationalism Topics
• 📝 Essay Prompts & Example
• ✏️ Frequent Questions

🔝 Top 10 Nationalism Essay Topics

• Irish nationalism in literature
• Cultural nationalism in India
• Can nationalism promote peace?
• The politics of contested nationalism
• How does religion influence nationalism?
• Does globalization diminish nationalism?
• Does nationalism promote imperialism?
• Nationalism in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
• How liberalism leads to economic nationalism
• Link between national identity and civic nationalism

❓ Nationalism Essay: What Is It About?

Nationalism is an idea that a nation’s interests are above those of other countries or individuals. It implies identifying with a nation and promoting its independence. In particular, nationalism ascribes value to a nation’s culture, traditions, religion, language, and territory.

In fact, “nationalism” is a very complicated term. It has many types and gradations that are exciting to explore. Besides, it has a long and varied history. In countries such as India and France nationalism helped to achieve democracy and independence. At the same time, in it extreme forms it led to wars and terrorism. Any of these aspects can be the focus of your nationalism essay.

Types of Nationalism

As we’ve mentioned before, nationalism is a complicated notion. It varies a lot from country to country as well as historically. That’s why scholars proposed a classification of nationalism types. It helps to reflect these differences. Check out some of the most popular forms of nationalism in the list below.

• Cultural nationalism. This type is centered on a nation’s culture and language. In the 1800s, it became a popular idea in Europe and postcolonial states. Cultural nationalism is reflected in the celebration of folklore and local dialects. For example, in Ireland it led to an increased interest in the Gaelic language. We can still find ideas related to this ideology today. A prominent example is Americans’ appreciation of their cultural symbols, such as the flag.
• Civic nationalism. Civic nationalism’s definition is an idea of belonging through common rights. According to this ideology, the interests of a state are more important than those of a single nation. Civic nationalism is based on modern ideas of equality and personal freedom. These values help people achieve common goals. Nowadays, civic nationalism is closely associated with liberal Western countries.
• Ethnic nationalism. This type is focused on common ethnicity and ancestry. According to ethno-nationalists, a country’s homogenous culture allows sovereignty. This ideology is considered controversial due to its association with racism and xenophobia. Ethnic nationalism’s pros and cons can be illustrated by its effects on culture in Germany. On the one hand, it influenced the art of the Romantic era. On the other, its extreme form led to the rise of Nazism.
• Economic nationalism. A simple definition of economic nationalism is the idea that a government should protect its economy from outside influences. It leads to the discouragement of cooperation between countries. Such an approach has its benefits. However, it is often counterproductive. Scholars point out many failures throughout the history of economic nationalism. The Great Depression, for example, was prolonged due to this approach.
• Religious nationalism. The fusion of politics and religion characterizes this ideology. Its proponents argue that religion is an integral part of a national identity. For instance, it helps to unite people. The rise of religious nationalism often occurs in countries that fight for independence. Notable examples are India, Pakistan, and Christian countries like Poland.

The Globalism vs Nationalism Debate

One of the fiercest debates concerning nationalism is focused on how it relates to globalism. These two attitudes are often seen as opposed to each other. Some even call globalism and nationalism “the new political divide.” Let’s see whether this point of view is justified.

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Nowadays, communities around the world are becoming more and more homogenous. This unification and interconnectedness is called globalization , while an ideology focused on its promotion is known as globalism.

Naturally, these tendencies have their pros and cons . Want to learn more? Have a look at the table below.

As you can see, both notions have their strong and weak aspects. But can globalism and nationalism coexist? In fact, many scholars say “ yes, they can .” Instead of choosing either option, people can combine their best traits. This way, we will promote effective communication and collaboration.

Nationalism vs. Patriotism

You may be wondering: Is nationalism a synonym for patriotism? The answer is that both words denote pride and love for one’s country. However, there is an important distinction to be made. While patriotism has a generally positive meaning, nationalism has a negative one.

The main difference lies in the attitude towards other nations:

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• Patriotism doesn’t imply that one’s nation is superior to others. Generally, this term refers to how the state approaches its ideals, values, and culture. In this case, a patriot of a particular country can represent any nation, regardless of their origin.
• In contrast, nationalism implies an idea of a nation’s sovereignty. This means that a country’s interests are viewed separately from the rest of the world. It also focuses on the importance of nation’s culture and ethnicity. In extreme situations, these values may result in an idea of supremacy.

In short, nationalism is patriotism taken to the extreme. With this in mind, let’s have a look at positive and negative effects of nationalism. An essay on any of the following points will surely be a success.

✔️ Nationalism Pros and Cons

If you have to write an essay on “why nationalism is good”, here are some of its key benefits for you to consider:

But what about the concept’s drawbacks? After all, nothing can be 100% beneficial. For a credible investigation, it’s necessary to examine both sides of the topic. Here are some disadvantages to consider for a paper on nationalism:

As you can see, nationalism can lead both to prosperity and destruction. Now you know why keeping the balance is crucial to a nation’s well-being. Think about it when you write your argumentative essay on nationalism.

📜 Nationalism Essay Structure

Now, let’s take a closer look at the essay structure. When writing your paper on nationalism, follow this outline:

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So, was the writing process as hard as you expected? Nationalism essays indeed require a little bit more time and research than other papers. Nonetheless, you can only benefit from this experience.

🌐 Nationalism Essay Topics

Don’t know which nationalism essay topic to choose? Try one of the ideas below:

• How do nationalism and patriotism differ? The former is linked to acquiring territories perceived as the homeland. The latter means taking pride in the nation’s achievements. Scholars sometimes consider patriotism a form of nationalism.
• How does nationalism affect the distribution of the Sars-CoV-2 vaccine? Determine whether the countries with nationalist tendencies are more successful in getting their population vaccinated.
• Nationality politics in the Soviet Union . Under the rule of Stalin, the USSR transformed into a totalitarian state. But before that, Lenin took care to enact extensive ethnicity laws. What happened when Stalin slammed the brakes on the program?
• Perceiving nationalism as bad: why is it common? For many, the word itself evokes negative associations. For a person who considers themselves a liberal , it may seem like a great evil. Where does this perception come from? What benefits does nationalism have for liberals?
• Nationalist ideology and its many categories. In nationalism studies, the main distinction is between its ethnic and civic types. But there are many other categories that you can explore. Use this prompt to give an overview of such concepts.
• Religious nationalism: Crusades vs. Jihad. In the Middle Ages, Christians tried to stop Islam’s expansion via bloody crusades. In modern times, the call to jihad is used to mobilize extremist Muslims. What are the major differences between these types of holy war?
• What role does nationalism play in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict Israel and Palestine have been fighting for decades over what they believe to be a holy land. The dispute appears to be unsolvable. What arguments do both parties bring forth? How does Arab nationalism come into play here?
• The development of nationalism over time . The French Revolution was the result of nationalist thinking. However, what we perceive as nationalist today is different from what it was back then. In your essay, trace the origins and evolution of the term “nationalism” and its meaning.
• Prominent dictators then and now: a comparison. Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco are well-known names. But how do they compare to modern authoritarian leaders? When answering this question, evaluate the role of nationalist ideology .
• What are some political disadvantages of nationalism? Populist leaders are often unpopular with other politicians. Some examples are Poland’s PiS party and Donald Trump. Discuss how a nationalist stance can affect domestic policies.
• Arab nationalism and its influence on the world economy .
• Nationalism vs. liberalism.
• German nationalism and the World Wars .
• Economic nationalism : pros and cons.
• European nationalism in the 20th century.
• Globalism vs. nationalism: how do they differ ?
• Jewish nationalism and its influence on the formation of the Israeli state.
• Relationship between nationalism and religion .
• Nationalism in Orwell’s novels.
• The French Revolution: how nationalism influenced the political system change .
• Is nationalism objectively good or bad?
• Nationalism, transnationalism, and globalism: differences and similarities.
• Russian nationalism in the 21st century and its impact on the world political system.
• Nationalism as a catalyst for war .
• Liberal nationalism and radical nationalism: benefits and disadvantages.
• Evaluate the significance of national identity .
• What is the difference between race and ethnicity?
• How can love of a country positively impact a state’s healthcare system ?
• What fueled the rise of nationalism in the post-socialist space?
• Trace the connection between nationalist ideology and morality .
• What countries are considered nationalizing ?
• Compare the conflicts where nationalism hinders solution.
• Choose five aspects of neo-nationalism and analyze them.
• Nationalist expressions in art .
• Nationalism in Ukraine: consequences of the Crimean annexation .
• Revolution and nationalism in South America.
• Examine the significance of street names to spread nationalist views .
• Why do people grow attached to a specific territory?
• The political power of nationalist language and propaganda .
• What does the feminist theory say about chauvinism?
• What makes post-colonial nationalism unique?
• Assess the difference between Western and non‐Western nationalism .
• Sex and gender in nationalism .
• Civic and ethnic forms of nationalism: similarities and differences.

📝 Nationalism Examples & Essay Prompts

Want more ideas? Check out these additional essay prompts on some of the crucial nationalism topics!

Nationalism in South Africa Essay Prompt

South African nationalism is a movement aimed at uniting indigenous African peoples and protecting their values. An essay on this topic can consist of the following parts:

• The factors that led to the rise of African nationalism. These include dissatisfaction with colonial oppression, racial discrimination, and poor living conditions.
• Effects of African nationalism. One significant achievement is indigenous peoples regaining their territories. They also improved their status and revived their culture that was distorted by colonialism.
• Conclusion of African nationalism. With time, the struggle for autonomy evolved into an idea of Pan Africanism. This concept refers to the unification of indigenous South African peoples.

Nationalism in India Essay Prompt

Nationalism in 19 th -century India was a reaction against British rule. One of its defining characteristics is the use of non-violent protests. Your essay on this topic may cover the following aspects:

• Mahatma Gandhi and Indian nationalism. Gandhi was a pioneer of non-violent civil disobedience acts. His adherence to equality inspired many human rights activists.
• Cultural nationalism in India. Pride rooted in national heritage, language, and religion played a crucial role in Indian nationalism. One of the most important figures associated with this movement is Bengal poet Rabindranath Tagore.

Nationalism in the Philippines Essay Prompt

Nationalism in the Philippines has a unique chronological pattern. It’s also closely related to the Philippino identity. You can explore these and other aspects in your essay:

• The rise of Filipino nationalism in the 19 th century. Discuss the role of José Rizal and the Propaganda Movement in these events.
• Nationalism and patriotism in the Philippines. Compare the levels of patriotism at different points in the country’s history.
• Is there a lack of nationalism in the Philippines? Studies show that Filipinos have a relatively weak sense of nationhood and patriotism. What is your perspective on this problem?

How Did Nationalism Lead to WWI?: Essay Prompt

Nationalism is widely considered to be one of the leading causes of WWI. Discuss it with the following prompts:

• Militarism and nationalism before WWI. Militarism is a belief in a country’s military superiority. Assess its role in countries such as the British and Russian Empires before the war.
• How did imperialism contribute to WWI? Imperialism refers to a nation’s fight for new territories. It fuelled the rivalry between the world’s leading countries before the war.
• Nationalism in the Balkans and the outbreak of WWI. Write a persuasive essay on the role of the Balkan crisis in Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. How did this event lead to the outbreak of war?

Want to see what a paper on this topic may look like? Check out this nationalism essay example:

Now you have all you need to write an excellent essay on nationalism. Liked this article? Let us know in the comment section below!

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✏️ Nationalism Essay FAQ

You can define nationalism as the identification with nation and support of its interests. Nationalism is aimed at protecting a nation from foreign influences. This idea is important because it helps a country be strong and independent.

Most specialists highlight religious, political, and ethnic nationalism. Different classifications suggest various types of nationalism. It can be positive and negative, militant, extreme, etc. The phenomenon is complex and multidimensional. You can find it in most societies.

Nationalism is a complex phenomenon. It has positive and negative sides. Because of this, it’s crucial to write about it objectively. In any academic text on nationalism you should provide relevant arguments, quotes, and other evidence.

A nationalism essay focuses on the concept’s principles, advantages, and disadvantages. You can find numerous articles and research papers about it online or in your school’s library. Beware of copying anything directly: use them only as a source of inspiration.

🔗 References

• A New Dawn in Nationalism Studies? European History Quaterly
• The SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism: Google Books
• Nationalism Studies Program: 2-year MA Student Handbook (CEU)
• Nationalism: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Nationalism is back: The Economist
• Working-class Neo-Nationalism in Postsocialist Cluj, Romania: Academia
• Nationalism: Encyclopedia Britannica
• Nationalism: Definition, Examples, and History: The Balance
• The Problem of Nationalism: The Heritage Foundation
• Effects of Nationalism: LearnAlberta
• The Difference Between Patriotism and Nationalism: Merriam-Webster
• Varieties of American Popular Nationalism: Harvard University
• Not So Civic: Is There a Difference between Ethnic and Civic Nationalism?: Annual Review
• Globalism and Nationalism: Which One Is Bad?: Taylor & Francis Online
• African Nationalism and the Struggle for Freedom: Pearson Higher Education
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• Nationalism Essay

Long and Short Nationalism and Patriotism Essay

The word ‘Nationalism’ itches a question in everyone’s mind - what is it and the significance of nationalism in a country. To define nationalism, it is simply nothing but patriotism towards the country. Every citizen must have some kind of sentiment towards their country and nationalism defines that. It is really significant in the field of international politics. Nationalism is a magical term that binds the people of a country altogether. 

Below are the samples of short and long essays on Nationalism provided keeping the students’ convenience in mind. Take a look for a better understanding. 

Long Nationalism and Patriotism Essay

Nationalism is synonymous with the word ‘Patriotism’. It is believed to be an ideology that depicts an individual’s love and respect towards the nation. It is nothing but the common man’s feeling towards their country. 

The concept of nationalism originated during the pre-independent era in India. As the Britishers stepped into this country as traders and slowly turned into rulers, it became inevitable to get them out of the country. As a consequence, all the Indians bonded together, became stronger and a lot of major events and movements followed in order 

Movements like Satyagrah, the Salt March, the non-co-operation movement, Quit India movement broke out and that’s how the concept of nationalism was evoked amongst the Indians irrespective of gender, race, or religion. In that era, many social groups were formed and they had a strong impact on the people of India. Followingly, some major events like the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the Khilafat movement took place. 

Indian National Congress was formed in 1885 in order to provide a civil platform for the common Indians. The struggle against Britishers helped the Indians to develop a feeling of responsibility and devotion towards their motherland. This collective power of devotion helped the Indians to understand the power of nationalism. 

Below are a few factors that are responsible for the rise of nationalism in India. Take a look -

The British came to India for trading purposes as a part of the East India company. But eventually became rulers of the country and violence started erupting everywhere which spoils the communal harmony among all the nationalists. 

However, India has been developed as a unified nation under the government of the Britishers. This had a strong influence on the economic development of the country and thus led to a strong sense of nationalism among every Indian. 

There was a lot of influence left by the Britishers such as the English language has become one of the popular international languages used by the Indians. All the knowledgeable people of the country started communicating in English and this has become the interactive medium between all the linguistic groups. 

While Indians are under the rule of Britishers, a bunch of good and bad things happened. Among the good deeds, one is the development of transportation in the country and as a result, the Britishers developed a well-led railway system across the country. It helps all the Indians to get connected well and bond together. 

Along with the independence movement, various social movements also took place at that time period in India which helped to reform many superstitious practices and social evils in order to develop the basic social structure of the country. 

Short Essay on Nationalism

Nationalism is nothing but an ideology that happens due to several factors. Among those factors, a few are - history, territory, mother tongue, culture, heritage, tradition, mentality etc. with the help of these factors, a sense of belonging develops among the people. It somehow also helps to nurture the love and devotion of an individual towards the entire nation. 

The concept of nationalism was there for a long time. But in India, the concept took birth during the time of the independence movement. That was the phase when all the Indians came forward irrespective of caste, religion, language, or region etc. and fought against the British monarchy. That’s how the collective devotion of all the staunch Indian nationalists became prominent and bonding became stronger. 

Nationalism is the common factor among all the citizens that would bind them together and give them the unity and strength which is required. Nationalism is the hardcore reason behind national integration. People of an individual nation get strength through this magical term. It puts all the countrymen together and keeps all the hatred and crimes at the bay. 

In India, the term ‘nationalism’ has been misused quite frequently by the politicians, media, and common man. However, there were a lot of factors that worked in favour of nationalism in India. From World War I to the Jallianwala bagh massacre, these major incidents in Indian history accelerated the entire nation and motivated the Indian citizens against the British rulers. This is how nationalism became the main factor for the Independence movement in pre-independent India.

FAQs on Nationalism Essay

1. Who is the Father of Indian Nationalism?

Ans: The father is Indian nationalism is Bal Gangadhar Tilak.

2. How Many Categories of Nationalism are There in Our Country?

Ans: There are two kinds of nationalism i.e. left-wing nationalism and right-wing nationalism. 

3. Define Nationalism.

Ans: Nationalism is nothing but the desire to support the nation in its true aspect. Every citizen’s responsibility is to maintain loyalty towards the nation. 

Essay on Nationalism

Students are often asked to write an essay on Nationalism in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Nationalism

Understanding nationalism.

Nationalism is a deep love for one’s country. It’s a feeling of pride, loyalty, and protectiveness towards your nation. It’s about valuing the culture, history, and identity of your country.

Nationalism’s Role

Nationalism plays a crucial role in uniting people. It encourages citizens to work together for the betterment of their country. It helps in fostering a sense of community and shared goals.

Nationalism: A Double-Edged Sword

While nationalism can unite people, it can also lead to conflicts if it fosters superiority over other nations. Therefore, it’s essential to balance nationalism with respect for global harmony.

Also check:

• Speech on Nationalism

250 Words Essay on Nationalism

The concept of nationalism.

Nationalism, a political ideology, has shaped world history and continues to influence global politics. It is a sentiment that attaches individuals to their nation, fostering a shared identity based on culture, language, or historical experiences.

Origins and Evolution

Nationalism emerged in the late 18th century during the French Revolution, where the concept of ‘nation’ was used to unite citizens against the monarchy. It evolved during the 19th and 20th centuries, playing a crucial role in the formation of modern states and independence movements.

Nationalism’s Dual Nature

Nationalism has a dual nature. On one hand, it can foster unity, patriotism, and social cohesion. For instance, nationalism was instrumental in decolonization movements, helping countries gain independence. On the other hand, excessive nationalism can lead to xenophobia, discrimination, and conflict. The two World Wars are stark examples of destructive nationalism.

Nationalism in Today’s World

In today’s globalized world, nationalism is experiencing a resurgence. It is being used as a tool by politicians to consolidate power, often at the expense of minority groups. This has led to a rise in populist movements and anti-immigrant sentiments in many parts of the world.

The Future of Nationalism

The future of nationalism is uncertain. While it can potentially serve as a unifying force, unchecked nationalism can lead to societal discord. Therefore, it is essential for societies to strike a balance, fostering a sense of national pride without compromising on inclusivity and diversity.

500 Words Essay on Nationalism

Introduction to nationalism.

Nationalism, a multifaceted concept, is often defined as a strong sense of loyalty or devotion to one’s own nation. It is an ideology that places the interests and culture of the nation above all else, often fostering a sense of identity and unity among its citizens. This essay delves into the nature of nationalism, its various forms, implications, and its role in shaping the modern world.

The Many Faces of Nationalism

Nationalism can manifest in various forms, each with its unique characteristics and implications. Civic nationalism, for instance, is based on shared political values and institutions, emphasizing citizens’ active participation in the nation’s democratic processes. In contrast, ethnic nationalism is rooted in shared cultural, linguistic, or racial ties, often leading to exclusionary practices against those deemed ‘other.’

Cultural nationalism emphasizes the shared cultural heritage and traditions, while liberal nationalism champions individual rights and freedoms within the nation-state. These diverse forms of nationalism highlight its complex and dynamic nature, which can both unite and divide societies.

Nationalism can be a powerful force for good, fostering unity, identity, and a sense of belonging. It can motivate citizens to contribute to the nation’s progress, preserve cultural heritage, and resist external threats. Nationalism has played a pivotal role in the decolonization movements and the establishment of nation-states in the 20th century.

However, nationalism can also have negative implications. When taken to extremes, it can lead to xenophobia, ethnic cleansing, and even war. The destructive potential of nationalism was evident in the two World Wars and numerous ethnic conflicts worldwide. Hence, while nationalism can foster unity and pride, it can also breed division and conflict.

Nationalism in the Globalized World

In the era of globalization, the role of nationalism is evolving. Globalization, with its emphasis on transnational connections and interdependence, seems to challenge the very idea of the nation-state. However, rather than diminishing, nationalism has adapted to these changes, often intensifying in response to perceived threats to national identity or sovereignty.

In some cases, globalization has led to a resurgence of nationalism, as seen in the rise of populist movements and the increasing emphasis on border control in various countries. This interplay between nationalism and globalization underscores the continued relevance of nationalism in the 21st century.

In conclusion, nationalism, with its various forms and implications, remains a potent force in shaping the world. While it can foster unity and identity, it can also lead to division and conflict. In the globalized world, nationalism continues to evolve, often in response to perceived threats to national identity or sovereignty. Understanding the dynamics of nationalism is, therefore, crucial in navigating the complexities of the modern world.

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Nationalism.

• Renaud-Philippe Garner Renaud-Philippe Garner Department of Political Science, Aarhus University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.2039
• Published online: 18 May 2022

Nationalism is a set of beliefs about the nation: its origins, nature, and value. For nationalists, we are particular social animals. On the one hand, our lives are structured by a profound sense of togetherness and similarity: We share languages and memories. On the other hand, our lives are characterized by deep divisions and differences: We draw borders and contest historical narratives. For nationalism, humanity is neither a single species-wide community nor an aggregation of individuals but divided into distinct and unique nations. At the heart of nationalism are claims about our identity and needs as social animals that form the basis of a series of normative claims. To answer the question “what should I do” or “how should I live,” one must first answer the questions “who am I” and “where do I belong.” Nationalism says that our membership in a nation takes precedence and ultimately must guide our choices and actions. In terms of guiding choice and action, nationalist thought proposes a specific form of partiality. Rather than treat the interests or claims of persons and groups impartially, the nationalist demands that one favors one’s own, either as a group or as individual persons. While nationalism does not claim to be the only form of partiality, it does claim to outrank all others: Loyalty or obligations to other groups or identities are subordinated to national loyalty. Together, these claims function as a political ideology. Nationalism identifies the nation as the central form of community and elevates it to the object of supreme loyalty. This fundamental concern for the nation and its flourishing can be fragmented into narrower aims or objectives: national autonomy, national identity, and national unity. Debate on nationalism tends to divide into two clusters, one descriptive and one normative, that only make partial contact. For historians and sociologists, the questions are explanatory: What is nationalism, what is a nation, how are they related, and when and how did they emerge? Philosophers and political theorists focus on the justification of nationalism or nationalist claims: Is national loyalty defensible, what are the limits of this loyalty, how do we rank our loyalties, and does nationalism conflict with human rights?

• nationalism
• perennialism
• civic nation
• ethnic nation
• liberal nationalism
• globalization

Introduction: A Contested Concept

Nationalism is not a consensual idea: We might say that it is doubly contested. On the one hand, there is little consensus on what it is . Primarily, historians and sociologists have conducted descriptive research: They argue for a definition of nationalism as well as an account of its emergence, and they advance typologies of nationalism or stages of its transformation. Arguably, the central debate concerns the origins of nationalism and nations: When did they emerge and why did they do so? Modernists claim that nationalism emerged in the past few centuries and created nations: The ideology invents a new and artificial form of community. Their critics, often experts on premodern eras, either respond that nations are far older than the modernist paradigm allows or that they are transformations of older communities rather than ex nihilo creations.

These debates are not merely about dates. Behind the answer to the question “when did nationalism first emerge?” we find questions like “what is nationalism?” “what is its function?” and “which conditions made it possible or inevitable?” Even among those who agree on an approximate timeline or place for its emergence, we find a range of competing explanations on what produced nationalism: new economic conditions, political transformations, or the power of new ideas.

Nor is there any consensus on the precise relationship between nationalism and nations. For some, nations predate nationalism but are transformed by it, while for others, nationalism creates nations, and for others yet, nations are the modern transformation of prenational communities.

On the other hand, we find intense disagreement about the morality or justification of nationalism. While some scholars seem ambivalent, noting both achievements and failures, and others defend some version of it, there is no gainsaying that nationalism is the object of sustained criticism. The normative debate is further complicated by the fact that what philosophers call “nationalism” only partially overlaps with what historians and sociologists mean by it. Many philosophers and political theorists seem interested in national partiality— the idea that one can, should, or must be partial to fellow nationals—rather than an ideology that orders domestic life and the international order.

Generally, the seminal works on nationalism are explanatory accounts. In addition, to this difference in age and output, there is a question of reliance. Normative debates depend on descriptive ones. Those making normative arguments tend to draw on the descriptive research—from their conception of nationalism to the extent to which they think the nation is artificial. Consequently, this entry focuses on central descriptive and normative questions, with a longer examination of the former. It begins with a clarificatory section (“ Nationalism or Patriotism? ”) that distinguishes the two eponymous concepts and provides a “core” definition of nationalism. The section “ The Origins and Nature of Nationalism ” provides a critical survey of the central descriptive debate: How and when did nationalism emerge? This section divides into subsections: “ Modernism and Its Proponents ” as well as “ Antimodernism .” The section “ Conceptions of the Nation ” addresses the question of what kind of community the nation is through a critical discussion of the ethnic–civic distinction. Normative questions are considered in the section “ The Justification of Nationalism .” The subsection “ Liberal Nationalism and Its Defense ” distinguishes liberal nationalism from core nationalism before turning to prominent arguments made in favor of and against the former.

Nationalism or Patriotism?

While nationalism and patriotism are sometimes treated as synonymous, there are good reasons to differentiate them. First, patriotism is far older than nationalism. While modernists all believe that nationalism is recent, none contest Greek patriotism during the Medic Wars ( Kohn, 1944 ). This chronological difference depends upon a more basic one: Nationalism and patriotism belong to different categories. Typically, patriotism is viewed as a love for or loyalty to one’s community, whether an emotion or character trait ( Kedourie, 1960 ; Kleinig et al., 2015 ; MacIntyre, 1984 ; Oldenquist, 1982 ). 1 Either way, patriotism is neither an ideology nor a form of politics. Understood as an emotion or a character trait, we can grasp the futility of asking when it first appeared: We do not ask when courage was invented or which society discovered love. 2

This distinction also helps explain why the two phenomena are related and sometimes conflated. If patriotism is older and more basic, it makes sense that nationalism draws on this emotion or character trait that arises naturally within human communities. Conversely, it is unsurprising that those who cultivate love and loyalty for their community are drawn to an ideology centered on it.

Nationalism, however, cannot be reduced to sentiment or a character trait. The standard view is that it is an ideology, whatever else it might be ( Billig, 1995 ; Eriksen, 2002 ; Kedourie, 1960 ; Smith, 1991 , 1998 , 2010 ). 3 Despite a wide variety of nationalisms and nationalist thinkers, we can still identify a few core propositions that were shared by seminal thinkers as well as by nationalist movements. We can refer to this as “core” or “classical nationalism.”

Nationalism begins with a claim about the nature and order of the world: It is divided into distinct and unique nations (i). 4 Then it adds a claim about the human good: Human freedom (or flourishing) is dependent upon membership in a nation (ii). Upon these claims about the world and our nature, they add normative claims. The nation, and only the nation, is the source of political legitimacy (iii). Nations must be autonomous and express their characters (iv). Finally, national loyalty outranks all other loyalties (v) ( Kedourie, 1960 ; Smith, 1991 , 1998 , 2010 ). 5

Together, these propositions can explain a great deal of what we call nationalism. 6 For instance, the quest for authenticity depends upon (i) and (iv). If nations are not unique, then it is hard to understand why authenticity should matter. Nor does it make much sense to stress the value of self-expression is what is being expressed is banal or common. Similarly, the nationalist aim of achieving statehood largely follows from (iii) and (iv). On the one hand, if all alien rule is illegitimate, then why should a nation accept it? On the other hand, it seems plausible that the best guarantee of autonomy and self-expression is state sovereignty. Or consider how nationalism is associated with mass mobilization and self-sacrifice. This is in part a function of (v). These projects are justified by an appeal to rank-ordering; if national loyalty reigns supreme, then all other loyalties must be subordinate.

In sum, while nationalist thinkers and nationalist movements present us with additions or iterations, these five beliefs capture much of what is shared. When one speaks about the age of nationalism or its spread, one is invariably speaking about some or all of these propositions. 7

The Origins and Nature of Nationalism

Since the mid- 20th century , the origins and nature of nationalism have been fiercely debated between modernists and their critics. While the former view has emerged as the dominant paradigm, steady criticism has produced notable rival views.

Modernism developed as a rejection of previous scholarship. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries , school manuals and scholarship presented nations as ancient, even immemorial. History was taught as a multimillennia narrative of nations and their great members. For example, Germans were taught that their nation long predated unification under Otto von Bismarck. The Hermannsdenkmal— a 19th-century monument celebrating the victory of Arminius, a 1st-century warlord, over the Romans at Teutoburger Forest—embodies this belief in continuity between contemporary Germans and their alleged ancestors ( Grosby, 2005 ).

Modernism and Its Proponents

Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist—but it does need some pre-existing differentiating marks to work on, even if, as indicated, these are purely negative. ( Gellner, 1964 , p. 168)

For modernists, nationalism and nations are products of modernity, even necessary features of it. They emerge, together, sometime between the English Revolution ( Greenfeld, 1992 ; Kohn, 1940 ) or Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation ( Kedourie, 1960 ). Central to modernism is the relationship between nationalism and nations: Nationalism invents nations. The latter are not organic communities. Unlike families or religious communities, they have not and cannot emerge anywhere, any time. The nation is created by nationalism, which in turn is the product of a particular set of sociohistorical circumstances.

This shared belief is also the point of departure for deep disagreement. Which features of modernity best explain the emergence of nationalism and the invention of nations? There are roughly five kinds of answers to this question: cultural, economic, political, ideological, and radical constructivism.

Modern man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or a faith, whatever he may say, but to a culture. ( Gellner, 1983 , p. 36)

Primarily associated with Ernest Gellner, the cultural view claims that modernization created nationalism, which in turn created nations, out of necessity ( Gellner, 1964 , 1973 , 1983 ). The disruption of premodern life caused by industrialization made it necessary to produce a homogeneous culture that would allow workers to communicate independently of context. To overcome fragmented local premodern cultures, one needs an overarching culture: a national culture. For this reason, a high culture is constructed and later a mass education system is devised to ensure its uniform transmission. Nationalism is a product of necessity: It constructs a new form of identity and community as a response to urban uprooting and industrialization. The dislocating effects of modernity require a refashioning of culture and identity.

People is all they have got: this is the essence of the underdevelopment dilemma itself. ( Nairn, 1977 , p. 100)

A rival view explains the origins of nationalism by appealing to another modern phenomenon: capitalism. For theorists like Tom Nairn, nationalism is a strategic response to the uneven spread of capitalism and the power that it provides ( Nairn, 1977 ). The unequal development and spread of capitalism distribute resources and power unequally: There are centers that benefited from the development of capitalism and there are poorer peripheries. Peripheral elites design an ideology that takes advantage of their only abundant resource: people. And to effectively mobilize and motivate those who do not share their class or interests, these peripheral elites must create a powerful sense of belonging. The solution is to draw on popular beliefs and practices to create a new interclass community: the nation. Thus, economic variants of modernism explain the advent of nationalism in terms of recent economic change, namely, capitalism.

On these views, nationalism is both a form of elite manipulation and transformation. The elites must construct a new sense of community to persuade the masses to endorse their priorities and projects. Yet, they must also change; they must become conversant in a language that draws on popular culture, its myths, and symbols, to mobilize this sense of interclass community.

But the clarity of focus on the nation as coterminous with the state cries out for a predominantly political explanation. ( Mann, 1995 , p. 48)

Yet another variant considers the territorial state to be the best explanation for the advent of nationalist ideology. Bluntly put, political changes are what call for a new political ideology. Nationalism emerges within the past few centuries because it is intimately linked to the modern state. The latter is not a collection of fiefdoms or local power structures but a stable administrative structure, centered in a capital, ruling over well-defined territories ( Giddens, 1985 ).

Here too modernity is cast as a disruptive force and nationalism is part and parcel of a response to it. Whatever else it disrupts, modernity destroys premodern polities and political frameworks. Instead of drawing on religious symbols or myths of descent, nationalism is the attachment to those symbols or representations of the modern state such as citizenship.

Other political variants of modernism emphasize interstate competition and the role that militarization plays ( Mann, 1986 ; Tilly, 1975 ). Still, the argument is essentially the same: Nationalism is created by modern states to help them function competitively and effectively in domestic or international affairs. Either way, it is a largely psychological phenomenon, a special esprit de corps tailor-made for the inhabitants of these new large administrative states.

Again, since a nation, ipso facto, must speak an original language, its speech must be cleansed of foreign accretions and borrowings, since the purer the language, the more natural it is, and the easier it becomes for the nation to realise itself, and to increase its freedom. ( Kedourie, 1960 , p. 67)

A fourth variant considers nationalism to be the response to the discontentment brought by modernity. Powerfully articulated by Elie Kedourie, this view presents nationalism as a civic religion, complete with a narrative of the fall, a path to redemption, and exhortations to sacrifice and purification. This creed was birthed by disillusioned marginal German intellectuals and then exported worldwide ( Kedourie, 1960 , 1971 ).

Collective humiliation and powerlessness are to be explained by national disunity, loss of identity, and autonomy. Like ancient Hebrews explaining their political subjugation in terms of their sinful ways, the nationalist blames contemporary discontentment on a failure to honor and safeguard one’s unique and distinct nation. The solution is national revival: The nation must be reunited, autonomy restored, and national identity restored to its authentic self.

Unlike other variants of modernism that see nationalism as the creation of elites seeking to secure the rising power structures or to provide the necessary social identity for the changing times, this view of nationalism as civic religion is invented by powerless members of society.

No surprise then that the search was on, so to speak, for a new way of linking fraternity, power and time meaningfully together. Nothing perhaps more precipitated this search, nor made it more fruitful, than print-capitalism, which made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to other, in profoundly new ways. ( Anderson, 1983/2006 , p. 36)

Finally, there are radical constructivist accounts that emphasize the artificiality of the nation: Nationalism is a narrative and the nation is a cultural artifact. For instance, Benedict Anderson has famously argued that changes in terms of how we conceptualize time, the combination of the printing press and capitalism, as well as political change meant that we could imagine new forms of community in which large groups of people can simultaneously imagine themselves as equal members ( Anderson, 1983/2006 ).

The convergence of factors explains what is needed for the narrative to take form and succeed. Print capitalism provides both the material means and an economic incentive to help construct and sustain reading publics, united by a vernacular language. Yet, the impetus to tell this story, to imagine such communities, comes from disaffected civil servants. Here we find echoes of the ideological account: Disaffected functionaries in Latin America came to resent their careers stunted by imperial metropoles. In short, the construction of nations through the nationalist narrative is made possible by several factors: new technology, changing ideas, and a class of people motivated to reimagine their sense of belonging.

Modernism is an attractive paradigm. Undeniably, nationalism spread and came to prominence in the past few centuries. Moreover, the nation-state and the notion of popular sovereignty certainly do not appear at home in the premodern world of multinational empires and dynastic power. And its advocates are right to show that much of what has been called ancient or authentic by nationalists was, in fact, neither. 8 Yet, for all its strengths, the modernist paradigm faces important hurdles.

The proliferation of variants reveals deep disagreement; irreconcilable modernisms cast doubt on the promise of modernism. For example, while modernists agree that the nation is a recent creation, they cannot agree on who created it. If nationalism invented nations, who invented nationalism?

For authors who defend economic modernism, it is the invention of peripheral elites who need a new form of mobilization to outcompete richer and more powerful elites ( Hechter, 1975 ; Nairn, 1977 ). Similarly, for those who consider nationalism as a form of political messianism, it is the invention of the marginal and frustrated among the educated and the skilled ( Kedourie, 1960 , 1971 ). Yet, conceiving nationalism as a rational strategy for weaker parties cannot be reconciled with the claim that nationalism emerges as the state’s official ideology to reinforce militarization or with the view that it is devised by elites for the sake of modernization and industrialization ( Gellner, 1964 , 1983 ; Tilly, 1975 ). One is left wondering whether nationalism is the ideology of the downtrodden who seek liberation or the ideology of the ruling class who seek consolidation.

There are deeper problems for modernist accounts. All of them purport to offer a unitary explanation and yet none do. Each variant draws its strength from its ability to compellingly explain certain cases, but none can explain all the central let alone the plausible cases. While economic theories rightly show how nationalism can be a strategy in an unequal contest, this hardly proves that nationalism is the consequence of such conditions: Underdevelopment often fails to produce nationalism, and nationalism regularly emerges among the (over)developed ( Connor, 1994 ). Similarly, explaining nationalism as a response to industrialization fails to account for those cases where the former precedes the latter ( Smith, 1983 ). And political accounts of nationalism fail to explain why nationalist energies can focus on something besides the state or sovereignty. If nationalism is only about the pursuit or consolidation of state power, what are we to make of cultural nationalism: artistic renaissances, campaigns for moral regeneration, and attempts to transform through education? And given that cultural and political nationalism feed off each other, why focus solely on the latter ( Hutchinson, 1987 , 1994 )?

Finally, the modernist paradigm struggles to persuasively answer important questions. Even if modern societies require new forms of community, this does not explain why the nation arouses such powerful and awe-inspiring passions. Put otherwise, how can instrumental accounts, which consider the nation an artificial community invented to serve some further end, explain its motivational power? Some modernists try to explain the power of nationalism by pointing to its self-referential quality: It is a form of self-worship ( Breuilly, 1993 ). But such replies must inevitably fail. Even if group worship provides great motivational power, this fails to answer a comparative question: Why is the national identity so much more powerful than other available identities? Why should an artificial and recent form of self-worship prove so effective?

Antimodernism

The appearance of the nation and its continuation over time is not a historically uniform process that can be attributed to one cause, such as the requirements of industrial capitalism, or confined to one period of time, such as the last several centuries. ( Grosby, 2005 , p. 58)

The primary fault line between modernists and their critics concerns not the origins of nationalism as an ideology but the nature of nations and their antiquity. Rather than conceive of nations as artificial and recent, the critics of modernism consider them to be either ancient forms of community or transformations of premodern forms of community.

Either way, critics of modernism tend to stress the extent to which nations must build upon dimensions of human identity that are far from modern, such as ethnicity or religion ( Armstrong, 1982 ; Gat, 2012 ; Grosby, 1991 , 2005 ; Hastings, 1997 ; Reynolds, 1983 , 1984 ; Smith, 1986 , 1991 , 1998 , 2000 ).

The argument tends to center on an existential claim: Is it or is it not the case that a nation has existed before modernity? For modernists, the answer must be negative. Indeed, if a single nation precedes nationalism, then the former can exist independently of the latter. And this demonstrates that nationalism neither invents the nation as a type of community nor all tokens of it. For this reason, considerable time and energy are expended to show that some nations, or at the very least one nation, existed before modernity.

We should distinguish between two antimodernist strands. Primordialism is the belief that nations are natural: They have always existed, or their origins are lost in time. While such views were more common in the 19th century , there are late- 20th-century attempts to defend primordialism. Sociobiological primordialism considers the nation as an extension of kin selection; our national ties are the product of our evolutionary inheritance and our tendency to favor those who are genetically similar ( van den Berghe, 1978 ). However, such views quickly break down. If the nation is primarily about kin selection, then it makes little sense to cooperate with and sacrifice oneself for those who are genetically unrelated. Even ethnic nations are bound by myths of common descent rather than actual genetic proximity.

Alternatively, we can speak of “cultural primordialism” when (national) culture is treated as a social given, something inherited that arouses powerful and nearly irresistible passions, even if this is only how we feel or perceive these ties ( Geertz, 1973 ). However, this view quickly falters. While “given” or “primordial” ties can be powerful, they are also subject to change, revision, and rejection. Moreover, the theory does not explain the power of these ties so much as rename them. Why should the given be stronger than the chosen?

Far more influential, perennialism accepts that nationalism is a modern ideology, that nations are historical objects—they appear at a point in time—but rejects that they were invented by nationalism in the modern era. 9 We can distinguish between perennialists who believe that the nation is persistent and those who argue that it is best understood as a recurrent phenomenon. The former is the idea that nations, or at least some of them, are continuous intergenerational communities that have existed without interruption while the latter is the view of nations as recurring, going in and out of existence throughout the ages ( Smith, 1998 ).

Because the critics of modernity do not claim that all or most nations are ancient, they readily concede that Tanzania is quite modern. Instead, the debate focuses on the antiquity of specific nations that serve as litmus tests. Thus, Adrian Hastings argued that England had already emerged as a functional national community during the Middle Ages. For him, there is an English national identity, modeled on the biblical model of Israel: a united people keenly aware of their identity, possessing a language and territory, a government, and a shared religion ( Hastings, 1997 ). Later developments, like the Reformation and the spread of a vernacular-language Bible, might reinforce and transform English identity, but what is being changed must be older than these transformations.

Naturally, if the English nation is modeled on something older, then the antiquity of the nation can be pressed further. Perhaps the hardest case for the modernist paradigm is that of ancient Israel. Here we are faced with what appears to be the uninterrupted intergenerational community that was conscious of its distinct identity, as well as possessed a unique language and religion and a homeland. In addition, they shared memories of an independent political community and rebellions against foreign occupation ( Grosby, 1991 ).

Again, cases such as medieval England or ancient Israel are designed to show that while premodern nations might be exceptional, modernism is wrong to assert that nationalism invents the concept of the nation and all instances of it. In a way, we might say that critics of modernity imagine nations like democracy: Most democracies are quite young, and the success of the idea is recent, but that does not show that democracy is a modern invention.

While radical critics of modernism argue that some nations have existed long before modernity, others present a moderate critique. Nations might be recent, but they are continuous with premodern communities. It is reasonable to understand these critics as rejecting the radical modernism of Eric Hobsbawm, who denies any serious continuity between older forms of community, ethnic or religious, for instance, and the nations invented by nationalism ( Hobsbawm, 1990 ; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983 ).

These moderate critics argue that nationalism does not create ex nihilo a novel form of community. Instead, nationalism transforms preexisting identities (cultural, ethnic, religious, etc.) to produce the modern nation. For medievalists like Susan Reynolds, it is a mistake to overlook the existence of communities that identified themselves through myths of ethnic descent, customs and laws, and the use of proper nouns. Nations might appear later, but many are rooted in the regnal kingdoms that possessed popular consciousness and a sense of identity ( Reynolds, 1983 , 1984 ).

Yet, the most sophisticated attempt to show continuity between the premodern and modern identity is probably the work of Anthony D. Smith’s. Through several decades of scholarship, Smith has stressed the importance of the longue durée , long-term analysis. To appreciate the emergence of nationalism and nations, we need to look at very long periods in part to avoid becoming narrowly focused on a particular era or set of cases that would lead to hasty generalizations. Where studies of short periods see invention, long-term analysis reveals that “invention” is often reinterpretation or reconstruction of older materials. Attention to the longue durée also helps explain why nationalism resonates. While many of its claims are inaccurate or false, the continuity between ethnic communities and modern nations shows that behind myths of antiquity and rootedness lie real shared memories and practices, an intergenerational sense of belonging that is not the invention of political elites ( Smith, 1986 , 1991 , 1998 , 2000 , 2009 ).

However insightful these rival views are, they are not without their weaknesses. To begin, none of them quite propose a rival grand narrative or general theory that explains the emergence of nationalism or nations. Again, many arguments center on the most convincing cases that can falsify modernism’s claims. Consequently, these case-study arguments often leave us with important questions about patterns and widespread change. Why do some nations like Israel emerge so early while others like Germany emerge much later? Why does the age of nationalism arrive so late if the nation is so old? What explains the appearance of major changes to collective identity if modernity does not invent nations?

Modernists also raise important methodological objections for their critics. For one, they accuse them of assuming that there is more continuity than the evidence supports ( Breuilly, 1996 ). A leitmotiv is that we have little idea what ordinary or plain persons believed in the premodern world given that they have left behind few writings. The writings of literate elites cannot be presumed to represent widespread beliefs or sentiments. 10 Furthermore, even when we do have some insight into what plain persons thought thanks to partial or fragmentary testimony, we must be careful to avoid reading the past through contemporary lenses.

In turn, this focus on written sources has itself been criticized. Azar Gat (2012) has argued that too much has been made of the written word or the lack of it. Not only is very little of human history covered by written documentation, but it is far from the only available evidence. For instance, while we have few texts documenting the sentiments of ordinary people, we have accounts of events that depended upon ordinary people. Gat repeatedly returns to the case of mobilization and war in the premodern world to argue that it is unrealistic to maintain that ordinary sentiments or identities are unknown or unknowable. Small and weak states did not simply coerce thousands if not tens of thousands of men to fight who barely recognized themselves in their elites. A fortiori , this is true of popular uprisings. 11 Simply put, Gat rejects the idea that we are begging the question of national identity or consciousness if they are part of the best explanation of phenomena ( Gat, 2012 ).

Still, this question of national consciousness is not solely methodological. It is one thing to ask on what grounds we attribute such beliefs or sentiments, and it is quite another to ask why this must be demonstrated. Here we shift from a discussion about whether nationalism invents nations to the very nature of the nation. Even if modernists and their critics could agree on how to conduct their inquiry, they might still disagree on its object. If a nation is defined as a group in which mass national consciousness must exist , then demonstrating that nations existed in the premodern world is far harder than if nations only require moderate consciousness. 12 Fundamentally, the question of how to prove the existence of premodern nations is a function of what the nation is.

Conceptions of the Nation

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things that, in truth, are but one constitute this soul, this spiritual principle. One is in the past, the other in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form. ( Renan, 2018 , p. 261)

Despite its centrality, the question “what is a nation?” has been debated since Ernest Renan’s eponymous lecture at La Sorbonne in 1882 . Disagreement over what the nation is—what kind of community is it, how does it differ from other forms?—has produced some striking responses.

Faced with this question, Hugh Seton-Watson admits that there is nothing else to say save that a nation exists when enough people within a community believe that they belong to a nation or act as if they do ( Seton-Watson, 1977 ). Others like Rogers Brubaker deny that the nation is a particular kind of object. Instead, we should consider the “nation” as a category of practice rather than a form of community with set properties. Hence his proposal to “think about nationalism without nations” ( Brubaker, 1996 , p. 21).

Nevertheless, we can identify some broadly consensual beliefs about the nation. To begin, nations are territorial communities: They claim land as rightfully theirs. The homeland is sacred territory. It is imbued with meaning because it is the site of past events that define the group: where battles were fought, the dead are buried, and past generations flourished.

Moreover, nations are always understood as bounded and limited communities. No nation, however ambitious, understands itself as universal. Unlike certain religious communities, the nation does not aspire to or imagine itself as encompassing humankind. Finally, the nation is primarily a group in which membership is inherited, even when it is open to outsiders. Newborns are not without nationality until they reach the age of reason; one receives a nationality at birth even if one later opts to renounce it or to try to obtain another.

Beyond these shared and widely accepted features, we remain confronted by a central question: What is the nature of the community? What unites conationals?

Civic and Ethnic Views of the Nations

Two main concepts of nation and fatherland emerged in the intertwining of influence and conditions; conflicting and fusing, they became embodied in currents of thought in all nations and, to a varying degree, in entire nations. The one was basically a rational and universal concept of political liberty and the rights of man, looking towards the city of the future. In it the secularized Stoic-Christian tradition lived on: in England, it is Protestant form, in France, in its Catholic form. It found its chief support in the political and economic strength of the educated middle classes and, with a shift of emphasis, in the social-democratically organized labor movements. The other was basically founded on history, on monuments and graveyards, even harking back to the mysteries of ancient times and of tribal solidarity. ( Kohn, 1944 , p. 574)

Nations, and nationalisms, are often sorted according to two ideal types: French and German, Western and Eastern, or civic and ethnic. 13 This typology refers to the nature of the community or the identity that defines the nation. The Western or civic nation is primarily a political association and therefore more of a voluntary community. On this view, the nation is a pact or covenant, a social contract. The nation qua political community occupies a territory that is governed by laws and institutions. This is the view of the nation most associated with Western nations, particularly France, where republicanism played an important part in defining membership in the nation.

The Eastern or ethnic nation is defined by descent, or rather the presumed shared descent of its members. Here members understand themselves as ancestrally related, possessing an identity that is inherited and unchosen on the model of the family. The idea of the ethnic nation is often compared to the family as in Walker Connor’s well-known claim that it is perceived as “the family fully extended” ( Connor, 1994 , p. 202).

We might summarize these two views of the nations in terms of competing conceptions of nationality and its attribution— jus soli and jus sanguinis . How one acquires membership is a function of the nature of the community. The former attributes nationality to those born within the national territory while the latter attributes nationality based on the identity of one’s parents. 14

Of course, one’s conception of the nation is linked to other crucial concepts, namely, national identity. How one understands the nature of the community called the nation affects one’s conception of national identity. What it means to be an X—American or Turkish—will depend on the nature of the community in question. If one considers that the United States of America is a civic nation, a social contract in which members of the republic share political ideals and obey the same laws, then being or becoming an American is a function of becoming a member of a political union. On the civic view, who one’s parents are or which religion one practices will often be orthogonal to determining one’s national identity. Yet, if one holds an ethnic view of the nation, then the identity of one’s parents is no longer irrelevant but essential. On this view, to be Turkish is to be ancestrally related to other Turks and thus filiation is central.

However, these are ideal types. They allow us to make analytical distinctions, to explain patterns of thought and behavior, but they do not correspond to social reality. No actual nation is purely civic or purely ethnic but contains both civic and elements. For example, during the Third French Republic, while students learned about la Répulique, une et indivisible , they also learned that their country used to be called Gaul and their ancestors were Gauls. We find both the civic view embodied by the Republic and the ethnic view embodied in shared ancestry. While it is useful to speak of civic or ethnic to pick out what is emphasized, real nations only approximate these models ( Smith, 1991 ; Yack, 1996 , 2012 ). It is perhaps most useful to think of nations as ranging from more civic (e.g., the United States of America) to more ethnic (e.g., Japan).

The division of nations into civic and ethnic communities is not merely a descriptive question. Behind this categorization loom normative issues: We consider the civic nation to be more open and compatible with consent while the ethnic nation is bound through unchosen features—hence the reason why the civic nation is referred to as voluntarist conception while the ethnic nation is an organic conception. While ethnic nationalism might like to describe itself with the language of the family— fatherland, motherland, brotherhood, and so on —a less controversial unchosen association, it remains the case that the ethnic conception of the nationality makes it harder for newcomers to join. One can profess one’s faith in the republic, one can consent to the social contract, but one cannot so easily choose to change one’s (presumed) descent.

Here again, we must not lose sight that if we consider civic nations to be voluntary and ethnic nations to be organic, and that all actual nations combine elements of both models, then no nation is purely voluntarist or organic. This mixed view, which combines consent and inheritance, was already present in Ernest Renan’s seminal lecture. As it is often highlighted, he insists on the importance of consent, famously calling the nation an “everyday plebiscite” ( Renan, 2018 , pp. 262–263). Nevertheless, he also speaks about the importance of an indivisible past, an inheritance of “glory and regrets” ( Renan, 2018 , p. 261).

The Justification of Nationalism

Despite its unrivaled appeal and motivational power, nationalism has seduced few scholars. Several of its most prominent scholars could hardly disguise their contempt like Elie Kedourie or Eric Hobsbawm. Among philosophers and political theorists, it is often met with skepticism or hostility. Ethnic nationalism, the most ubiquitous form, past and present, is largely thought to be indefensible. Civic nationalism, while judged less harshly, is not universally embraced. In the words of an eminent political theorist, nationalism is “the starkest political shame of the twentieth century , most intractable and yet most unanticipated blot on the political history of the world since the year 1900 ” ( Dunn, 1979 , p. 55). Normatively, nationalism is on the back foot.

And yet, there is also considerable misunderstanding. To a large extent, the descriptive and the normative work fail to make contact. Consider what is arguably the most prominent anthology of high-profile philosophical papers on the justification of nationalism, The Morality of Nationalism ( McKim & McMahan, 1997 ). The endnotes reveal that many chapters contain few or no references to major or minor studies of nationalism. Several philosophers base their arguments on a commonsense understanding or on one or two works. Something similar holds the other way around. In Nations and Nationalism: A Reader ( Spencer & Wollman, 2010 ), 3 out of 19 of the authors from the above anthology appear very cursorily in the references. None of those contributing to the first anthology are the authors of any essential texts in the reader.

There are likely many reasons for this situation, but two should retain our attention. First, many normative works on nationalism either fail to distinguish it from patriotism or conflate them. In his defense of “nationalism,” Hurka defines it as “people being partial to their conationals” ( Hurka, 1997 , p. 140). However, so defined, it is indistinguishable from a widespread understanding of patriotism. Similarly, Judith Lichtenberg seems to think that the only difference between nationalism and patriotism is that the former applies before the establishment of the state while the latter applies after it ( Lichtenberg, 1997 ). This is an astonishing claim as it would make patriotism more recent than nationalism.

Second, and more fundamentally, many normative theorists use “nationalism” to mean something very different from the core ideology of nationalism or some variant. Typically, they mean national partiality , which amounts to the idea that one may, should, or must favor the claims or interests of one’s conationals over those of foreigners. For instance, when Thomas Hurka defends a moderate form of national partiality, he is very far from justifying the claim that national loyalty outranks all others, which was proposition (v). It is perfectly possible to favor one’s conationals over foreigners and yet believe that friends and family command a greater loyalty still.

We can add that nationalists, with few notable exceptions, do not have a purely instrumental view of loyalty and sacrifice: They do not love the nation to better serve humankind. 15 Rather, the nation itself is the ultimate end. In other words, the instrumental defenses of national partiality that we find in the philosophical literature share little with the classical view of nationalism. 16

In short, many philosophers are using “nationalism” in a very narrow sense compared to the scholars of nationalism. While we can find important contributions in these piecemeal or partial discussions of the morality of nationalism, we can also find defenses of something that goes beyond some measure of partiality or an isolated defense of self-determination. 17 However, we do not find much of a defense of classical or core nationalism. Commonly, we find a defense of liberal nationalism .

Liberal Nationalism and Its Defense

Liberals then need to ask themselves whether national convictions matter to their way of thinking, to their values, norms, and modes of behaviour, to their notions of social justice, and to the range of practical policies they support. In other words, they must rethink their beliefs and policies and seek to adapt them to the world in which they live. ( Tamir, 1993 , pp. 3–4)

Liberal nationalism is not part of an explanatory theory of nationalism. 18 Instead, it is an attempt to revise nationalism so that it can be reconciled with the dominant post-Enlightenment political framework, liberalism. Recall that the core ideology of nationalism involves certain claims about morality and human flourishing. On the one hand, we find claims about the value of community and membership. For instance, we saw that proposition (ii) of core nationalism was that individual freedom or flourishing required membership in a nation. Either way, the point is the connection between membership in a nation and human well-being. On the other hand, we find claims that are action-guiding: Proposition (v) is that national loyalty always comes first.

To be schematic, the classical view of the nation can be summarized as an ideology with a demanding view of partiality, which rests upon very strong claims about the value of nations. This demandingness is captured by the insistence that one sacrifice everything on the national altar. We find it in a Swiss “political catechism,” exhorting citizens to “sacrifice willingly and joyfully” their property and lives to the fatherland ( Kohn, 1944 , p. 385). Or in the poetry of Thomas Babington Macauley famously taught to British schoolchildren:

Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate; “To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods.”

In sum, the morality view put forward by classical nationalism emphasizes the utmost importance of national membership in human flourishing and consequently affirms a rigid hierarchy of duties that places national loyalty above all else. These features—its demandingness, its absolute claims about communal life and flourishing—help explain why many have been so critical.

On the one hand, internal critiques seek to show that the classical view of nationalism is incapable of defending its strong claims. Prominently, we find objections concerning the relative value of the nation and nationality. A popular form of this objection lists the various communities to which one belongs and asks for a clear explanation as to why membership in the nation is so important. To be clear, the argument is not that the nation does not matter but that even if one can establish that it plays a very important role in human flourishing, perhaps even that it is the most valuable form of communal life, this does not yet show that national loyalty must always trump other loyalties ( Lichtenberg, 1997 ).

Here it is worth pointing out how descriptive research is mobilized to make normative arguments. If modernism is true, then the defenders of nationalism must explain why human flourishing depends so much upon a recent invention. Were premodern lives all deeply marred? If nations were invented, why can we not invent more inclusive communities to replace them? Conversely, if the critics of modernity are right, then it is easier to argue that national membership like family membership is a deep feature of human life and flourishing.

On a similar line of thought, one can admit that national autonomy is valuable or defensible and accept that national identity should be expressed and yet challenge precisely what is required to achieve either. If neither national autonomy nor national self-expression requires a nation-state, at least not in all cases, then it becomes much harder to justify nationalist demands for one.

On the other hand, we find external critiques that point to the conflict between nationalism and other normative beliefs or commitments we might have. First, it is difficult to reconcile the core ideology of nationalism with any demanding form of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, given the rigid rank-ordering of loyalties in core nationalism, one’s loyalty to humankind is at best something to be attended to once one’s duties to the nation are discharged. If cosmopolitanism is a commitment to impartial benevolence and the belief that our common humanity is our overriding identity and the object of our strongest loyalty, then they are flatly incompatible.

A similar point can be made about human rights. Understood as bedrock normative claims, human rights would represent (nearly) absolute side constraints. Here too there is a very real possibility that human rights and nationalism conflict. If national loyalty dominates all other loyalties, then it is difficult to understand how a nationalist can coherently choose to honor human rights when these conflict with the demands of the nation. Indeed, when scholars and plain persons evoke how nationalism can be belligerent or fanatical, this is largely what they mean. If loyalty always takes precedence, then there is little or nothing nationalists will not do. And this, its critics say, is precisely why the 20th century was so bloody. 19

Finally, classical nationalism can seem hard to reconcile with a strong commitment to autonomy or political consent. One is obligated to one’s nation and fellow nationals, and yet one’s nationality is often unchosen. This worry is at its strongest when applied to ethnic nationalism as on this view, membership is doubly unchosen: One cannot choose one’s ancestors at birth, nor can one easily later choose to be ancestrally related to members of a new group. Yet, ethnic nationalism is not unique in imposing obligations based on unchosen identities ( Scheffler, 1994 ). Even membership in civic nations is largely unchosen and can be demanding.

Liberal nationalism seeks to reconcile nationalism and liberalism, even showing them to be mutually reinforcing. Proposed initially by Yael Tamir in her seminal Liberal Nationalism , variants of this moderate form of nationalism have also been prominently defended by David Miller and Chaim Gans ( Gans, 2003 ; Miller, 1995 , 1999 , 2007 , 2016 ; Tamir, 1993 , 2019 ). Before addressing arguments for liberal nationalism, we should consider how it generally differs from classical or core nationalism.

First, liberal nationalists abandon the rigid acontextual hierarchy of duties of core nationalism. National loyalty may still outrank other loyalties, but it does not always do so. Most notably, when the human rights of foreigners are at stake, our duties to fellow nationals or to the nation itself must come second. This is the spirit of the “weak cosmopolitanism” we find endorsed by liberal nationalists ( Miller, 2016 ). We might also say that while we have stronger positive duties to fellow nationals than to foreigners, our negative duties to not violate human rights apply equally to all and take precedence over positive duties to fellow members ( Miller, 2005 ).

Second, liberal nationalism is essentially a nonethnic form of nationalism. This does not make it a pure civic nationalism because it focuses on the preservation and transmission of a national identity and a public culture that are not exhausted by constitutionalism. 20 However, it does essentially abandon myths of ethnic descent or ancestral relatedness as a part of national identity ( Smith, 2010 ). While nationality might still be attributed at birth, it becomes considerably easier to join and become accepted within another nation once ethnic descent is jettisoned.

Third, liberal nationalists are more concerned with the relationship between the nation and liberal democracy ( Tamir, 1993 , 2019 ). While many classical nationalists were strong advocates of democratic or republican regimes, it was by no means universal. Indeed, core nationalism is compatible with an authoritarian government so long as it is authentic or expressive of the national character. Indeed, some very prominent nationalists were antidemocratic, like Charles Maurras and l’Action française as well as Russian nationalists, who summed up their view as “Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality” ( Riasanovsky, 2005 ).

To justify their views, liberal nationalists essentially offer two kinds of arguments. Recall, their project is not to revise or rehabilitate democracy or liberalism as it is to revise and rehabilitate nationalism; this explains why their arguments presume the value of democracy and liberalism and focus on establishing the ethical credentials of (a reformed) nationalism.

The first kind of argument put forward by nationalists might be called communitarian . These arguments are all noninstrumental in the sense that they do not derive the value of national community or loyalty from its contribution to either liberal democracy or liberal conceptions of justice. The arguments focus on the value of community independently of its contribution to democracy or social justice. We might further divide this argument into arguments over the intrinsic worth of national communities and the constitutive role of national communities in human flourishing.

The former strives to demonstrate that nations are valuable communities; they are the site of shared meaning and values. Cultures or cultural communities are good things, and they should continue to exist. Moreover, if we add that these cultures are distinct and unique—proposition (i) from core nationalism—then we ought to appreciate that preserving and sustaining nations provides the world with a diversity of cultures ( Berlin, 1976 ). If culture is good, then nations are valuable as incarnations of culture, and if we value a diversity of cultures, we ought to value the irreducible plurality of nations.

The latter kind of argument seeks to show how nations are constitutive of human flourishing. In their strongest form, they claim that one cannot flourish outside of the nation while weaker versions simply highlight how dispensing with the nation or national makes human flourishing harder or less complete than it otherwise might be. Here, we find various iterations. Some focus on the relationship between national identity and self-esteem ( Berlin, 1979 ; MacCormick, 1982 , 1991 , 1996 ; Margalit & Raz, 1990 ; Nielsen, 1999 ; Tamir, 1993 ; Taylor,1992 ), others on how our understanding of morality is conditioned by our membership in a nation and our participation in its moral traditions, its interpretation of principles or values ( MacIntyre, 1981 , 1984 , 1988 ; Taylor, 1989 ; Walzer, 1983 , 1987 , 1994 ). Others still insist on how choice and personal development require communal membership ( Kymlicka, 1995 ; Tamir, 1993 ).

The key point is that all these arguments seek to show that without the nation, human life would be greatly impoverished. Our national identities and our national loyalty constitute, at least for many of us, part and parcel of what it is to live a meaningful or good life.

The second kind of argument is instrumental: The value of the nation is derived from its role in sustaining either liberal democracy or liberal conceptions of justice. National identity and loyalty are either presented as necessary or uniquely valuable means of achieving our political aims of popular rule or social justice. Put otherwise, these arguments all work back from our commitments to democracy or justice and argue that once we properly appreciate how nations can help us achieve our aims, we will value them.

The most famous, the trust argument , has many variations. Essentially, we begin with the need for trust: To cooperate, to sacrifice for others, we must trust that others will reciprocate. For instance, in a democracy, the minority must believe that the majority will not abuse its power and will relinquish it when it loses. All must believe that others are equally committed to the common good. Yet, within large groups, trust cannot rest on personal knowledge of individual track records. To establish trust and motivate people to cooperate and make sacrifices, people need to feel committed to something above and beyond the partisan factions. The nation is presented as an engine of social trust because national identity will bind together and motivate nationals to work as a team. Liberal nationalists present the nation as (uniquely) capable of providing the identification and trust necessary to overcome the various forces, like disagreement or egoism, that threaten social cooperation, sacrifice, and trust ( Canovan, 1996 ; Kymlicka, 2001 ; Miller, 1995 ; Moore, 2001 ; Schnapper, 1998 ).

Of course, not only democracy requires social trust. Redistributive policies and social justice also require cooperation and sacrifice from people who are personally unacquainted. Here too, the argument goes, national identity provides the necessary identification and motivation.

In short, liberal nationalism is defended on two grounds. Noninstrumental arguments are fundamentally arguments about the value of community tout court or its constitutive role in human flourishing. Either way, they need to defend a certain conception of human nature or one about intrinsic value. The instrumental arguments are less ambitious as they begin from the commitments held by many critics of nationalism, such as democracy and social justice, and seek to show the cost of eliminating national identities and loyalties.

While more moderate than classical nationalism, liberal nationalism has not been spared criticism. On the one hand, it faces internal critiques. For instance, the trust argument has been the target of a fair amount of skepticism. Does national identity bind and motivate as its advocates claim? Critics have argued that it is far from clear that national identity can or does create the kind of affective bond and trust that its proponents claim. For instance, there appear to be plenty of cases in which fellow nationals distrust each other and would prefer to deal with foreigners if they had the choice ( Abizadeh, 2002 ). Moreover, given that a central claim can be empirically verified, we are entitled to ask what quantitative evidence can be produced in addition to sociohistorical narratives about the relationship between nation-states and welfare states. Here, even defenders of liberal nationalism concede that testing the claim has only provided partial support ( Miller & Ali, 2014 ).

Multiple external criticisms have been formulated, but two are particularly noteworthy against the backdrop of globalization. 21 An older and quite prominent critique is egalitarian. Essentially, these critics begin by identifying our commitment to equality and then show how nation-states contribute to inequality: They favor nationals at the expense of foreigners. While this might be tolerable in a world where everyone had access to a decent life, it is intolerable when so many lack so much and others live in abundance. In sum, the argument seeks to show that liberal nationalism, or any variation that does not significantly depart from the status quo, is deeply incompatible with a commitment to human equality ( Caney, 2005 ; Pogge, 2002 ; Singer, 1972 ; Steiner, 1994 ).

The second critique focuses on how liberal nationalism remains at odds with certain conceptions of human rights. Here, research is undeniably influenced by the political reality of the early 21st century ; migration and refugee crises have stimulated debate on the morality of borders. Behind talk of borders, we find the deeper conflict between, on the one hand, the notion of collective autonomy or the self-determination of peoples and, on the other hand, a human right to free movement or to immigrate. If liberal nationalism allows that one can exclude people from one’s group or territory, then we must ask whether self-determination comes at the expense of a basic right. For those who endorse a human right to immigrate, liberal nationalism’s support for borders and exclusion is objectionable ( Carens, 2013 ; Oberman, 2016 ).

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• Taylor, C. (1992). The politics of recognition. In A. Gutmann (Ed.), Multiculturalism and “the politics of recognition” (pp. 25–73). Princeton University Press.
• Taylor, C. (1997). Nationalism and modernity. In R. McKim & J. McMahan (Eds.), The morality of nationalism (pp. 31–55). Oxford University Press.
• Tilly, C. (Ed.). (1975). The formation of national states in Western Europe . Princeton University Press.
• van den Berghe, P. (1978). Race and ethnicity: A sociobiological perspective. Ethnic and Racial Studies , 1 (4), 401–411.
• Viroli, M. (1995). For love of country: An essay on nationalism and patriotism . Clarendon.
• Walby, S. (1992). Woman and nation. In A. D. Smith (Ed.), Ethnicity and nationalism: International studies in sociology and social anthropology (pp. 81–100). Brill.
• Walzer, M. (1983). Spheres of justice . Basic Books.
• Walzer, M. (1987). Interpretation and social criticism . Harvard University Press.
• Walzer, M. (1994). Thick and thin . University of Notre-Dame Press.
• Yack, B. (1996). The myth of the civic nation. Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society , 10 (2), 193–211.
• Yack, B. (2012). Nationalism and the moral psychology of community . Chicago University Press.

1. Classically, patriotism was classified as a virtue (i.e., an admirable character trait). Yet, its ethical credentials have been increasingly questioned in the wake of World War I. Still, proponents and opponents of patriotism tend to agree that it is a character trait.

2. One view is that patriotism is loyalty to political institutions, specifically republican, rather than to an ethnocultural community ( Connor, 1994 ; Dietz, 1989 ; Taylor, 1997 ; Viroli, 1995 ). However, this definition is questionable. Even if “patriots” has often been used to name advocates of republicanism, it is certainly not the only recorded use. Nor does this view match the common uses of “patriot” or “patriotism” to speak of the intense loyalty of those who have no institutions or do not necessarily believe in republicanism (e.g., patriotic Kurds). Worse, if patriotism is loyalty to institutions and nationalism is loyalty to an ethnocultural group, then those who defend this distinction seem committed to the claim that nationalism is ancient. How else can they describe loyalty to the Jewish people and Kingdom during the Jewish-Roman wars?

3. A prominent dissenter in the literature is Benedict Anderson. He claimed that nationalism was more like kinship or religion, no doubt in part due to what he considered to be its philosophical poverty and even incoherence ( Anderson, 2006 , pp. 4–5).

4. We might say that nations are numerically distinct and qualitatively distinct as opposed to manufactured objects that are numerically distinct but qualitatively indistinct.

5. The point is not that there existed a clear doctrine called “core nationalism” that people simply adopted or not. There are and have been nationalists of all ideological stripes—conservative, liberal, socialist, and so on. The point of putting forward core nationalism is to identify those beliefs most shared between them that allow us to recognize that despite their differences and nuances, there are common threads.

6. This view is open to the challenge that it primarily summarizes Western nationalism. For those interested in an influential non-Western perspective, see Chatterjee (1986 , 1993 ).

7. An example is the way in which proposition (iii) has become so central to nationalist movements in the wake of the French Revolution. The age of nationalism and later decolonization delegitimized the millennia-old institution of empire by spreading the proposition that all alien rule is illegitimate.

8. From Thanksgiving that commemorates events in the early 17th century but only becomes a national institution in the late 19th century, to the 19th-century invention of distinct clan tartans in Scotland, more than one practice or symbol is far more recent than commonly believed ( Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983 ).

9. Authors like Azar Gat would be unhappy with this label. Nevertheless, his overall argument is far more critical of modernism than anything else. Indeed, insisting on the antiquity of the national state seems like a form of perennialism ( Gat, 2012 ).

10. Modernists are skeptical of identity unsupported by institutions. Identity that is not affirmed and transmitted through institutions is “fragmentary, discontinuous and elusive” ( Breuilly, 1996 , p. 156).

11. The battle of Raphia and the subsequent popular Egyptian revolt against Hellenistic rule is a textbook case drawn from the premodern world ( Gat, 2012 , pp. 118–119). Similar examples abound in Gat’s account.

12. For instance, Walker Connor insists that nations begin at the end of the 19th or early 20th century because they require mass consciousness, which in turn depends upon mass communication and standardized education. Adrian Hastings believed that so long as national consciousness extends to many people beyond government circles and the ruling class, then one can speak of a nation ( Connor, 1994 ; Hastings, 1997 ).

13. These are the most prominent, but they are not the only classification of nations and nationalism. For instance, one may draw the line between secular and religious forms of nationalism ( Juergensmeyer, 1993 ).

14. While many accept that there are different kinds of nations, some reject this pluralism in favor of a monolithic view. Walker Connor insists that all nationalism is ethnic nationalism ( Connor, 1994 ).

15. Perhaps the most notable exception is Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who often defends nationalism as essential for the progress of humanity ( Fichte, 2008 ). Notwithstanding these passages, Fichte certainly sounds like an ardent nationalist.

16. Authors who defend loyalty to the nation or national partiality purely as a means of achieving the greatest happiness or to ensure the maximal discharging of moral duties, such as R. M. Hare and Robert Goodin respectively argue, are hardly endorsing “nationalism” ( Goodin, 1988 ; Hare, 1981 ). Few nationalists think of their nation as a mere tool let alone believe that humanity is the ultimate object of loyalty.

17. An excellent example of the way that debate has proceeded is the way that Alasdair MacIntyre (1984) is cited or discussed. MacIntyre does not discuss let alone defend nationalism but patriotism. His focus is clearly on a character trait and not an ideology: Nowhere does he claim that all political legitimacy comes from the nation or that nations must be as autonomous as possible. Of course, this does not mean that MacIntyre’s defense of patriotism is irrelevant—he does after all make strong claims about communal life and human flourishing. The point is that many philosophers and political theorists treat nationalism and national partiality as interchangeable. Consequently, what is discussed on the heading of “nationalism” in the normative debate is often an anemic understanding of what historians and sociologists are discussing.

18. Authors like David Miller might reply that liberal nationalism is not a contemporary reconstruction of nationalism but a view inspired by historical nationalists such as Giuseppe Manzini and John Stuart Mill ( Gustavsson & Miller, 2019 ). While one might convincingly argue that Manzini advocated something sufficiently like contemporary liberal nationalism, things are less clear for Mill. While he did believe that national sentiment was crucial to representative government, he also advocated colonialism on the grounds that it made the colonized better off—a point hard to square with core nationalism ( Bell, 2010 ).

19. The accusation that nationalism is particularly responsible for brutal and total wars in the 20th century is widespread ( Smith, 1998 , 2010 ). Even if the accusation is correct, nationalism was also a driving force, if not the driving force, behind decolonization. Whatever historical debates are to be had about what causes what, the cost-benefit analysis of nationalism is likely more complex than François Mitterand’s “ Le nationalisme, c’est la guerre .”

20. If by “constitutional patriotism” we mean that people are primarily loyal not to a cultural community but the norms and values of a liberal democratic constitution, then liberal nationalism remains a form of nationalism ( Habermas, 1994 ).

21. There is no shortage of external critiques. Feminist authors have pointed out the extent to which nationalism can be understood as a gendered ideology: one that rarely grants women an equal role in the nation or addresses their concerns ( Elshtain, 1993 ; Enloe, 1989 ; Walby, 1992 ). Similarly, those whose argue that we inhabit an increasingly postnational or globalized world argue that the nation and nationalism are obsolete ( Falk, 2002 ; Horsman & Marshall, 1994 ; McNeill, 1986 ).

Related Articles

• Nationalism and Foreign Policy
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Nationalism

The term “nationalism” is generally used to describe two phenomena:

• the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity, and
• the actions that the members of a nation take when seeking to achieve (or sustain) self-determination.

(1) raises questions about the concept of a nation (or national identity), which is often defined in terms of common origin, ethnicity, or cultural ties, and specifically about whether an individual’s membership in a nation should be regarded as non-voluntary or voluntary. (2) raises questions about whether self-determination must be understood as involving having full statehood with complete authority over domestic and international affairs, or whether something less is required.

Nationalism came into the focus of philosophical debate three decades ago, in the nineties, partly in consequence of rather spectacular and troubling nationalist clashes. Surges of nationalism tend to present a morally ambiguous, and for this reason often fascinating, picture. “National awakening” and struggles for political independence are often both heroic and cruel; the formation of a recognizably national state often responds to deep popular sentiment but sometimes yields inhuman consequences, from violent expulsion and “cleansing” of non-nationals to organized mass murder. The moral debate on nationalism reflects a deep moral tension between solidarity with oppressed national groups on the one hand and repulsion in the face of crimes perpetrated in the name of nationalism on the other. Moreover, the issue of nationalism points to a wider domain of problems related to the treatment of ethnic and cultural differences within democratic polity, arguably among the most pressing problems of contemporary political theory.

In the last two decades, migration crisis and the populist reactions to migration and domestic economic issues have been the defining traits of a new political constellation. The traditional issue of the contrast between nationalism and cosmopolitanism has changed its profile: the current drastic contrast is between populist aversion to the foreigners-migrants and a more generous, or simply just, attitude of acceptance and Samaritan help. The populist aversion inherits some features traditionally associated with patriotism and nationalism, and the opposite attitude the main features of traditional cosmopolitanism. One could expect that the work on nationalism will be moving further on this new and challenging playground, addressing the new contrast and trying to locate nationalism in relation to it.

In this entry, we shall first present conceptual issues of definition and classification (Sections 1 and 2) and then the arguments put forward in the debate (Section 3), dedicating more space to the arguments in favor of nationalism than to those against it in order to give the philosophical nationalist a proper hearing. In the last part we shall turn to the new constellation and sketch the new issues raised by nationalist and trans-nationalist populisms and the migration crisis.

1.1 The Basic Concept of Nationalism

1.2 the concept of a nation, 2.1 concepts of nationalism: classical and liberal, 2.2 moral claims, classical vs. liberal: the centrality of nation, 3.1 classical and liberal nationalisms, 3.2 arguments in favor of nationalism, classical vs. liberal: the deep need for community, 3.3 arguments in favor of nationalism: issues of justice, 3.4 populism and a new face of nationalism, 3.5 nation-state in global context, 4. conclusion, introduction, other internet resources, related entries, 1. what is a nation.

Although the term “nationalism” has a variety of meanings, it centrally encompasses two phenomena: (1) the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their identity as members of that nation and (2) the actions that the members of a nation take in seeking to achieve (or sustain) some form of political sovereignty (see for example, Nielsen 1998–9: 9). Each of these aspects requires elaboration.

• raises questions about the concept of a nation or national identity, about what it is to belong to a nation, and about how much one ought to care about one’s nation. Nations and national identity may be defined in terms of common origin, ethnicity, or cultural ties, and while an individual’s membership in the nation is often regarded as involuntary, it is sometimes regarded as voluntary. The degree of care for one’s nation that nationalists require is often, but not always, taken to be very high: according to such views, the claims of one’s nation take precedence over rival contenders for authority and loyalty. [ 1 ]
• raises questions about whether sovereignty requires the acquisition of full statehood with complete authority over domestic and international affairs, or whether something less than statehood suffices. Although sovereignty is often taken to mean full statehood (Gellner 1983: ch. 1), [ 2 ] possible exceptions have been recognized (Miller 1992: 87; Miller 2000). Some authors even defend an anarchist version of patriotism-moderate nationalism foreshadowed by Bakunin (see Sparrow 2007).

There is a terminological and conceptual question of distinguishing nationalism from patriotism. A popular proposal is the contrast between attachment to one’s country as defining patriotism and attachment to one’s people and its traditions as defining nationalism (Kleinig 2014: 228, and Primoratz 2017: Section 1.2). One problem with this proposal is that love for a country is not really just love of a piece of land but normally involves attachment to the community of its inhabitants, and this introduces “nation” into the conception of patriotism. Another contrast is the one between strong, and somewhat aggressive attachment (nationalism) and a mild one (patriotism), dating back at least to George Orwell (see his 1945 essay). [ 3 ]

Despite these definitional worries, there is a fair amount of agreement about the classical, historically paradigmatic form of nationalism. It typically features the supremacy of the nation’s claims over other claims to individual allegiance and full sovereignty as the persistent aim of its political program. Territorial sovereignty has traditionally been seen as a defining element of state power and essential for nationhood. It was extolled in classic modern works by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau and is returning to center stage in the debate, though philosophers are now more skeptical (see below). Issues surrounding the control of the movement of money and people (in particular immigration) and the resource rights implied in territorial sovereignty make the topic politically central in the age of globalization and philosophically interesting for nationalists and anti-nationalists alike.

In recent times, the philosophical focus has moved more in the direction of “liberal nationalism”, the view that mitigates the classical claims and tries to bring together the pro-national attitude and the respect for traditional liberal values. For instance, the territorial state as political unit is seen by classical nationalists as centrally “belonging” to one ethnic-cultural group and as actively charged with protecting and promulgating its traditions. The liberal variety allows for “sharing” of the territorial state with non-dominant ethnic groups. Consequences are varied and quite interested (for more see below, especially section 2.1 ).

In its general form, the issue of nationalism concerns the mapping between the ethno-cultural domain (featuring ethno-cultural groups or “nations”) and the domain of political organization. In breaking down the issue, we have mentioned the importance of the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity. This point raises two sorts of questions. First, the descriptive ones:

Second, the normative ones:

This section discusses the descriptive questions, starting with (1a) and (1b) ;the normative questions are addressed in Section 3 on the moral debate. If one wants to enjoin people to struggle for their national interests, one must have some idea about what a nation is and what it is to belong to a nation. So, in order to formulate and ground their evaluations, claims, and directives for action, pro-nationalist thinkers have expounded theories of ethnicity, culture, nation, and state. Their opponents have in turn challenged these elaborations. Now, some presuppositions about ethnic groups and nations are essential for the nationalist, while others are theoretical elaborations designed to support the essential ones. The definition and status of the social group that benefits from the nationalist program, variously called the “nation”, “ethno-nation”, or “ethnic group”, is essential. Since nationalism is particularly prominent with groups that do not yet have a state, a definition of nation and nationalism purely in terms of belonging to a state is a non-starter.

Indeed, purely “civic” loyalties are often categorized separately under the title “patriotism”, which we already mentioned, or “constitutional patriotism”. [ 4 ] This leaves two extreme options and a number of intermediates. The first extreme option has been put forward by a small but distinguished band of theorists. [ 5 ] According to their purely voluntaristic definition, a nation is any group of people aspiring to a common political state-like organization. If such a group of people succeeds in forming a state, the loyalties of the group members become “civic” (as opposed to “ethnic”) in nature. At the other extreme, and more typically, nationalist claims are focused upon the non-voluntary community of common origin, language, tradition, and culture: the classic ethno-nation is a community of origin and culture, including prominently a language and customs. The distinction is related (although not identical) to that drawn by older schools of social and political science between “civic” and “ethnic” nationalism, the former being allegedly Western European and the latter more Central and Eastern European, originating in Germany. [ 6 ] Philosophical discussions centered on nationalism tend to concern the ethnic-cultural variants only, and this habit will be followed here. A group aspiring to nationhood on this basis will be called an “ethno-nation” to underscore its ethno-cultural rather than purely civic underpinnings. For the ethno-(cultural) nationalist it is one’s ethnic-cultural background that determines one’s membership in the community. One cannot choose to be a member; instead, membership depends on the accident of origin and early socialization. However, commonality of origin has become mythical for most contemporary candidate groups: ethnic groups have been mixing for millennia.

Sophisticated, liberal pro-nationalists therefore tend to stress cultural membership only and speak of “nationality”, omitting the “ethno-” part (Miller 1992, 2000; Tamir 1993,2013; Gans 2003). Michel Seymour’s proposal of a “socio-cultural definition” adds a political dimension to the purely cultural one: a nation is a cultural group, possibly but not necessarily united by a common descent, endowed with civic ties (Seymour 2000). This is the kind of definition that would be accepted by most parties in the debate today. So defined, the nation is a somewhat mixed category, both ethno-cultural and civic, but still closer to the purely ethno-cultural than to the purely civic extreme.

Let us now turn to the issue of the origin and “authenticity” of ethno-cultural groups or ethno-nations. In social and political science one usually distinguishes two kinds of views, but there is a third group, combining element from both. The first are modernist views that see nationalism as born in modern times, together with nation-states. [ 7 ] In our times the view was pioneered by Ernst Gellner (see his 1983). [ 8 ] Other modernist choose similar starting points with century or two of variation. [ 9 ] The opposite view can be called, following Edward Shils (1957) “primordialist”. According to it, actual ethno-cultural nations have either existed “since time immemorial”.

The third, quite plausible kind of view, distinct from both primordialism-ethno-symbolism and modernism, has been initiated by W. Connor (1994). [ 10 ] A nation is a politicized and mobilized ethnic group rather than a state. So, the origins of nationalism predate the modern state, and its emotional content remains up to our times (Conversi 2002: 270), but the actual statist organization is, indeed, modern. However, nation-state is a nationalist dream and fiction, never really implemented, due to the inescapable plurality of social groups. So much for the three dominant perspectives on the origin of nationalism.

Indeed, the older authors—from great thinkers like Herder and Otto Bauer to the propagandists who followed their footsteps—took great pains to ground normative claims upon firm ontological realism about nations: nations are real, bona fide entities. However, the contemporary moral debate has tried to diminish the importance of the imagined/real divide. Prominent contemporary philosophers have claimed that normative-evaluative nationalist claims are compatible with the “imagined” nature of a nation. [ 11 ] They point out that common imaginings can tie people together, and that actual interaction resulting from togetherness can engender important moral obligations.

Let us now turn to question (1c) about the nature of pro-national attitudes. The explanatory issue that has interested political and social scientists concerns ethno-nationalist sentiment, the paradigm case of a pro-national attitude. Is it as irrational, romantic, and indifferent to self-interest as it might seem on the surface? The issue has divided authors who see nationalism as basically irrational and those who try to explain it as being in some sense rational. Authors who see it as irrational propose various explanations of why people assent to irrational views. Some say, critically, that nationalism is based on “false consciousness”. But where does such false consciousness come from? The most simplistic view is that it is a result of direct manipulation of “masses” by “elites”. On the opposite side, the famous critic of nationalism Elie Kedourie (1960) thinks this irrationality is spontaneous. A decade and a half ago Liah Greenfeld went as far as linking nationalism to mental illness in her provocative 2005 article (see also her 2006 book). On the opposite side, Michael Walzer has offered a sympathetic account of nationalist passion in his 2002. Authors relying upon the Marxist tradition offer various deeper explanations. To mention one, the French structuralist Étienne Balibar sees it as a result of the “production” of ideology effectuated by mechanisms which have nothing to do with spontaneous credulity of individuals, but with impersonal, structural social factors (Balibar & Wallerstein 1988 [1991]). [ 12 ]

Some authors claim that it is often rational for individuals to become nationalists (Hardin 1985). Can one rationally explain the extremes of ethno-national conflict? Authors like Russell Hardin propose to do so in terms of a general view of when hostile behavior is rational: most typically, if an individual has no reason to trust someone, it is reasonable for that individual to take precautions against the other. If both sides take precautions, however, each will tend to see the other as increasingly inimical. It then becomes rational to start treating the other as an enemy. Mere suspicion can thus lead by small, individually rational steps to a situation of conflict. (Such negative development is often presented as a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma; see the entry on prisoner’s dilemma ). It is relatively easy to spot the circumstances in which this general pattern applies to national solidarities and conflicts (see also Wimmer 2013).

Finally, as for question (1d) , the nation is typically seen as an essentially non-voluntary community to which one belongs by birth and early nurture and such that the belonging is enhanced and made more complete by one’s additional conscious endorsement. Not everyone agrees: liberal nationalists accept the idea of choice of one’s national belonging and of possibility for immigrants to become nationals by choice and intentional acculturation.

2. Varieties of Nationalism

We pointed out at the very beginning of the entry that nationalism focuses upon (1) the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity, and (2) the actions that the members of a nation take when seeking to achieve (or sustain) some form of political sovereignty. The politically central point is (2): the actions enjoined by the nationalist. To these we now turn, beginning with sovereignty and territory, the usual foci of a national struggle for independence. They raise an important issue:

The classical answer is that a state is required. A more liberal answer is that some form of political autonomy suffices. Once this has been discussed, we can turn to the related normative issues:

Consider first the classical nationalist answer to (2a) . Political sovereignty requires a state “rightfully owned” by the ethno-nation (Oldenquist 1997). Developments of this line of thought often state or imply specific answers to (2b) , and (2c) , i.e., that in a national independence struggle the use of force against the threatening central power is almost always a legitimate means for bringing about sovereignty. However, classical nationalism is not only concerned with the creation of a state but also with its maintenance and strengthening.

Classical nationalism is the political program that sees the creation and maintenance of a fully sovereign state owned by a given ethno-national group (“people” or “nation”) as a primary duty of each member of the group. Starting from the assumption that the appropriate (or “natural”) unit of culture is an ethno-nation, it claims that a primary duty of each member is to abide by one’s recognizably ethno-national culture in all cultural matters.

Classical nationalists are usually vigilant about the kind of culture they protect and promote and about the kind of attitude people have to their nation-state. This watchful attitude carries some potential dangers: many elements of a given culture that are universal or simply not recognizably national may fall prey to such nationalist enthusiasms. Classical nationalism in everyday life puts various additional demands on individuals, from buying more expensive home-produced goods in preference to cheaper imported ones to procreating as many future members of the nation as one can manage (see Yuval-Davies 1997, and Yack 2012).

Besides classical nationalism (and its more radical extremist cousins), various moderate views are also now classified as nationalist. Indeed, the philosophical discussion has shifted to these moderate or even ultra-moderate forms, and most philosophers who describe themselves as nationalists propose very moderate nationalist programs.

Nationalism in this wider sense is any complex of attitudes, claims, and directives for action ascribing a fundamental political, moral, and cultural value to nation and nationality and deriving obligations (for individual members of the nation, and for any involved third parties, individual or collective) from this ascribed value. The main representative of this group of views is liberal nationalism , proposed by authors like Miller, Tamir, and Gans (see below).

Nationalisms in this wider sense can vary somewhat in their conceptions of the nation (which are often left implicit in their discourse), in the grounds for and degree of its value, and in the scope of their prescribed obligations. Moderate nationalism is less demanding than classical nationalism and sometimes goes under the name of “patriotism.” (A different usage, again, reserves “patriotism” for valuing civic community and loyalty to state, in contrast to nationalism, centered on ethnic-cultural communities).

Let us now turn to liberal nationalism, the most discussed kind of moderate nationalism.

Liberal nationalists see liberal-democratic principles and pro-national attitudes as belonging together. One of the main proponents of the view, Yael Tamir, started the debate in her 1993 book and in her recent book talks about the nation-state as “an ideal meeting point between the two” (2019: 6). Of course, some things have to be sacrificed: we must acknowledge that either the meaningfulness of a community or its openness must be sacrificed to some extent as we cannot have them both. (2019: 57). How much of each is to give way is left open, and of course, various liberal nationalists take different views of what precisely the right answer is.

Tamir’s version of liberal nationalism is a kind of social liberalism, in this respect similar to the views of David Miller who talks about “solidaristic communities” in his 1999 book Principles of Social Justice and also takes stance in his 1995 and 2008 books. They both see the feeling of national identity as a feeling that promotes solidarity, and solidarity as means for increased social justice (Tamir 2019, in particular ch.20; compare Walzer 1983, Kymlicka 1995a, 2001, and Gans 2003, 2008).

Liberal nationalists diverge about the value of multiculturalism. Kymlicka takes it as basic for his picture of liberalism while Tamir dismisses it without much ado: multicultural, multiethnic democracies have a very poor track record, she claims (2019: 62). Tamir’s diagnosis of the present day political crisis, with politicians like Trump and Le Pen coming to the forefront, is that “liberal democrats were paralyzed by their assumed victory” whereas “nationalists felt defeated and obsolete” (2019: 7).

Tamir lists two kinds of reasons that guarantee special political status to nations. First kind, that no other political entity “is more able than the state to promote ideas in the public sphere” (2019: 52), and the second kind that nation needs continuous creative effort to make it functional and attractive.

The historical development of liberalism turned it into a universalistic, anti-communitarian principle; this has been a fatal mistake that can be and should be corrected by the liberal nationalist synthesis. Can we revive the unifying narratives of our nationality without sacrificing the liberal inheritance of freedom and rights? Liberal nationalism answers in the affirmative. From its standpoint, national particularism has primacy: “The love of humanity is a noble ideal, but real love is always particular…” (2019: 68).

Interestingly, Tamir combines this high regard of nation with an extreme constructivist view of its nature: nations are mental structures that exist in the minds of their members (2019: 58).

Is liberal nationalism implemented anywhere in the present world, or is it more of an ideal, probably end-state theory, that proposes a picture of a desirable society? Judging by the writings of liberal nationalists, it is the latter, although presented as a relatively easily reachable ideal, combining two traditions that are already well implemented in political reality.

The variations of nationalism most relevant for philosophy are those that influence the moral standing of claims and of recommended nationalist practices. The elaborate philosophical views put forward in favor of nationalism will be referred to as “theoretical nationalism”, the adjective serving to distinguish such views from less sophisticated and more practical nationalist discourse. The central theoretical nationalist evaluative claims can be charted on the map of possible positions within political theory in the following useful but somewhat simplified and schematic way.

Nationalist claims featuring the nation as central to political action must answer two crucial general questions. First, is there one kind of large social group that is of special moral importance? The nationalist answer is that there certainly is one, namely, the nation. Moreover, when an ultimate choice is to be made, say between ties of family, or friendship, and the nation, the latter has priority. Liberal nationalists prefer a more moderate stance, which ascribes value to national belonging, but don’t make it central in this way. Second, what are the grounds for an individual’s obligations to the morally central group? Are they based on voluntary or involuntary membership in the group? The typical contemporary nationalist thinker opts for the latter, while admitting that voluntary endorsement of one’s national identity is a morally important achievement. On the philosophical map, pro-nationalist normative tastes fit nicely with the communitarian stance in general: most pro-nationalist philosophers are communitarians who choose the nation as the preferred community (in contrast to those of their fellow communitarians who prefer more far-ranging communities, such as those defined by global religious traditions). [ 13 ]

Before proceeding to moral claims, let us briefly sketch the issues and viewpoints connected to territory and territorial rights that are essential for nationalist political programs. [ 14 ] Why is territory important for ethno-national groups, and what are the extent and grounds of territorial rights? Its primary importance resides in sovereignty and all the associated possibilities for internal control and external exclusion. Add to this the Rousseauian view that political attachments are essentially bounded and that love —or, to put it more mildly, republican civil friendship—for one’s group requires exclusion of some “other”, and the importance becomes quite obvious. What about the grounds for the demand for territorial rights? Nationalist and pro-nationalist views mostly rely on the attachment that members of a nation have to national territory and to the formative value of territory for a nation to justify territorial claims (see Miller 2000 and Meisels 2009). This is similar in some respects to the rationale given by proponents of indigenous peoples’ rights (Tully 2004, but see also Hendrix 2008) and in other respects to Kolers’ 2009 ethno-geographical non-nationalist theory, but differs in preferring ethno-national groups as the sole carriers of the right. These attachment views stand in stark contrast to more pragmatic views about territorial rights as means for conflict resolution (e.g., Levy 2000). Another quite popular alternative is the family of individualistic views grounding territorial rights in rights and interests of individuals. [ 15 ] On the extreme end of anti-nationalist views stands the idea of Pogge) that there are no specific territorial problems for political philosophy—the “dissolution approach”, as Kolers calls it.

We now pass to the normative dimension of nationalism. We shall first describe the very heart of the nationalist program, i.e., sketch and classify the typical normative and evaluative nationalist claims. These claims can be seen as answers to the normative subset of our initial questions about (1) pro-national attitudes and (2) actions.

We will see that these claims recommend various courses of action: centrally, those meant to secure and sustain a political organization for the given ethno-cultural national community (thereby making more specific the answers to our normative questions (1e) , (1f) , (2b) , and (2c) ). Further, they enjoin the community’s members to promulgate recognizable ethno-cultural contents as central features of the cultural life within such a state. Finally, we shall discuss various lines of pro-nationalist thought that have been put forward in defense of these claims. To begin, let us return to the claims concerning the furthering of the national state and culture. These are proposed by the nationalist as norms of conduct. The philosophically most important variations concern three aspects of such normative claims:

• The normative nature and strength of the claim: does it promote merely a right (say, to have and maintain a form of political self-government, preferably and typically a state, or have cultural life centered upon a recognizably ethno-national culture), or a moral obligation (to get and maintain one), or a moral, legal, and political obligation? The strongest claim is typical of classical nationalism; its typical norms are both moral and, once the nation-state is in place, legally enforceable obligations for all parties concerned, including for the individual members of the ethno-nation. A weaker but still quite demanding version speaks only of moral obligation (“sacred duty”).
• The strength of the nationalist claim in relation to various external interests and rights: to give a real example, is the use of the domestic language so important that even international conferences should be held in it, at the cost of losing the most interesting participants from abroad? The force of the nationalist claim is here being weighed against the force of other claims, including those of individual or group interests or rights. Variations in comparative strength of nationalist claims take place on a continuum between two extremes. At one rather unpalatable extreme, nation-focused claims take precedence over any other claims, including over human rights. Further towards the center is the classical nationalism that gives nation-centered claims precedence over individual interests and many needs, but not necessarily over general human rights (see, for example, MacIntyre 1994, Oldenquist 1997). On the opposite end, which is mild, humane, and liberal, the central classical nationalist claims are accorded prima facie status only (see Tamir 1993, Gans 2003, and Miller 2013; and for applications to Central Europe Stefan Auer 2004).

Universalizing nationalism is the political program that claims that every ethno-nation should have a state that it should rightfully own and the interests of which it should promote.

Alternatively, a claim may be particularistic, such as the claim “Group X ought to have a state”, where this implies nothing about any other group:

Particularistic nationalism is the political program claiming that some ethno-nation should have its state, without extending the claim to all ethno-nations. It claims thus either by omission (unreflective particularistic nationalism), or by explicitly specifying who is excluded: “Group X ought to have a state, but group Y should not” (invidious nationalism).

The most difficult and indeed chauvinistic sub-case of particularism, i.e., (B), has been called “invidious” since it explicitly denies the privilege of having a state to some peoples. Serious theoretical nationalists usually defend only the universalist variety, whereas the nationalist-in-the-street most often defends the egoistic indeterminate one.

The nationalist picture of morality traditionally has been quite close to the dominant view in the theory of international relations called “realism”. Put starkly, the view is that morality ends at the boundaries of the nation-state; beyond there is nothing but anarchy. [ 16 ] It nicely complements the main classical nationalist claim about the nation-state, i.e., that each ethno-nation or people should have a state of its own, and suggests what happens next: nation-states enter into competition in the name of their constitutive peoples.

3. The Moral Debate

Recall the initial normative question centered around (1) attitudes and (2) actions. Is national partiality justified, and to what extent? What actions are appropriate to bring about sovereignty? In particular, are ethno-national states and institutionally protected (ethno-) national cultures goods independent from the individual will of their members, and how far may one go in protecting them? The philosophical debate for and against nationalism is a debate about the moral validity of its central claims. In particular, the ultimate moral issue is the following: is any form of nationalism morally permissible or justified, and, if not, how bad are particular forms of it? [ 17 ] Why do nationalist claims require a defense? In some situations they seem plausible: for instance, the plight of some stateless national groups—the history of Jews and Armenians, the historical and contemporary misfortunes of Kurds—lends credence to the idea that having their own state would have solved the worst problems. Still, there are good reasons to examine nationalist claims more carefully. The most general reason is that it should first be shown that the political form of the nation-state has some value as such, that a national community has a particular, or even central, moral and political value, and that claims in its favor have normative validity. Once this is established, a further defense is needed. Some classical nationalist claims appear to clash—at least under normal circumstances of contemporary life—with various values that people tend to accept. Some of these values are considered essential to liberal-democratic societies, while others are important specifically for the flourishing of creativity and culture. The main values in the first set are individual autonomy and benevolent impartiality (most prominently towards members of groups culturally different from one’s own). The alleged special duties towards one’s ethno-national culture can and often do interfere with individuals’ right to autonomy.

Liberal nationalists are aware of the difficulties of the classical approach, and soften the classical claims, giving them only a prima facie status. They usually speak of “various accretions that have given nationalism a bad name”, and they are eager to “separate the idea of nationality itself from these excesses” (Miller 1992, 2000). Such thoughtful pro-nationalist writers have participated in an ongoing philosophical dialogue between proponents and opponents of the claim. [ 18 ] In order to help the reader find their through this involved debate, we shall briefly summarize the considerations which are open to the ethno-nationalist to defend their case (compare the useful overview in Lichtenberg 1997). Further lines of thought built upon these considerations can be used to defend very different varieties of nationalism, from radical to very moderate ones.

For brevity, each line of thought will be reduced to a brief argument; the actual debate is more involved than one can represent in a sketch. Some prominent lines of criticism that have been put forward in the debate will be indicated in brackets (see Miscevic 2001). The main arguments in favor of nationalism will be divided into two sets. The first set of arguments defends the claim that national communities have a high value, sometime seen as coming from the interests of their individual member (e.g., by Kymlicka, Miller, and Raz) and sometimes as non-instrumental and independent of the wishes and choices of their individual members, and argues that they should therefore be protected by means of state and official statist policies. The second set is less deeply “comprehensive”, and encompasses arguments from the requirements of justice, independent from substantial assumptions about culture and cultural values.

The first set will be presented in more detail since it has formed the core of the debate. It depicts the community as the source of value or as the transmission device connecting its members to some important values. For the classical nationalist, the arguments from this set are communitarian in a particularly “deep” sense since they are grounded in basic features of the human condition.

The general form of deep communitarian arguments is as follows. First, the communitarian premise: there is some uncontroversial good (e.g., a person’s identity), and some kind of community is essential for acquisition and preservation of it. Then comes the claim that the ethno-cultural nation is the kind of community ideally suited for this task. Then follows the statist conclusion: in order for such a community to preserve its own identity and support the identity of its members, it has to assume (always or at least normally) the political form of a state. The conclusion of this type of argument is that the ethno-national community has the right to an ethno-national state and the citizens of the state have the right and obligation to favor their own ethnic culture in relation to any other.

Although the deeper philosophical assumptions in the arguments stem from the communitarian tradition, weakened forms have also been proposed by more liberal philosophers. The original communitarian lines of thought in favor of nationalism suggest that there is some value in preserving ethno-national cultural traditions, in feelings of belonging to a common nation, and in solidarity between a nation’s members. A liberal nationalist might claim that these are not the central values of political life but are values nevertheless. Moreover, the diametrically opposing views, pure individualism and cosmopolitanism, do seem arid, abstract, and unmotivated by comparison. By cosmopolitanism we refer to moral and political doctrines claiming that

• one’s primary moral obligations are directed to all human beings (regardless of geographical or cultural distance), and
• political arrangements should faithfully reflect this universal moral obligation (in the form of supra-statist arrangements that take precedence over nation-states).

Confronted with opposing forces of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, many philosophers opt for a mixture of liberalism-cosmopolitanism and patriotism-nationalism. In his writings, B. Barber glorifies “a remarkable mixture of cosmopolitanism and parochialism” that in his view characterizes American national identity (Barber 1996: 31). Charles Taylor claims that “we have no choice but to be cosmopolitan and patriots” (Taylor 1996: 121). Hilary Putnam proposes loyalty to what is best in the multiple traditions in which each of us participates, apparently a middle way between a narrow-minded patriotism and an overly abstract cosmopolitanism (Putnam 1996: 114). The compromise has been foreshadowed by Berlin (1979) and Taylor (1989, 1993), [ 19 ] and in the last two decades it has occupied center stage in the debate and even provoked re-readings of historical nationalism in its light. [ 20 ] Most liberal nationalist authors accept various weakened versions of the arguments we list below, taking them to support moderate or ultra-moderate nationalist claims.

Here are then the main weakenings of classical ethno-nationalism that liberal, limited-liberal, and cosmopolitan nationalists propose. First, ethno-national claims have only prima facie strength and cannot trump individual rights. Second, legitimate ethno-national claims do not in themselves automatically amount to the right to a state, but rather to the right to a certain level of cultural autonomy. The main models of autonomy are either territorial or non-territorial: the first involves territorial devolution; the second, cultural autonomy granted to individuals regardless of their domicile within the state. [ 21 ] Third, ethno-nationalism is subordinate to civic patriotism, which has little or nothing to do with ethnic criteria. Fourth, ethno-national mythologies and similar “important falsehoods” are to be tolerated only if benign and inoffensive, in which case they are morally permissible despite their falsity. Finally, any legitimacy that ethno-national claims may have is to be derived from choices the concerned individuals are free to make.

Consider now the particular pro-nationalist arguments from the first set. The first argument depends on assumptions that also appear in the subsequent ones, but it further ascribes to the community an intrinsic value. The later arguments point more towards an instrumental value of nation, derived from the value of individual flourishing, moral understanding, firm identity and the like.

• The Argument From Intrinsic Value . Each ethno-national community is valuable in and of itself since it is only within the natural encompassing framework of various cultural traditions that important meanings and values are produced and transmitted. The members of such communities share a special cultural proximity to each other. By speaking the same language and sharing customs and traditions, the members of these communities are typically closer to one another in various ways than they are to the outsiders.
• The Argument from Flourishing . The ethno-national community is essential for each of its members to flourish. In particular, it is only within such a community that an individual can acquire concepts and values crucial for understanding the community’s cultural life in general and the individual’s own life in particular. There has been much debate on the pro-nationalist side about whether divergence of values is essential for separateness of national groups.

The Canadian liberal nationalists Seymour (1999), Taylor, and Kymlicka pointed out that “divergences of value between different regions of Canada” that aspire to separate nationhood are “minimal”. Taylor (1993: 155) concluded that it is not separateness of value that matters.

• The Argument from Identity . Communitarian philosophers emphasize nurture over nature as the principal force determining our identity as people—we come to be who we are because of the social settings and contexts in which we mature. This claim certainly has some plausibility. The very identity of each person depends upon his/her participation in communal life (see MacIntyre 1994, Nielsen, 1998, and Lagerspetz 2000). Given that an individual’s morality depends upon their having a mature and stable personal identity, the communal conditions that foster the development of personal identity must be preserved and encouraged. Therefore, communal life should be organized around particular national cultures.
• The Argument from Moral Understanding . A particularly important variety of value is moral value. Some values are universal, e.g., freedom and equality, but these are too abstract and “thin”. The rich, “thick” moral values are discernible only within particular traditions; as Charles Taylor puts it, “the language we have come to accept articulates the issues of the good for us” (1989: 35). The nation offers a natural framework for moral traditions, and thereby for moral understanding; it is the primary school of morals.

The ‘physiognomies’ of cultures are unique: each presents a wonderful exfoliation of human potentialities in its own time and place and environment. We are forbidden to make judgments of comparative value, for that is measuring the incommensurable. (1976: 206)

Assuming that the (ethno-)nation is the natural unit of culture, the preservation of cultural diversity amounts to institutionally protecting the purity of (ethno-)national culture. The plurality of cultural styles can be preserved and enhanced by tying them to ethno-national “forms of life”.

David Miller has developed an interesting and sophisticated liberal pro-national stance over the course of decades from his work in 1990 to the most recent work in 2013. He accepts multicultural diversity within a society but stresses an overarching national identity, taking as his prime example British national identity, which encompasses the English, Scottish, and other ethnic identities. He demands an “inclusive identity, accessible to members of all cultural groups” (2013: 91). miller claims such identity is necessary for basic social solidarity, and it goes far beyond simple constitutional patriotism. A skeptic could note the following. The problem with multicultural society is that national identity has historically been a matter of ethno-national ties and has required sameness in the weighted majority of cultural traits (common language, common “history-as-remembered”, customs, religion and so on). However, multi-cultural states typically bring together groups with very different histories, languages, religions, and even quite contrasting appearances. Now, how is the overarching “national identity” to be achieved starting from the very thin identity of common belonging to a state? One seems to have a dilemma. Grounding social solidarity in national identity requires the latter to be rather thin and seems likely to end up as full-on, unitary cultural identity. Thick constitutional patriotism may be one interesting possible attitude that can ground such solidarity while preserving the original cultural diversity.

The arguments in the second set concern political justice and do not rely on metaphysical claims about identity, flourishing, and cultural values. They appeal to (actual or alleged) circumstances that would make nationalist policies reasonable (or permissible or even mandatory), such as (a) the fact that a large part of the world is organized into nation-states (so that each new group aspiring to create a nation-state just follows an established pattern), or (b) the circumstances of group self-defense or of redressing past injustice that might justify nationalist policies (to take a special case). Some of the arguments also present nationhood as conducive to important political goods, such as equality.

• The Argument from the Right to Collective Self-determination . A group of people of a sufficient size has a prima facie right to govern itself and decide its future membership, if the members of the group so wish. It is fundamentally the democratic will of the members themselves that grounds the right to an ethno-national state and to ethno-centric cultural institutions and practices. This argument presents the justification of (ethno-)national claims as deriving from the will of the members of the nation. It is therefore highly suitable for liberal nationalism but not appealing to a deep communitarian who sees the demands of the nation as independent from, and prior to, the choices of particular individuals. [ 22 ]
• The Argument from the Right to Self-defense and to Redress Past Injustices . Oppression and injustice give the victimized group a just cause and the right to secede. If a minority group is oppressed by the majority to the extent that almost every minority member is worse off than most members of the majority simply in virtue of belonging to the minority, then nationalist claims on behalf of the minority are morally plausible and potentially compelling. The argument establishes a typical remedial right, acceptable from a liberal standpoint (see the discussion in Kukathas and Poole 2000, also Buchanan 1991; for past injustices see Waldron 1992).
• The Argument from Equality . Members of a minority group are often disadvantaged in relation to the dominant culture because they have to rely on those with the same language and culture to conduct the affairs of daily life. Therefore, liberal neutrality itself requires that the majority provide certain basic cultural goods, i.e., granting differential rights (see Kymlicka 1995b, 2001, and 2003b). Institutional protections and the right to the minority group’s own institutional structure are remedies that restore equality and turn the resulting nation-state into a more moderate multicultural one.
• The Argument from Success . The nationstate has in the past succeeded in promoting equality and democracy. Ethno-national solidarity is a powerful motive for a more egalitarian distribution of goods (Miller 1995; Canovan 1996, 2000). The nation-state also seems to be essential to safeguard the moral life of communities in the future, since it is the only form of political institution capable of protecting communities from the threats of globalization and assimilationism (for a detailed critical discussion of this argument see Mason 1999).

Andreas Wimmer (2018) presents an interesting discussion of the historical success of nation-state (discussed in Knott, Tolz, Green, & Wimmer 2019).

These political arguments can be combined with deep communitarian ones. However, taken in isolation, their perspectives offer a “liberal culturalism” that is more suitable for ethno-culturally plural societies. More remote from classical nationalism than the liberal one of Tamir and Nielsen, it eschews any communitarian philosophical underpinning. [ 23 ] The idea of moderate nation-building points to an open multi-culturalism in which every group receives its share of remedial rights but, instead of walling itself off from others, participates in a common, overlapping civic culture in open communication with other sub-communities. Given the variety of pluralistic societies and intensity of trans-national interactions, such openness seems to many to be the only guarantee of stable social and political life (see the debate in Shapiro and Kymlicka 1997).

In general, the liberal nationalist stance is mild and civil, and there is much to be said in favor of it. It tries to reconcile our intuitions in favor of some sort of political protection of cultural communities with a liberal political morality. Of course, this raises issues of compatibility between liberal universal principles and the particular attachments to one’s ethno-cultural nation. Very liberal nationalists such as Tamir divorce ethno-cultural nationhood from statehood. Also, the kind of love for country they suggest is tempered by all kinds of universalist considerations, which in the last instance trump national interest (Tamir 1993: 115; 2019: passim, see also Moore 2001 and Gans 2003). There is an ongoing debate among philosophical nationalists about how much weakening and compromising is still compatible with a stance’s being nationalist at all. [ 24 ] There is also a streak of cosmopolitan interest present in the work of some liberal nationalists (Nielsen 1998–99). [ 25 ]

In the last two decades, the issues of nationalism have been increasingly integrated into the debate about the international order (see the entries on globalization and cosmopolitanism ). The main conceptual link is the claim that nation-states are natural, stable, and suitable units of the international order. A related debate concerns the role of minorities in the processes of globalization (see Kaldor 2004). Moreover, the two approaches might ultimately converge: a multiculturalist liberal nationalism and a moderate, difference-respecting cosmopolitanism have a lot in common. [ 26 ]

“Populism” is an umbrella term, covering both right-wing and left-wing varieties. This section will pay attention to right-wing populist movements, very close to their traditional nationalist predecessors. This corresponds to the situation in the biggest part of Europe, and in the US, where nationalist topics are being put forward by the right-wing populist. [ 27 ]

However, it has become quite clear that nationalism is only one of the political “isms” attracting the right-wing populists. The migration crisis has brought to the forefront populist self-identification with linguistic-cultural communities (“we, French speaking people” for the former, “we Christians” for the later) that goes beyond nationalism.

Jan-Werner Müller (2016) and Cas Mudde (2007) note that the form common to all sorts of populism is quite simple and describe it as “thin”. Mudde explains: “Populism is understood as a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the People” (2007: 23). Populism, so defined, has two opposites: elitism and pluralism. First, there is the elite vs. people (“underdog”) contrast. Second, it is possible to distinguish two ways of characterizing “the people”: either in terms of social status (class, income-level, etc.) or in terms of ethnic and/or cultural belonging (see also de Cleen 2017).

The second, horizontal dimension distinguishes the predominantly left-wing from the predominantly right-wing populisms and leaves a place for a centrist populist option. Take classical strong ethnic nationalism. The relation between right-wing populism and such a nationalism is very tight. This has led some theoreticians (Taguieff 2015) to present “nationalist populism” as the only kind of populism. The term captures exactly the synthesis of populism and the strong ethnic nationalism or nativism. From populism, it takes the general schema of anti-elitism: the leader is addressing directly the people and is allegedly following the people’s interest. From nationalism, it takes the characterization of the people: it is the ethnic community, in most cases the state-owing ethnic community, or the ethno-nation. In his work, Mudde documents the claim that purely right-wing populists claim to represent the true people who form the true nation and whose purity is being muddied by new entrants. In the United States, one can talk about populist and reactionary movements, like the Tea Party, that have emerged through the recent experience of immigration, terrorist attacks, and growing economic polarization. We have to set aside here, for reasons of space, the main populist alternative (or quasi-alternative) to national populism. In some countries, like Germany, some populist groups-parties (e.g., German AfD party (Alternative for Germany)), appeal to properties much wider in their reach than ethno-national belonging, typically to religious affiliations. Others combine this appeal with the ethno-national one. This yields what Riva Kastoryano (2006) calls “transnational nationalism”.

Interestingly, liberal nationalism is not very attractive to the populists. On the theoretical side one can note that Tamir (2019) sees her liberal nationalism as a good recipe against the threat of demagogues like Trump and Boris Johnson (she avoids the use of the label “populist”, e.g., 2019: 31).

The rise of populism is changing the political playfield one must work with. The tolerant (liberal nationalist or anti-nationalist) views are confronting new problems in the populist age marked by migration crisis, etc. The dangers traditionally associated with military presence are gone; the national populists have to invent and construct a presumed danger that comes into the country together with foreign families, including those with children. In short, if these conjectures hold, the politicians and theoreticians are faced with a change. The traditional issue of the contrast between patriotism/nationalism and cosmopolitanism has changed its profile: the current drastic contrast is between the populist aversion to the foreigners-migrants and a more generous attitude of acceptance and Samaritan help. Finally, the populist understanding of “our people” (“we-community”) encompasses not only nationalist options but also goes way beyond it. The important element is the promiscuous character of the populist choices. It is probable that the future scholarship on nationalism will mainly focus on this new and challenging playfield, with an aim to address the new contrast and locate kinds of nationalism in relation to it. [ 28 ]

The migration crisis has made the nation-state in global context the central political topic concerning nationality. Before moving on to current events, the state of art before the crisis should be summarized. First, consider the debates on territory and nation and issues of global justice.

Liberal nationalists try to preserve the traditional nationalist link between ethnic “ownership” of the state and sovereignty and territorial control, but in a much more flexible and sophisticated setting. Tamar Meisels thus argues in favor of “taking existing national settlements into account as a central factor in demarcating territorial boundaries” since this line “has both liberal foundations” (i.e., in the work of John Locke) and liberal-national appeal (2009: 159) grounded in its affinity with the liberal doctrine of national self-determination. She combines it with Chaim Gans’ (2003: Ch. 4) interpretation of “historical right” claims as “the right to formative territories”. She thus combines “historical arguments, understood as claims to formative territories”, with her argument from settlement and insists on their interplay and mutual reinforcement, presenting them as being “most closely related to, and based on, liberal nationalist assumptions and underlying ideas” (Meisels 2009: 160). She nevertheless stresses that more than one ethnic group can have formative ties to a given territory, and that there might be competing claims based on settlement. [ 29 ] But, given the ethno-national conflicts of the twentieth century, one can safely assume that culturally plural states divided into isolated and closed sub-communities glued together merely by arrangements of modus vivendi are inherently unstable. Stability might therefore require that the pluralist society envisioned by liberal culturalists promote quite intense intra-state interaction between cultural groups in order to forestall mistrust, reduce prejudice, and create a solid basis for cohabitation.

But where should one stop? The question arises since there are many geographically open, interacting territories of various sizes. Consider first the geographical openness of big continental planes, then add the modern ease of interaction (“No island is an island any more”, one could say), and, finally and dramatically, the substantial ecological interconnectedness of land and climate. Here, the tough nationalistic line is no longer proposed seriously in ethical debates, so the furthest pro-national extreme is in fact a relatively moderate stance, exemplified by Miller in the works listed. Here is a typical proposal of his concerning global justice based on nation-states: it might become a matter of national pride to have set aside a certain percentage of GDP for developmental goals—perhaps for projects in one particular country or group of countries (2013: 182).

This brings us to the topic of migrations, and the heated debate on the present scene. [ 30 ] In Europe immigration is probably the main topic of the present day populist uproar, and in the United States it is one of the main topics. So, immigration plus the nationalist-populist reactions to it are in the current decade the main testing ground for nationalist and cosmopolitan views.

Let’s look at the pro-national side in the debate. Liberal nationalists, in particular Miller, have put forward some thoughtful pro-nationalist proposal concerning immigration. Miller’s proposal allows refugees to seek asylum temporarily until the situation in their country of origin improves; it also limits economic migration. Miller argues against the defensibility of a global standard for equality, opportunity, welfare, etc., because measures of just equality are context-bound. People do have the right to a minimum standard of living, but the right to migrate only activates as a last resort after all other measures within a candidate-migrant’s country of origin have been tried. However, he also (particularly in his book on “Strangers in our midst”, 2016), claims that national responsibility to accept immigrant refugees is balanced by considerations of the interest of would-be immigrants and the interests that national communities have in maintaining control over their own composition and character.

If we agree with the liberal nationalists on the positive side, we can ask about the dynamics of the help required for the immigrants. Distinguish at least three stages, first, the immediate emergency (starvation, freezing, urgent medical problems) and catering to it, second, settlement and learning (on the host and the immigrant newcomer side), and third, the stage of (some kind of) citizenship, of relatively stable life in the host country.

In the first phase, the immediate help comes first, both normatively and causally: just accept the would-be refugees (indeed, the would-be refugees should be helped in leaving their countries and travelling to the host country). In longer term, staying should involve opportunity for work and training.

But there is more. The Samaritan obligation can and should function as a preparation for wider global activity. [ 31 ] So, we have two theoretical steps, first, accepting Samaritanism and second, agreeing with deeper trans-national measure of blocking distant causes, like poverty and wars in the Third world. Let us call this “Samaritan-to-deeper-measures model”. The model is geared to the dramatically changed playground in which the nationalism issues are played out in the context of populism and refugee crisis, raising issues that were not around two decades ago.

In presenting the claims that the pro-nationalists defend, we have proceeded from the more radical towards more liberal nationalist alternatives. In examining the arguments for these claims, we have presented metaphysically demanding communitarian arguments resting upon deep communitarian assumptions about culture, such as the premise that the ethno-cultural nation is the most important community for all individuals. This is an interesting and respectable claim, but its plausibility has not been established. The moral debate about nationalism has resulted in various weakenings of culture-based arguments, typically proposed by liberal nationalists, which render the arguments less ambitious but much more plausible. Having abandoned the old nationalist ideal of a state owned by a single dominant ethno-cultural group, liberal nationalists have become receptive to the idea that identification with a plurality of cultures and communities is important for a person’s social identity. They have equally become sensitive to trans-national issues and more willing to embrace a partly cosmopolitan perspective. Liberal nationalism has also brought to the fore more modest, less philosophically or metaphysically charged arguments grounded in concerns about justice. These stress the practical importance of ethno-cultural membership, ethno-cultural groups’ rights to have injustices redressed, democratic rights of political association, and the role that ethno-cultural ties and associations can play in promoting just social arrangements.

The events in the current decade, the refugee crisis and the rise of right-wing populism, have dramatically changed the relevant practical and theoretical playground. The traditional nationalism is still relevant, but populist nationalism attracts much more attention: new theories are being produced and debated, coming to occupy the center stage. On the other hand, migration crisis has replaced the typical cosmopolitan issue of solidarity-with-distant-strangers with burning issues of helping refugees present at our doors. Of course, the causes of the crisis are still the same ones that cosmopolitans have been worrying about much earlier: wars and dramatically unequal global distribution of goods, and of threats, like illnesses and climate disasters. The task of the theory is now to connect these deeper issues with the new problems occupying the center-stage of the new playground; it is a challenge now formulated in somewhat different vocabulary and within different political conceptual frameworks than before.

This is a short list of books on nationalism that are readable and useful introductions to the literature. First, two contemporary classics of social science with opposing views are:

• Gellner, Ernest, 1983, Nations and Nationalism , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Smith, Anthony D., 1991, National Identity , Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Three presentations of liberal nationalism, two of them by the same author, Yael Tamir, offer the best introduction to the approach:

• Miller, David, 1995, On Nationality , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198293569.001.0001
• Tamir, Yael, 1993, Liberal Nationalism , Press, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2019, Why Nationalism , Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Two short and readable introductions are:

• Özkirimli, Umut, 2010, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction , second edition, London: Palgrave Macmillan. First edition is 2000; third edition is 2017.
• Spencer, Philip and Howard Wollman, 2002, Nationalism, A Critical Introduction , London: Sage.

The two best anthologies of high-quality philosophical papers on the morality of nationalism are:

• McKim, Robert and Jeff McMahan (eds), 1997, The Morality of Nationalism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Couture, Jocelyne, Kai Nielsen, and Michel Seymour (eds.), 1998, Rethinking Nationalism , Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Supplement Volume 22, Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press.

The debate continues in:

• Miscevic, Nenad (ed), 2000, Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict: Philosophical Perspectives , La Salle and Chicago: Open Court.
• Dieckoff, Alain (ed.), 2004, The Politics of Belonging: Nationalism, Liberalism, and Pluralism , Lanham: Lexington.
• Primoratz, Igor and Aleksandar Pavković (eds), 2007, Patriotism, Philosophical and Political Perspectives , London: Ashgate.
• Breen, Keith and Shane O’Neill (eds.), 2010, After the Nation? Critical Reflections on Nationalism and Postnationalism , London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9780230293175

A good brief sociological introduction to nationalism in general is:

• Grosby, Steven, 2005, Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

and to the gender-inspired criticism of nationalism is:

• Yuval-Davis, Nira, 1997, Gender & Nation , London: Sage Publications.
• Heuer, Jennifer, 2008, “Gender and Nationalism”, in Herb and Kaplan 2008: vol. 1, 43–58.
• Hogan, Jackie, 2009, Gender, Race and National Identity: Nations of Flesh and Blood , London: Routledge.

The best general introduction to the communitarian-individualist debate is still:

• Avineri, Shlomo and Avner de-Shalit (eds.), 1992, Communitarianism and Individualism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

For a non-nationalist defense of culturalist claims see:

• Kymlicka, Will (ed.), 1995a, The Rights of Minority Cultures , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A very readable philosophical defense of very moderate liberal nationalism is:

• Gans, Chaim, 2003, The Limits of Nationalism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490231

And for application to Central Europe see:

• Auer, Stefan, 2004, Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe , London: Routledge.

A polemical, witty and thoughtful critique is offered in:

• Barry, Brian, 2001, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism , Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.

And a more recent one in

• Kelly, Paul, 2015, “Liberalism and Nationalism”, in The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism , Steven Wall (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 329–352. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139942478.018

Interesting critical analyses of group solidarity in general and nationalism in particular, written in the traditions of rational choice theory and motivation analysis, are:

• Hardin, Russell, 1985, One for All, The Logic of Group Conflict , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Yack, Bernard, 2012, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

There is a wide offering of interesting sociological and political science work on nationalism, which is beginning to be summarized in:

• Motyl, Alexander (ed.), 2001, Encyclopedia of Nationalism , Volumes I and II, New York: Academic Press.

A fine encyclopedic overview is:

• Herb, Guntram H. and David H. Kaplan, 2008, Nations and Nationalism: a Global Historical Overview , four volumes, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio.

A detailed sociological study of life under nationalist rule is:

• Billig, Michael, 1995, Banal Nationalism , London: Sage Publications.

The most readable short anthology of brief papers for and against cosmopolitanism (and nationalism) by leading authors in the field is:

• Cohen, Joshua (ed.), 1996, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism , Martha Nussbaum and respondents, Boston, MA: Beacon Press
• Anderson, Benedict, 1983 [2006], Imagined Communities , London: Verso; revised edition, 2006.
• Aron, Raymond, 1962, Paix et guerre entre les nations , Paris: Calmann-Levy. Translated as Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations , Richard Howard and Annette Baker Fox (trans), Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965.
• Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein, 1988 [1991], Race, nation, classe: les identités ambiguës , Paris: Editiones La Découverte; translated as Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities , Chris Turner (trans.), London-New York: Verso.
• Barber, Benjamin R., 1996, “Constitutional Faith”, in J. Cohen (ed.) 1996: 30–37.
• –––, 1996, Jihad Vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World , New York: Ballantine Books.
• Barry, Brian, 1999, “Statism and Nationalism: a Cosmopolitan Critique”, in Shapiro and Brilmayer 1999: 12–66.
• –––, 2001, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism , Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
• Bauböck, Reiner, 2004, “Territorial or Cultural Autonomy for National Minorities?”, in Dieckoff 2004: 221–258.
• Bechhofer, Frank and David McCrone (eds.), 2009, National Identity, Nationalism and Constitutional Change , London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9780230234147
• Bell, Duncan (ed.), 2008, Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Berlin, Isaiah, 1976, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas , London: The Hogarth Press.
• –––, 1979, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power”, in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas , London: Hogarth Press, 333–355.
• Betts, Alexander and Paul Collier, 2017, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System , London: Penguin.
• –––, 2017, “Banal Nationalism and the Imagining of Politics”, in Everyday Nationhood: Theorising Culture, Identity and Belonging after Banal Nationalism , Michael Skey and Marco Antonsich (eds.), London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 307–321. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57098-7_15
• Blake, Michael, 2013, Justice and Foreign Policy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199552009.001.0001
• Breuilly, John, 2001, “The State”, in Motyl (ed.) 2001: Volume 1.
• –––, 2011, “On the Principle of Nationality”, in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought , Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 77–109. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.005
• Breuilly, John, John Hutchinson, and Eric Kaufmann (eds), 2019, special issue on populism and nationalism in Nations and Nationalism , 25(1): 1–400.
• Brubaker, Rogers, 2004, “In the Name of the Nation: Reflections on Nationalism and Patriotism1”, Citizenship Studies , 8(2): 115–127. doi:10.1080/1362102042000214705
• –––, 2013, “Language, Religion and the Politics of Difference”, Nations and Nationalism , 19(1): 1–20. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8129.2012.00562.x
• –––, 2015, Grounds for Difference , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Buchanan, Allen, 1991, Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec , Boulder: Westview Press.
• –––, 2004, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198295359.001.0001
• Buchanan, Allen and Margaret Moore (eds.), 2003, States, Nations and Borders: The Ethics of Making Boundaries , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511613937
• Butt, Daniel, Sarah Jane Fine, & Zofia Stemplowska (eds), 2018, Political Philosophy, Here and Now: Essays in Honour of David Miller , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Calhoun, Craig, 2007, Nations Matter. Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream , London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203960899
• Canovan, Margaret, 1996, Nationhood and Political Theory , Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
• –––, 2000, “Patriotism Is Not Enough”, British Journal of Political Science , 30(3): 413–432. doi:10.1017/S000712340000017X
• –––, 2001, “Sleeping Dogs, Prowling Cats and Soaring Doves: Three Paradoxes in the Political Theory of Nationhood”, Political Studies , 49(2): 203–215. doi:10.1111/1467-9248.00309
• Carens, Joseph H., 2013, The Ethics of Immigration , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Casertano, Stefano, 2013, Our Land, Our Oil! Natural Resources, Local Nationalism, and Violent Secession , Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. doi:10.1007/978-3-531-19443-1
• Chatterjee, Deen K. and B. Smith (eds.), 2003, Moral Distance , special issue of The Monist , 86(3): 327–515.
• Christiano, Thomas, 2008, “Immigration, Community and Cosmopolitanism”, in San Diego Law Review , 933(Nov–Dec): 938–962.
• –––, 2012, “The Legitimacy of International Institutions”, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Law , Andrei Marmor (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 380–394.
• Christiano, Thomas and John Christman (eds.), 2009, Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy , Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781444310399
• Cohen, Joshua (ed.), 1996, For Love of Country? (Martha C. Nussbaum with respondents), Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
• Colm Hogan, Patrick, 2009, Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science and Identity , Ohio: Ohio State University Press.
• Connor, Walker, 1994, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Conversi, Daniele, 2002, Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism , London: Routledge.
• –––, 2018, “Introduction: Why a State Is Not a Nation – and Whether Economics Really Matters. Walker Connor 50 Years On”, Nations and Nationalism , 24(3): 497–505. doi:10.1111/nana.12441
• Crowley, Brian Lee, 1987, The Self, the Individual and the Community , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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• de Cleen, Benjamin, 2017, “Populism and Nationalism”, in Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Populism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• de Lange, Deborah E., 2010, Power and Influence: The Embeddedness of Nations , New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. doi:10.1057/9780230115545
• De Schutter, Helder and Ronald Tinnevelt (eds.), 2011, Nationalism and Global Justice: David Miller and His Critics , London: Routledge.
• Delanty, Gerard, John Hutchinson, Eric Kaufmann, Umut Özkirimli, and Andreas Wimmer, 2008, “Debate on John Hutchinson’s Nations as Zones of Conflict ”, Nations and Nationalism , 14(1): 1–28. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8129.2008.00306.x
• Delanty, Gerard and Krishan Kumar (eds.), 2006, The SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism , Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
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• –––, 2017, Nationalism and the Multination State , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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• Eisenberg, Avigail and Jeff Spinner-Halev (eds.), 2005, Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Rights and Diversity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490224
• Farris, Sara R., 2017, In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism , Durham: Duke University Press.
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• Fine, Sarah and Lea Ypi (eds.), 2016, Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199676606.001.0001
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• Frost, Catharine, 2006, Morality and Nationalism , London: Routledge.
• –––, ,2017, “Citizenship and Nationhood”, in Rainer Baubock et al. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gat, Azar and Alexander Yakobson, 2013, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139047654
• Giddens, Anthony, 1985, The Nation-state and Violence (Volume 2), Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Glenn, John, 1997, “Nations and Nationalism: Marxist Approaches to the Subject”, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics , 3(2): 79–100. doi:10.1080/13537119708428503
• Goetze, David, 2001, “Evolutionary Theory”, in Motyl (ed.) 2001: Volume 1.
• Goodin, Robert E., 2006, “Liberal Multiculturalism: Protective and Polyglot”, Political Theory , 34(3): 289–303. doi:10.1177/0090591705284131
• Greenfeld, Liah, 2001, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2005, “Nationalism and the Mind”, Nations and Nationalism , 11(3): 325–341. doi:10.1111/j.1354-5078.2005.00207.x
• –––, 2006, Nationalism and the Mind: Essays Modern Culture . London: Oneworld.
• Habermas, Jürgen, 1992 [1996], Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated as Between Facts and Norms: Contribution to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy , Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996.
• –––, 1996 [1998], Die Einbeziehung des Anderen: Studien zur politischen Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated as The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory , Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (eds), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998.
• Haidt, Jonathan, 2016, “When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism”, The American Interest , 12(1): 10 July 2016. URL = < available online >.
• Hale, Henry E., 2008, The Foundations of Ethnic Politics: Separatism of States and Nations in Eurasia and the World , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511790669
• Harris, Erika, 2016, “Why Has Nationalism Not Run Its Course?”, Nations and Nationalism , 22(2): 243–247. doi:10.1111/nana.12185
• Hastings, Adrian, 1997, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511612107
• Hazony, Yoram, 2018, The Virtue of Nationalism , New York: Basic Books.
• Hearn, Jonathan, 2018, “Power, Culture, Identity, and the Work of Anthony Smith”, Nations and Nationalism , 24(2): 286–291. doi:10.1111/nana.12407
• Hearn, Jonathan, Chandran Kukathas, David Miller, and Bernard Yack, 2014, “Debate on Bernard Yack’s Book Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community ”, Nations and Nationalism , 20(3): 395–414. doi:10.1111/nana.12074
• Hechter, Michael, 2001, Containing Nationalism , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019924751X.001.0001
• Helbling, Marc, Tim Reeskens, and Matthew Wright, 2016, “The Mobilisation of Identities: A Study on the Relationship between Elite Rhetoric and Public Opinion on National Identity in Developed Democracies”, Nations and Nationalism , 22(4): 744–767. doi:10.1111/nana.12235
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• Hutchinson, John, 2005, Nations as Zones of Conflict , London: Sage; see also the debate on this book in Delanty et al. 2008.
• –––, 2017, Nationalism and War , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198798453.001.0001
• –––, 2018, “Bringing the Study of Warfare into Theories of Nationalism”, Nations and Nationalism , 24(1): 6–21. doi:10.1111/nana.12364
• Ichijo, Atsuko and Ronald Ranta, 2016, Food, National Identity and Nationalism: From Everyday to Global Politics , London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. doi:10.1057/9781137483133
• Ichijo, Atsuko, Jon E. Fox, Arthur Aughey, David McCrone, and Frank Bechhofer, 2017, “Debate on Understanding National Identity by David McCrone and Frank Bechhofer”, Nations and Nationalism , 23(3): 441–462. doi:10.1111/nana.12314
• Ingram, James D., 2017, “Populism and Cosmopolitanism”, in Oxford Handbook of Populism , Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo,and Pierre Ostiguy (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 644–660.
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• Yuval-Davis, Nira, 1997, Gender and Nation , New York: Sage Publications.
• Žižek, Slavoj, 2015, “In the Wake of Paris Attacks the Left Must Embrace Its Radical Western Roots”, In These Times , 16 November 2015, available online .
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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Nussbaum, Martha C. 2002, “ Beyond the Social Contract: Toward Global Justice ”, Tanner Lecture, Australian National University.
• Waldron, Jeremy, 2005, “ Proximity as the Basis of Political Community .”
• Nationalism – A Bibliography , compiled by Peter Rasmussen. A good collection of links and bibliographies, but no longer maintained.
• The Warwick Debates , debate between Ernest Gellner and Anthony D. Smith at the London School of Economics, 1995.
• ARENA: Centre for European Studies ; ARENA is a research centre at the University of Oslo studying the dynamics of the evolving European systems of governance. This site contains a good selection of papers on ethics of international relations.
• Global Policy Forum , has papers on the future of nation-states.
• Academy of European Law , at the European University Institute.
• Territory and Justice network: repository of pre-publication papers .

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Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction

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Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction examines the political and moral challenges that face the vast majority of human beings who consider themselves to be members of various nations. It explores nationality through the difficulties and conflicts that have arisen throughout history, from ancient civilizations to the present day, and discusses nations and nationalism from social, philosophical, and anthropological perspectives. This VSI looks at the nation in history, the territorial element in nationality, and the complex ways nationality has co-existed with religion, and shows how closely linked the concept of nationalism is with being human.

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• Nations and liberalism?

External resources

• In the OUP print catalogue
• For Love of Country: An Essay On Patriotism and Nationalism (1997) on Oxford Scholarship Online
• Minority Nationalism and the Changing International Order (2001) on Oxford Scholarship Online
• Negotiating Nationalism: Nation-Building, Federalism, and Secession in the Multinational State (2006) on Oxford Scholarship Online
• The Ethics of Nationalism (2001) on Oxford Scholarship Online
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138 Nationalism Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Are you looking for nationalism essay topics? This is a very complex subject, so you can be misled easily. Read our nationalism essay examples to discover the most fruitful issues.

🏆 Best Nationalism Essay Topics & Examples

👍 good nationalism essay examples, 💡 most interesting nationalism topics to write about, ❓ nationalism essay questions.

In your nationalism essay, you might want to focus on its key features or history. Another idea is to talk about the challenges of nationalism, discussing why it is a working idea or not. One more option is to research the history and formation of nationalism in different countries. Whether you are assigned to write an argumentative essay, research paper, or thesis on this topic, our article will be helpful. Here you’ll find everything you might need to write an A+ paper! Nationalism research questions, prompts, and title ideas are collected below. Best nationalism essay examples are also added to inspire you even more.

• Nationalism as a Problem by Partha Chatterjee The second chapter named ‘The Thematic and the problematic’ tries to distinguish between the thematic and the problematic levels of nationalist thought.
• Nationalism Versus Capitalism: Compare & Contrast According to Marxist philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, the main disadvantage of capitalism is prosperity that seduces workers with the items of comfort and makes them forget their primarily aim of overthrowing the capitalism.
• Features of Nationalism: Types and Stereotypes At the base of nationalism is the idea of nation as the supreme authority, which substitutes all other possible sources and guarantors of the highest value.
• Nationalism in the Ottoman Empire The battle of Nicopolis also saw the empire expand into other regions of the European continent but later, other conquests such as the battle of Ankara, the conquest of Constantinople and the invasion of Otranto […]
• Nationalism in World War II Another critical “nation-statehood making” is the break of the Soviet Union and the end of cold war between Soviet Union republic and the United States.
• Nationalism in International Relations Given this interplay of international relations and nationalism, this paper examines the view that nationalism has been and continues to be the most significant force in international relations.
• African Nationalism as Colonial Legacy The oppression of rural areas and production and the prioritization of the urban population has become the main reason for the spread of poverty among the African population.
• Linguistic Nationalism in Korea Under Japanese Occupation The present paper focuses on the review of studies dedicated to the Korean language’s status during Japan’s colonization and discusses how Koreans tried to defend their language and nation’s rights.
• Has Nationalism Been a Unifying or Divisive Force During the 19th and 20th Centuries? It can therefore be said that colonial rule gave rise to the two forces of unifying nationalism and divisive tribalism and that the appropriate and legitimate framework for decolonization was nationalism, which emanated from the […]
• The Representation of Irish Nationalism In contrast, Joyce’s “The Dead” criticizes the cultural imperialism that threatens the harmony of the Irish and the revival of the Irish language and culture.
• Shinto Religion and Japanese Nationalism The kami was the first leader of the Japanese people who contributed to the creation of Japan as a state. They note that the style of dressing and the performance of rituals show that Shinto […]
• Reformation and Rise of Nationalism The country was then an already operational state was being ruled by monarchy.”The political and constitutional changes that came in the wake of the French Revolution led to the transfer of sovereignty from the monarchy […]
• Nineteenth Century Musical Nationalism: Important Milestones A great hero of Italian music and opera, Verdi is put in the front reference when it comes to music discussion, nineteenth century Italy and nationalism.
• The Role of Nationalism and National Identities in the Uae According to Patrick the UAE has yet to develop the concept of a nation as manifested by the increase in the public debate approaches to guard the national identity through amicably defining who is a […]
• Piano Music, Baroque and Nationalism Influences The keyboard music of the Baroque period has exhibited the features characteristic of the other forms of art of the period: the increasingly complex and ornate patterns and the virtuosic and exquisite nature of the […]
• Impact of Migration on Nationalism During the 19th Century In the 19th century, migration influenced nationalism since increased interactions led to the unity of purpose among citizens in various states. For instance, the migration of Europeans to African countries made the locals doubt the […]
• Revolutions, Nationalism, and Exploitation in the Modern World Many meaningful changes occurred between 1789 and 2001, including the French Revolution in the 1780s, German nationalism in the 1800s, and the Gulag repressions in the 1900s.
• Football and Nationalism in Argentina Among the most popular sports in Argentina is football with Boca Juniors and River Plate as some of the best-performing clubs hailing from the country. Despite political turmoil, Boca Juniors and River Plate transformed the […]
• The Nationalism Role During the French Revolution One of the most developed variants of this concept is the nationalism of the era of the French Revolution. In 1789, with the outbreak of the French Revolution, the idea of nationalism spread throughout France, […]
• Nationalism in Austria, Germany and Italy Italy and Germany were able to become the major political powers only through unification under a robust national idea, with the domination of the Austrian Empire serving as the catalyst of this process.
• Quebec Separation: Nationalism, History, and Benefits The French government did not want to invest in the colony, and it granted the development of the settlement to a trading company, which was given a monopoly on the fur trade and was to […]
• White Nationalism as a Growing Problem in Society The group seeks to protect the survival and domination of the white race and the traditional cultures of the historically white communities.
• Nationalism in the Context of Globalization It is important to understand the idea of nationalism through the relationship between the concepts of state and nation. In other words, the crisis of citizenship is rooted in the notion of the disappearance of […]
• Chinese and Taiwanese Nationalism However, if Taiwan succeeds in creating a shared feeling of nationhood uniting the Taiwanese and mainland newcomers, it may pose yet another challenge to China’s pursuit of unification in not only ethnic but national terms.
• Martial Arts Cinema and Nationalism The Chinese have mastered the uniqueness of their martial arts, thereby relying on them as one of the best and most powerful tools for promoting a sense of pride and nationalism.
• Nationalism in Europe Before WWI This movement was the result of effective propaganda and an aggressive policy aimed at the redistribution of territories and the seizure of power.
• A Critical Review of Nancy Ward: American Patriot or Cherokee Nationalist The article states that Nancy Ward’s actions come from her understanding of changes that Cherokee had to face, and her will to adapt to the changes rather than commit to American Patriotism or Cherokee nationalism.
• Imperialism, Colonialism, and Nationalism The concepts of imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism were particularly prominent and essential in the 19th and 20th centuries. In conclusion, imperialism, colonialism, and nationalism played a key role in the course of the 19th and […]
• Feminism and Nationalism: The Western World In this case, we find that feminism has been a different that all the time and therefore, it is impossible to predict the trend of feminism in future.
• Political Economy: Relationship Between Poverty, Inequality, and Nationalism The prevalence of nationalism leads to changes in the education system, as the government tries to justify the superiority of the country by altering the curriculum.
• Imperialism and Nationalism in Middle Eastern Politics Thus, in order to understand the political situation in the region, one needs proper knowledge of its history and the driving forces that led to the emergence of its contemporary countries.
• Nationalism and Identity Among Middle East Immigrants to Australia The common myth about the Muslim immigrants especially those from the middles east is that they have formed a unitary cultural identity.
• Architecture: Nationalism to Regionalism in Australia From the above description of the architecture, it is clear that it is a unique way of showing identities that vary from one civilization to the other, one ethnicity to the other, and from one […]
• Nietzsche’s Nihilism and the Rise of Ethnic Nationalism It was connected to the attempts of the philosopher to find a way out of the political and cultural crisis in Europe.
• Nationalism in the Postcolonial Viewpoint As such, the school of thought also challenges the notion that Western nationalism is the sole form of the phenomenon. This essay will discuss the dangers of nationalism, as seen from the postcolonial perspective, as […]
• Stokely Carmichael’s Contribution to Black Nationalism The purpose of the Meredith March was to create equal rights for black voters to remove the fear of many black people to cross Mississippi and to fight against racism.
• China’s Nationalism: Main Aspects The moral fabric of the Chinese people has become jeopardized by the beliefs of the masses and the support of the government.
• Nationalism in the Arab Literature The novel is focused on the events of the 1919 revolution in Egypt and the role of Arabian youth in it.
• Nationalism in the Context of the Japanese Nationalism in the context of the Japanese entails a very wide range of ideologies and sentiments that have been adopted by the Japanese people for the past two centuries concerning their native nation, the culture, […]
• “China’s New Nationalism” by Peter Hays Gries Gries argues that the two countries that matter the most to China are the US and Japan and that the evolving Chinese nationalism is in response to its interaction with these two nations.
• Serbian Nationalism Rise Main Factors The rising of nationalism at the time when the period of the late 1700s was coming to a close is associated with the multiplication of the thought of well-liked independence.
• Arab Masculinity and Nationalism, on the Example of Two Novels The novels Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih and Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali brightly reveal the story of two male heroes who are in constant search of a […]
• Nationalism of Southeast Asian Nations They authors portray the struggles of average people who strive to prove to themselves and to the rest of the world that they must not be treated as inferior or subhuman.
• Pan Asianism, Nationalism and Transnationalism Pan Asianism was the sole fuel to this war as Japan wanted to expand its interest in Asia in opposition of the western states.
• Nationalism Definition & Meaning There is no permission to target civilians in a war and all possible efforts must be made to avoid the killing of noncombatants.
• Why Nationalism Is a Gendered Realm While the man remains the central figure, the woman, as McClintock puts it, is the ‘boundary’ of what constitutes the nation; women are the mortar that holds the bricks together in the wall, important but […]
• Nationalism: Theories and Classification Expansionist nationalism; this is a form of nationalism that promotes the theory of expansion of a nation’s territories in an attempt to acquire more space or land to accommodate its people
• The History of Canadian Cultural Nationalism and Anti-Americanism This paper analyses the movements and the efforts taken to protect the cultural nationalism in Canada, and providing the idea that the reasons for such actions were not limited to opposing the Americanization, or specifically […]
• Nationalism and 19th Century Music It was in the wake of the nationalist revolts that rose out of 1848: the intention to demand freedom from the shackles of the Austrian Empire.
• The Relation of Music to Nationalism in the Work of Bedrich Smetana Composer This paper discusses and explores the following; the meaning and background of nationalism as a political and cultural force in the nineteenth century particularly in Europe, and the relation of music to nationalism exploring the […]
• China’s Rising Nationalism The supremacy of pride in Confucianism civilization is present in the nationalists in China. In Chinese nationalism nowadays, Intellectuals contribute significantly and they have become a major dividing force in the politics and ideology of […]
• The Nature of Modern Chinese Nationalism The Chinese people have different opinions on what would form a stronger China as well as the state’s structure, the goal of the Chinese State and the forms of foreign relations that would best fit […]
• Liberalism and Nationalism in Western Civilization The concepts of liberalism and nationalism are typically a western construct of rational, reasoning, objective, and analytical traditions which have their origins in the Greek civilization, the world’s first progenitors of city-states and democracies.
• German National Consciousness Much was needed to instill a sense of German identity and common political ambition, a feeling of belonging together as one nation, into the populations of the central European states, Protestant and Catholic alike, the […]
• Meiji Nationalism and Its Characteristics A key element in Japan Nationalism was the concerted effort by the government to re-invented tradition to rally people behind the cause of modernization. Due to this divine origin, Japanese were expected to entrust the […]
• Nationalism as a Liberating and an Enslaving Force For instance, nationalism was the underlying ideology behind the American Revolutionary War of 1775, which ultimately led to the independence of the country.
• Nationalism as a Liberating and Enslaving Force Wien acknowledges that this kind of nationalism can be used as a powerful force for supporting the viability and sustainability of a country.
• Nationalism in Premodern Korea and Other Nations The first and most important argument, according to the proponents of the theory, is the identity of the language and the related reason for the primary separation of groups of people.
• Proto-Nationalism in Korea and Other Nations Since 1780 The reading also touches upon the topic of language and the role it plays in the evolution of proto-nationalism and the promotion of its ideas across the globe. What is the role of proto-nationalism in […]
• Proto-Nationalism in Premodern Korea and Since 1780 Hobsbawm discusses the reasons and the ways of the concept of “national patriotism” becoming a powerful political force within a short time.
• Asian Studies. Christianity, Nationalism, and Chineseness The Christianization of Japan was a prerogative of the crown of Portugal, which aimed at establishing a profitable trade and at preaching the Christian faith to the native people.
• Nationalist Ideologies’ Rise in the 19th Century The growing popularity of nationalist ideologies in the 19th century was as a result of the following factors. Many people were exposed to political knowledge as a result of the spread of nationalist ideologies.
• New States and Nationalism in International Arena Globalization and the current international arena are hostile to all new states and that makes their entrance a nightmare that they wish to overcome.
• Ethnicity and Nationalism In the chapter, the author lists a number of different approaches to studying the position of women in society. This is a very interesting application and extension of the ideas expressed in Peggy Macintosh’s article […]
• American Culture and U.S. Nationalism I am convinced that the American culture is one of the best cultures in the world. This has seen my appreciation of the American culture.
• Conservatism, Nationalism, Socialism as Ideologies From the time of its establishment, the term has been used in the description of a broad range of views about political science.
• Sports Role in the Imperialism and Nationalism Development In that case, it is an indication of certain developments within the nation’s country that promote the ideas of inequality and superiority, such as the ideas of imperialism and nationalism.
• The Concept of Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, and History Instances of nationalism provided in the annals of history are the rise of Nazi Germany or the Arab nationalism. Nationalism and national identity is created through this common sense of the nation.
• Korean Nationalism: Yi Hangno and Ch’oe Ikhyŏn In fact, they are quite sharp in their writings; for example, Ch’oe Ikhy n refers to the Japanese as people who “have the face of human beings but the mind of beasts” and repeatedly refers […]
• The Ideology of Nationalism: People’s Common Identity This is by his sentiment that the study of ethnicity and nationality is in large part the study of politically induced cultural change.
• Anglo-American Relations, Freedom and Nationalism Thus, in his reflection on the nature of the interrelations between two powerful empires, which arose at the end of the 19th century, the writer argues that the striving of the British Empire and the […]
• Nationalism and Women in Literary Works In Season of Migration to the North, Hosna Bint Mahmoud supports the nationalist activities of the unnamed narrator. She, like the narrator, is opposed to the oppression of women.
• Nationalism and Colonialism in Arab Literature In brief, the narrative mainly starts as a “love and romance story” that portrays the life of Muhsin, his love with Saniya and state of jealous in his family.
• Middle Eastern Nationalism in 1914-1950 Western countries were interested in having the control over the countries in the region as they wanted to have access to their resources and wanted to make sure that the governments will be loyal to […]
• Role of Nationalism in Developed Democracies Some analysts are of the view that the people include the entire population of the world while others observe that homogeneity is always considered when talking about the people.
• Asian Studies: Vietnamese Nationalism The decline of the colonial rule in Vietnam gave rise to the development of the nationalist movement in this country. In particular, one should focus on the views of Phan Chu Trinh, Ho Chi Minh, […]
• Is It Possible to Imagine Nationalism Without the Nation? The historical development of the notion of nationalism streams from the ancient politics that witnessed the dramatic emergence of the French Revolution of 1789 that marked the formation of the first ‘nation-state’.
• German Nationalism and Its Effects There has been an extensive account of a favorite cultural model in Germany, even prior to the augmentation of the National Socialists and their capitalization on the initiative of the Volksgemeinschaft in the 1930s and […]
• Nationalism in the Modern-Day World He says that in the developed countries of Europe, Asia and the United States of America industrialization and a strong economic base has in particular led to rise of nationalism in them.
• The Nationalism and Islam in the Middle East Region The discovery of crude oil in the region during the 20th century has changed the fortunes of the region. The issue of the Jewish resettlement in the Middle East has been viewed as central to […]
• Nationalism and Its 19th Century History Although the majority of nations in Europe were established during the 20th century, it is worth to note that the events leading to the creation of these states took place during the 19th century.
• Nationalism and Its 19th Century History From a Moral and Functional Perspective France used nationalism to unite the state against its enemies, and this showed the morality of nationalism. The paper first describes the nature and history of nationalism.
• Nationalism and Identity Among Middle East Immigrants in Australia The enumerators are given required training and sent to the field with specific questions to guide them on the type of information to be collected. The researcher visited libraries and the internet to obtain critical […]
• Battle of Verdun: Nationalism and Pride Based on the account of Horne and the opinions presented in this paper, it can be stated that the entire battle of Verdun was complete was of human life and shows how nationalism and pride […]
• Ethnic Nationalism Among People The researcher also notes that the conflicts are inevitable in the contemporary globalized world as people witness the differences between the cultures.
• When the War Comes to an End: Expansion, Panic and Surge of Nationalism Leading to a numerous alterations in the sphere of the international relationships between the United States and the rest of the world, the 1812 war heralded a new era in the development of the USA […]
• Nationalism Does Not Form a Single Fraternal Community Now that a description of the Argentinean historical and political discourse has been given, it is crucial to link this to the divergent occurrence of nationalism in the country.
• Australian Nationalism and Middle East Immigrants The objective of this essay is to provide an overview of the what Australian nationalism and identity means to the Middle East immigrants in Australia Nationalism and Identity among Middle East Immigrants to Australia According […]
• International Entrepreneurship: Competing Models of Nationalism Ralston Saul, the author of ‘The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World’, as well as Ronkainen Czinkota, Sutton-Brady, and Beal, the authors of ‘International Marketing: Asia Pacific Edition’ come in handy to […]
• Nationalist State in Southern Africa The country is ranked as the biggest economy in Africa and is the 28th largest economy in the world. In 1820s, the Dutch and the British acquired land in the north and east of South […]
• History of Black Nationalism The black movement passed a message of thinking about the racial identity and the empowerment of the free blacks in the United States.
• Restoration and Nationalism The main objective of restoration and nationalism was to liberate people from foreign rule and also to create cohesiveness among members of certain ethnic groups. This increased extensive force of nationalism and the empires were […]
• Nationalism in Korean Cinema In the course of his duty as a police officer, he arrest citizens and in the process tortures one by the name Myongsik in attempt to maintain order in the society that is marred with […]
• Ethnic Nationalism in the Modern World Therefore, it still remains that ethnonationalism is a major cause of the plight of minority groups and the increase of refugees in the world today. It was this ethnic mixing that led to the idea […]
• Nationalism and Changing Roles Nationalism has various effects to the people involved and this paper looks into the effects of nationalism on the roles of the working class, women, and minorities in an effort to achieve political power through […]
• History of Nationalist Ideologies The dominance of global politics and values by nationalist ideologies can be traced back to the ninetieth century, from the Romantic concept, “cultural diversity” and the liberal’s argument that political legitimacy is only achieved from […]
• Nationalism and Its Negative Effects in the Modern World This is the difference between a nationalism of a nation that interferes with the rights of other nations as it strives to uphold its own objectives and a nationalism that is sensitive to the rights […]
• The Concept and History of Liberal Nationalism It can be argued that it is only in the “Age of Renaissance where one can find the emergence of this particular idea, the idea that a group of people came together to form an […]
• New Nationalism: Origins and Effects The movement concentrated on issues relating to history of man and the intrigues of civilization. This brought a new dimension to understanding of social situations and the required procedure for diffusing upheavals in society.
• Rise and Development of Nationalism in East Asia Even though much of the concerns about the alteration of the dressing to have the capacity to erode the culture of the Chinese people concerned what women wore in the ninetieth century, the link between […]
• Nationalism as a Political Occurrence Anthony Smith recognized five ways of using nationalism: the entire procedure of developing and preserving a nation; a source of sense of belonging and patriotism to the nation; symbolization to the nation; a political orientation […]
• Nationalism’s Opposing Meanings In this publication, Anderson referred to the constructed nature of culture and the role of print capitalism in nationalism. The Revolution attracted the National Guard, the militia, and a section of the army.
• GCC Countries: National Identity or Radical Nationalism Still going on, the conflict which was further referred to as the ‘Saudi national debate’ has transcended the boundaries of critiquing the political issues in the state and has become the voice of the national […]
• Marx’s Anticipation of the Nationalism and Imperialism of the Second Half of the 19th Century The process of civilization is nothing other than a typical and complete adoption or duplication of the injurious culture of the west.
• Religious Hypocrisy in Dublin and Nationalism As Benstock argues, the priest is in near state of mind breakdown as he is in the verge of losing the faith that he proclaimed in the church.
• Influence of Nationalism and Communism on the Non-Western World In countries like Japan, class mantra was the order of the day in the areas that were controlled by communists, the CCP which was the main political party was against agrarian radicalism and hence abandoned […]
• Adolf Hitler and Nationalism The war would also bring the downfall of the old European culture of kings and noblemen and their codes of honor”.[2] However, neither the number of casualties at the battlefields could reflect the actual devastation […]
• Anarchy, Black Nationalism and Feminism The site acknowledges that anarchism has been associated with violence and therefore the site is meant to enlighten both anarchists and the public on this misconception.
• Was WWI the Result of Tensions Caused by German Nationalism?
• Does Taglit Birthright Israel Foster Long-Distance Nationalism?
• How Did Nationalism Reveal Itself Through Films During World War II?
• Was There Any Such Thing as African Nationalism Before?
• What Extent Did the Revolutions of 1848 Support the Ideas of Nationalism and Liberalism?
• How Does Nationalism Affects Nations?
• Why Did Chinese Nationalism Fail?
• How Do Different Political Geographers Study Nationalism?
• How Black Nationalism Helped Civil Rights?
• How Does Nationalism Solidify a Country?
• How Does Globalisation Affect Nationalism?
• Why Has Nationalism Become Such a Powerful Force in the Mode?
• What Came First Nations or Nationalism?
• What Has Nationalism Done to Europe?
• How Adolf Hitler Implemented a Distinct Form of Nationalism?
• What Explanations Are Offered for the Development of Nationalism?
• Does Nationalism Inevitably Breed Rivalry and Conflict?
• How Comanches and Nationalism Helped Young United States?
• How Strong Was Nationalism in the Second Reich?
• Was Nationalism the Most Important Force of Change in Europe up to 1870?
• How Nationalism Affected Composer’s Music?
• When Does Nationalism Become Ultra Nationalism?
• How Did Nationalism Arise in Southeast Asia History?
• What Can the Study of Nationalism Contribute to Our Understanding of International Relations?
• How Important Has Nationalism Been in Shaping the Modern World?
• How Does Radical Nationalism Affects Society?
• Can the European Union Be Considered as a Compensator for Serbian Nationalism?
• How Does Nationalism Influence Europe During the 20th?
• Why Did the Idea of Liberal Nationalism Fail in 19th Century Germany?
• How Far Has Nationalism Changed Over the Last Hundred Years?
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• Chicago (N-B)

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Nationalism Essay

500+ words nationalism essay.

Nationalism is a feeling of love and pride for our country. Whenever we think about the term nationalism, we get thoughts related to patriotism, national flags, sacrifices for the country etc. The Republic Day parade in Delhi is a striking symbol of Indian nationalism, and it brings out the sense of power, strength, and diversity of the Indian nation. With the help of this nationalism essay, students will get to know what nationalism means and how it plays an important role in uniting the people of a country. They can also get the list of CBSE Essays on different topics for their practice. It will help them to increase their scores in the English exam, and they can participate in various essay writing competitions at the school level.

Meaning of Nationalism

Nationalism may be defined as a sentiment, loyalty or sympathy which binds a group of people together and thus creates unity among them. Nationalism consists of some basic elements, which can be like a common language, traditions, religion, race, history or geography of a place etc. It is not necessarily true that people of every nationality must have these basic elements. In India, several races, languages, and cultures contribute to the Indian nationality.

Nationalism in India

Nationalism is rooted in the popular principle of nationality. For India, the making of national identity was a long process whose roots can be drawn from the ancient era. India had been ruled by many emperors in different time periods. It was during the 19th Century, the concept of national identity emerged among the people of India. It gave rise to national consciousness. People had a desire to get the identity of their nation. The major reasons behind this were economic, social and political factors. People discovered their unity in their struggle story, and with the help of Nationalism, they got freedom.

Elaborating on the concept of Indian Nationalism, the Encyclopedia on Social Science says, “India is a nation in which the Hindu religion served as a cohesive traditional element in uniting people of various races, religions and languages. India achieved national unity through the influence of Western ideas, notably those of British origin, and in the struggle against British rule”.

The great Rabindranath Tagore spoke of nationalism as “the most powerful anaesthetic that man has invented.” He added further: “Under the influence of its fumes the whole people can carry out its systematic programme of the most virulent self-seeking without being in the least aware of its moral perversion.”

Role of Nationalism

Nationalism inspired intense loyalties among the people. It has united people and helped to liberate them from oppressive rule. But, it has also been the cause of conflict and bitterness and wars. It has been a factor in the breakup of empires and states. The struggles related to nationalism have resulted in redrawing the boundaries of several empires and states. As a result of this, today we can see that the world is divided into different nations and states. So, it’s important that we as citizens use the spirit of nationalism in a constructive way. It should contribute to the growth of the nation and should build a feeling of brotherhood among people.

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What George Orwell Wrote About the Dangers of Nationalism

On facts, fallacies, and power.

George Orwell begins his essay “Notes on Nationalism” by admitting that nationalism is not really the right word, but something of an approximate term for what he means to be discussing. He explains:

By “nationalism” I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled “good” or “bad.” But secondly—and this is much more important—I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.

Elsewhere he describes nationalism more simply as “the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.”

Writing immediately following the Second World War and just at the beginning of the period of decolonization, Orwell surely selected nationalism— as opposed to chauvinism or fanaticism —for sound but historically specific reasons. Today he may have chosen fundamentalism , though it is equally far from his specific meaning. He later produced a whole vocabulary to describe this process of thought: blackwhite , crimestop , doublethink , goodthink . The important thing is the kind of attachment the nationalist forms, not the particular object of that attachment: “the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation. . . . It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.”

Within this framework, Orwell lists three “principal characteristics of nationalist thought”:

1. “ Obsession . As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit.” His special mission is to prove that his chosen nation is in all respects better than its rivals. Therefore, even to the outer limits of plausibility, any question may be traced back to this central issue. No detail is indifferent, no fact is neutral.

2. “Instability.” The content of the nationalist’s belief, and even the object of his devotion, is liable to change as circumstances do. “What remains constant in the nationalist is his own state of mind”—the relentless, reductive, uncompromising fervor. The point is to keep oneself always in a frenzied state concerning vicarious contests of honor, whether indulging in spasms of rage over perceived insults or in sadistic ecstasies celebrating some new triumph. It is the single-minded intensity that matters, not the ostensible cause.

3. “ Indifference to Reality .” Nationalists achieve by instinct the kind of doublethink that the denizens of Airstrip One cultivated by conscious effort: “Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also—since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself—unshakably certain of being in the right.” His fundamental belief, he feels sure, must be true; therefore, the facts will have to be made to fit it.

Orwell classifies the prominent types of nationalism as “Positive Nationalism” (which is for one’s own country; e.g. , Celtic Nationalism or Zionism), “Negative Nationalism” (which is against some other group; for example, Antisemitism or Trotskyism in its purely anti-Soviet version), and “Transferred Nationalism” (identification with a race, class, or country—in Orwell’s day, usually the USSR—other than one’s own).33 Naturally, it is possible to hold any of these beliefs and not succumb to “nationalism” in the Orwellian sense. The problem is not inherent to any specific body of thought, just as no particular theory will guarantee an immunity. The issue is less the philosophical content and more the subjective manner by which the individual relates to it. The nationalist holds his special doctrine not only as the unassailable truth, but as an absolute standard by which the truth may be judged. Its scope is not limited to moral or political matters, and all questions, whether of fact or value, may be answered in advance by referring to the nationalist’s creed—or, more precisely, to the “competitive prestige” of the “power unit” to which he has committed himself.

The dangers of nationalist thinking extend far beyond any particular error, and even beyond the movements that become infected with it. For once nationalism spreads past a certain point, it will tend to degrade the overall quality of political debate, and therefore of political thought—and because no fact or idea is irrelevant to nationalist ambitions, ultimately all thought.

In what is likely the most despondent passage in his diary, Orwell wrote:

We are all drowning in filth. When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgment have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone’s thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting [forward] a “case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends. . . One notices this in the case of people one disagrees with, such as Fascists or pacifists, but in fact everyone is the same, at least everyone who has definite opinions. Everyone is dishonest, and everyone is utterly heartless toward people who are outside the immediate range of his own interests and sympathies. What is most striking of all is the way sympathy can be turned on or off like a tap according to political expediency. . . . I am not thinking of lying for political ends, but of actual changes in subjective feeling. But is there no one who has both firm opinions and a balanced outlook? Actually there are plenty, but they are powerless. All power is in the hands of paranoiacs.

Political discussion, in such a setting, cannot constitute an attempt to get at the truth, or to achieve some degree of mutual understanding, or to persuade others of one’s own view, or even simply to make oneself understood. It is instead a kind of game in which both the victory and the stakes are largely imaginary. Orwell analyzed the nationalist’s motives: “What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him.” Since both sides are, as a rule, equally “uninterested in what happens in the real world,” the outcome of such disputes “is always entirely inconclusive,” and “each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory.”

In this sort of competition it is nearly inevitable that fantasies come to stand in for facts, fallacies overtake arguments, and character assassination becomes a favored tactic on all sides. A fog of uncertainty soon settles over every account, “which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening,” and therefore “makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied.” But no matter. Uncertainty quickly curdles into indifference. Facts are selected or suppressed in order to make a case; if need be, the necessary facts are simply invented or, contrariwise, erased.

What worried Orwell most was that individual people—perhaps even millions of them—might come to draw their sense of integrity from the willing submission to shifting dogmas, rather than respect for the truth or the demands of one’s own conscience. They may then cease to recognize that such things as fabricating evidence and slandering your opponents were despicable—or even simply dishonest. He found the thought “frightening . . . because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” In 1984 , he presses the tendency to its logical conclusion. O’Brien, the Inner Party official, the teacher-torturer, lectures poor Winston Smith in his cell within the Ministry of Love:

We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. . . . we control the past. . . . You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. . . . But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.

In the end, Winston is broken. He becomes converted to the Party’s view. He had once written that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” But at last he learns that “Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once.” His loyalty to the Party is ensured by—more, it is identical with— the surrender of his own judgment.

As with his prescriptions for improving poor writing, Orwell’s strategy for addressing the fallacies of nationalism is to teach us to recognize them, and then to appeal to our own good sense. The first step, he suggests, may lie in recognizing our own imperfection, fallibility, and bias. He writes:

As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one’s own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. . . . The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality.

One may not be able to avoid bias, but one need not adopt bias as a principle. One can, if nothing else, refuse to surrender one’s own individual judgment. That will be partly a question of character: the ability to distinguish between what you wish and what you know, “the power of facing unpleasant facts,” the will to live without comforting lies. Perhaps what is needed most of all is a continued belief in the existence of an objective truth while maintaining a severe, demanding skepticism concerning all claims to know what it is.

That is of course but a partial solution. It may help to keep an individual mind sane and honest, but it does little to change the overall atmosphere. Orwell realized as much, and yet toward the end of his life that question of individual thought became his central concern. Faced with the continued threat of totalitarianism, Orwell came to view the struggle for freedom as occurring, not solely between classes or nations, but first and perhaps most importantly within “the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.”

__________________________________

Adapted from  Between the Bullet and the Lie: Essays on Orwell .  Used with permission of AK Press. Copyright © 2017 by Kristian Williams.

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Essay on Nationalism

India is a land of cultural, religious and linguistic diversity. Nationalism is the only thread which binds the people together in the thread of oneness, despite their belonging to different cultural-ethnic backgrounds. It plays an important role in uniting all Indians from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

Students are supposed to write essays on nationalism in various examination and competitions. Here we are providing essays of varying words-length – 100, 150, 200, 250, 300 and 400 words – and they can take their pick as per their needs to articulate their sense of pride in the oneness of their vast, beautiful and strong nation.

Long and Short Nationalism Essay in English

Below we have provided short and long essay on nationalism in English. These essays have been written in simple English language to avoid any complications arising due to complex words and also to ensure that you easily get an insight on the subject.

These nationalism essay have been written covering all the vital facts on nationalism. After going through the essays you will understand the meaning of nationalism and its significance in protecting the freedom and integrity of India.

You can use these essays on your several school or college essay writing, debate competitions.

Essay on Nationalism 1 (100 words)

Nationalism means the spirit of devotion to the nation, which must permeate the hearts and minds of every citizen of the country. This is the reason why national anthem is played in educational institutions, and now even in cinema halls before the start of the movies, and the curriculum is enriched with the life stories about the nation’s great sons, heroes and the freedom fighters.

Nationalism is the feeling which gives courage and strength to the soldiers to guard the borders of their country. If the citizens stand united despite being the followers of different religions, speaking different languages, and practicing diverse cultures of their regions, no internal or external threat can harm their country. India is a prominent example of this all-pervasive sense of nationalism that has always served the nation well.

Essay on Nationalism 2 (150 words)

Nationalism is a concept according to which the nation is considered to be supreme – deserving the highest priority. Nationalism is an ideology that promotes the shared identity of the citizens of any country. For a nation’s progress and prosperity, it is imperative that its citizens rise above their regional identities and strengthen the sense of pride in their nation.

There are many countries, including India which are culturally, religiously and linguistically diverse and in these countries the sense of nationalism helps achieve unity in diversity. For the development of India, it is imperative that its citizens work together despite being different in their thoughts and ideas and it can be made possible only through developing a sense of nationalism among them.

Indians have a deep sense of nationalism and this is the reason why they always stand untied when it comes to respecting and honouring their national flag, national anthem and national symbols, which all leads towards preservation of the unity and integrity of the country.

Essay on Nationalism 3 (200 words)

Nationalism means rising about narrow identities of caste, religion and regions to feel a deep sense of pride in our nation. Lord Ram rightly told brother Lakshman after defeating Ravan that the famed golden city of Lanka hardly appeals to him  as Janani janmabhoomischa swargadapi gariyasi  (Mother and motherland are superior to heaven).

Our country does not practice any sense of discrimination to any citizen as they enjoy all rights and privileges. It is the duty of all of us to foster the unity and integrity of India by a sense of nationalism that transcends all barriers of region, religion and language.

It was this overriding spirit of nationalism that won India freedom from the British after years of hard struggle and innumerable sacrifices. At that time India was divided into several princely states but it stood as one nation in the struggle for freedom. We have to preserve and protect this freedom as even seven decades after independence; there are threats to national security and unity from the separatist and secessionist forces within and outside India. Only a deep-rooted feeling of nationalism can save India from any further division in the name of right to self-determination in Kashmir or insurgent movements in North-East India.

Essay on Nationalism 4 (250 words)

Introduction

Nationalism means that we carry in our hearts, respect, love and gratitude for our motherland. Although this sense is bestowed on us naturally, but due to some external causes, or may be due to a little ignorance or vicious propaganda, there have been movements espousing anti-national feelings such as the ones witnessed in Kashmir or North-East India. But thanks to the unwavering sense of nationalism in its citizens, India has stood firm as one nation, foiling the designs of separatist forces.

Putting the nation first

As a mother gives birth to her children and overpowers many obstacles to extend love and care on them, our nation also does the same for us. Just like a mother, our motherland also bears the pain while producing means of survival and nourishment for all of us. Scholars have said all the vegetation, rivers and other natural resources of the place where we take birth act as the greatest gifts to live a happy and peaceful existence. It is the affection and the sense of honour towards our motherland that makes us stand strongly in front of the other nations around the world.

In fact, a nation is born only when all citizens living in its boundary share a sense of oneness in cultural heritage and involvement with each other. It is this undiluted sense of nationalism that binds India in one thread from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. The feeling of nationalism has always prevailed over differences of cast, creed and religion in a vast country like India. Indians justifiably take pride in living in the largest democracy of the world, known for its values of peace, human brotherhood and collective progress.

Essay on Nationalism 5 (300 words)

The kind of love, affection and the blessings that a mother showers on her baby while nursing him is incomparable and the same is true with our motherland. Just like a mother who can never think of anything other than the betterment of her children, our nation also showers motherly love on us, without expecting anything in return from us. But it is imperative for every Indian to have a sense of pride and gratitude towards the nation, in other words, practice nationalism in words and deeds.

India is one nation, despite religious and regional diversity

Nationalism binds us all in a spirit of oneness, despite all of us having different customs, holding different beliefs, observing different festivals and speaking in different languages. It is the sense of nationalism that protects the nation against all threats and dangers to its unity and integrity. We can have our different identities as people living in culturally and linguistically distinct states, but stand together as one under one flag, national anthem and national emblem. We can take our place with pride among citizens of the world as proud and loyal citizens of the largest democracy of the world.

The importance of our motherland surpasses all other considerations of caste, creed, and religion. It is only through this deep sense of nationalism and patriotism that we can safeguard our freedom that we achieved after supreme sacrifices and sufferings by millions of sons and daughters of India. Let us never dilute the spirit of nationalism to repay our debts to our motherland.

There are some forces at work which want to weaken the country by spreading separatist feelings and cries for azadi (as witnessed in troubled parts of Kashmir and North-East India). It is unfortunate that some educational institutions in India were recently in the thick of anti-India sloganeering and protests with cries of tearing apart India rending the air. Only an unwavering sense of nationalism can save the country from falling a prey to the evil designs of anti-India forces.

Essay on Nationalism 6 (400 words)

A sense of attachment and dedication towards the country in which one resides is called nationalism. Nationalism is the only reason which keeps every citizen of a country united despite their differences on linguistic, ethnicity and cultural fronts.

Equating nation with mother

Not only in our country but in the entire world, the nation is commonly treated as mother, because as a mother does for her children a nation cares for its citizen and rears and support them with the help of various natural resources without which requirements and purpose of life cannot be completed. It has been observed that during the times of conflicts and war, common citizens of the nation also get united and support their soldiers and the government.

Nationalism binds people in one thread

Nationalism is a collective sense of idea, the power of which can be sensed through the reality that the people living in the country’s borders ignore their differences and give importance to the loyalty towards the nation. Even they do not hesitate to give supreme sacrifice for their nation if it becomes necessary for the survival of their nation. Only because of the sense of nationalism, the people of different part of a country who may be completely unknown to each other get united, develop consensus and also discuss together on the issues related to their nation and find a common solution.

Nationalism and Globalization

According to some scholars, the process of globalization has influenced the nationalist thinking up to a major extent and now because of it the sense of national borders as well as the nationalism no longer exit and it has become a challenge to be handled. They argue that globalization and technological progress, such as internet and mobile phones have together turned the world into a global village and thus there is no sense of nationalism as a core value. However, this interpretation of nationalism is immaterial.

For the progress of any nation it is important that its citizen keep alive the sense of nationalism within them. Observing keenly the importance of developing sense of nationalism and spirit of love for their country in their citizens, every government around the world essentially organize their national festivals in which honouring the national flag is an important activity. Overall, the progress of any nation largely depends on the sense of nationalism in their citizens which is an important feeling to bind all the citizens together despite them hailing from different religions, castes, or social strata.

Related Information:

Essay on India

Essay on Patriotism

Essay on Importance of Patriotism

Essay on Democracy in India

Essay on Fundamental Rights

Essay on Freedom of Speech

Paragraph on National Festivals of India

Essay on Social Media

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Notes on Nationalism

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of  the Orwell Estate . The Orwell Foundation is an independent charity – please consider making a donation or becoming a Friend of the Foundation to help us maintain these resources for readers everywhere. 

Somewhere or other Byron makes use of the French word longueur , and remarks in passing that though in England we happen not to have the word , we have the thing in considerable profusion. In the same way, there is a habit of mind which is now so widespread that it affects our thinking on nearly every subject, but which has not yet been given a name. As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word ‘nationalism’, but it will be seen in a moment that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation – that is, a single race or a geographical area. It can attach itself to a church or a class, or it may work in a merely negative sense, against something or other and without the need for any positive object of loyalty.

By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. [1] But secondly ­– and this is much more important – I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

So long as it is applied merely to the more notorious and identifiable nationalist movements in Germany, Japan, and other countries, all this is obvious enough. Confronted with a phenomenon like Nazism, which we can observe from the outside, nearly all of us would say much the same things about it. But here I must repeat what I said above, that I am only using the word ‘nationalism’ for lack of a better. Nationalism, in the extended sense in which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one’s own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.

It is also worth emphasizing once again that nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the U.S.S.R. without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist – that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating – but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the up-grade and some hated rival is on the down-grade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also – since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself – unshakeably certain of being in the right.

Now that I have given this lengthy definition, I think it will be admitted that the habit of mind I am talking about is widespread among the English intelligentsia, and more widespread there than among the mass of the people. For those who feel deeply about contemporary politics, certain topics have become so infected by considerations of prestige that a genuinely rational approach to them is almost impossible. Out of the hundreds of examples that one might choose, take this question: Which of the three great allies, the U.S.S.R., Britain and the U.S.A., has contributed most to the defeat of Germany? In theory it should be possible to give a reasoned and perhaps even a conclusive answer to this question. In practice, however, the necessary calculations cannot be made, because anyone likely to bother his head about such a question would inevitably see it in terms of competitive prestige. He would therefore start by deciding in favour of Russia, Britain or America as the case might be, and only after this would begin searching for arguments that seemed to support his case. And there are whole strings of kindred questions to which you can only get an honest answer from someone who is indifferent to the whole subject involved, and whose opinion on it is probably worthless in any case. Hence, partly, the remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of all the ‘experts’ of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939. [2] And when news of the Pact broke, the most wildly divergent explanations were of it were given, and predictions were made which were falsified almost immediately, being based in nearly every case not on a study of probabilities but on a desire to make the U.S.S.R. seem good or bad, strong or weak. Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties. [3] And aesthetic judgements, especially literary judgements, are often corrupted in the same way as political ones. It would be difficult for an Indian nationalist to enjoy reading Kipling or for a Conservative to see merit in Mayakovsky, and there is always a temptation to claim that any book whose tendency one disagrees with must be a bad book from a literary point of view. People of strongly nationalistic outlook often perform this sleight of hand without being conscious of dishonesty.

In England, if one simply considers the number of people involved, it is probable that the dominant form of nationalism is old-fashioned British jingoism. It is certain that this is still widespread, and much more so than most observers would have believed a dozen years ago. However, in this essay I am concerned chiefly with the reactions of the intelligentsia, among whom jingoism and even patriotism of the old kind are almost dead, though they now seem to be reviving among a minority. Among the intelligentsia, it hardly needs saying that the dominant form of nationalism is Communism ­– using this word in a very loose sense, to include not merely Communist Party members but ‘fellow-travellers’ and russophiles generally. A Communist, for my purpose here, is one who looks upon the U.S.S.R. as his Fatherland and feels it his duty to justify Russian policy and advance Russian interests at all costs. Obviously such people abound in England today, and their direct and indirect influence is very great. But many other forms of nationalism also flourish, and it is by noticing the points of resemblance between different and even seemingly opposed currents of thought that one can best get the matter into perspective.

Ten or twenty years ago, the form of nationalism most closely corresponding to Communism today was political Catholicism. Its most outstanding exponent – though he was perhaps an extreme case rather than a typical one – was G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton was a writer of considerable talent who chose to suppress both his sensibilities and his intellectual honesty in the cause of Roman Catholic propaganda. During the last twenty years or so of his life, his entire output was in reality an endless repetition of the same thing, under its laboured cleverness as simple and boring as ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians’. Every book that he wrote, every paragraph, every sentence, every incident in every story, every scrap of dialogue, had to demonstrate beyond possibility of mistake the superiority of the Catholic over the Protestant or the pagan. But Chesterton was not content to think of this superiority as merely intellectual or spiritual: it had to be translated into terms of national prestige and military power, which entailed an ignorant idealization of the Latin countries, especially France. Chesterton had not lived long in France, and his picture of it – as a land of Catholic peasants incessantly singing the Marseillaise over glasses of red wine – had about as much relation to reality as Chu Chin Chow has to everyday life in Baghdad. And with this went not only an enormous over-estimation of French military power (both before and after 1914-18 he maintained that France, by itself, was stronger than Germany), but a silly and vulgar glorification of the actual process of war. Chesterton’s battle poems, such as ‘Lepanto’ or ‘The Ballad of Saint Barbara’, make ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ read like a pacifist tract: they are perhaps the most tawdry bits of bombast to be found in our language. The interesting thing is that had the romantic rubbish which he habitually wrote about France and the French army been written by somebody else about Britain and the British army, he would have been the first to jeer. In home politics he was a Little Englander, a true hater of jingoism and imperialism, and according to his lights a true friend of democracy. Yet when he looked outwards into the international field, he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.

Obviously there are considerable resemblances between political Catholicism, as exemplified by Chesterton, and Communism. So there are between either of these and for instance Scottish nationalism, Zionism, Antisemitism or Trotskyism. It would be an oversimplification to say that all forms of nationalism are the same, even in their mental atmosphere, but there are certain rules that hold good in all cases. The following are the principal characteristics of nationalist thought:

Obsession. As nearly as possible, no nationalist ever thinks, talks, or writes about anything except the superiority of his own power unit. It is difficult if not impossible for any nationalist to conceal his allegiance. The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organization, fills him with uneasiness which he can only relieve by making some sharp retort. If the chosen unit is an actual country, such as Ireland or India, he will generally claim superiority for it not only in military power and political virtue, but in art, literature, sport, structure of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking. He will show great sensitiveness about such things as the correct display of flags, relative size of headlines and the order in which different countries are named. [4] Nomenclature plays a very important part in nationalist thought. Countries which have won their independence or gone through a nationalist revolution usually change their names, and any country or other unit round which strong feelings revolve is likely to have several names, each of them carrying a different implication. The two sides of the Spanish Civil War had between them nine or ten names expressing different degrees of love and hatred. Some of these names (e.g. ‘Patriots’ for Franco-supporters, or ‘Loyalists’ for Government-supporters) were frankly question-begging, and there was no single one of them which the two rival factions could have agreed to use. All nationalists consider it a duty to spread their own language to the detriment of rival languages, and among English-speakers this struggle reappears in subtler form as a struggle between dialects. Anglophobe Americans will refuse to use a slang phrase if they know it to be of British origin, and the conflict between Latinizers and Germanizers often has nationalist motives behind it. Scottish nationalists insist on the superiority of Lowland Scots, and Socialists whose nationalism takes the form of class hatred tirade against the B.B.C. accent and even the broad A. One could multiply instances. Nationalist thought often gives the impression of being tinged by belief in sympathetic magic – a belief which probably comes out in the widespread custom of burning political enemies in effigy, or using pictures of them as targets in shooting galleries.

Instability. The intensity with which they are held does not prevent nationalist loyalties from being transferable. To begin with, as I have pointed out already, they can be and often are fastened upon some foreign country. One quite commonly finds that great national leaders, or the founders of nationalist movements, do not even belong to the country they have glorified. Sometimes they are outright foreigners, or more often they come from peripheral areas where nationality is doubtful. Examples are Stalin, Hitler, Napoleon, de Valera, Disraeli, Poincaré, Beaverbrook. The Pan-German movement was in part the creation of an Englishman, Houston Chamberlain. For the past fifty or a hundred years, transferred nationalism has been a common phenomenon among literary intellectuals. With Lafcadio Hearne the transference was to Japan, with Carlyle and many others of his time to Germany, and in our own age it is usually to Russia. But the peculiarly interesting fact is that re -transference is also possible. A country or other unit which has been worshipped for years may suddenly become detestable, and some other object of affection may take its place with almost no interval. In the first version of H. G. Wells’s Outline of History , and others of his writings about that time, one finds the United States praised almost as extravagantly as Russia is praised by Communists today: yet within a few years this uncritical admiration had turned into hostility. The bigoted Communist who changes in a space of weeks, or even of days, into an equally bigoted Trotskyist is a common spectacle. In continental Europe Fascist movements were largely recruited from among Communists, and the opposite process may well happen within the next few years. What remains constant in the nationalist is his own state of mind: the object of his feelings is changeable, and may be imaginary.

But for an intellectual, transference has an important function which I have already mentioned shortly in connection with Chesterton. It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic – more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest – than he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. When one sees the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the Red army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one realizes that this is only possible because some kind of dislocation has taken place. In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion – that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware – will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack – all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognized for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one’s conduct.

Indifference to Reality. All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side. The Liberal News Chronicle published, as an example of shocking barbarity, photographs of Russians hanged by the Germans, and then a year or two later published with warm approval almost exactly similar photographs of Germans hanged by the Russians. [5] It is the same with historical events. History is thought of largely in nationalist terms, and such things as the Inquisition, the tortures of the Star Chamber, the exploits of the English buccaneers (Sir Francis Drake, for instance, who was given to sinking Spanish prisoners alive), the Reign of Terror, the heroes of the Mutiny blowing hundreds of Indians from the guns, or Cromwell’s soldiers slashing Irishwomen’s faces with razors, become morally neutral or even meritorious when it is felt that they were done in the ‘right’ cause. If one looks back over the past quarter of a century, one finds that there was hardly a single year when atrocity stories were not being reported from some part of the world: and yet in not one single case were these atrocities – in Spain, Russia, China, Hungary, Mexico, Amritsar, Smyrna – believed in and disapproved of by the English intelligentsia as a whole. Whether such deeds were reprehensible, or even whether they happened, was always decided according to political predilection.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one’s own mind.

Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should – in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 – and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible. Much of the propagandist writing of our time amounts to plain forgery. Material facts are suppressed, dates altered, quotations removed from their context and doctored so as to change their meaning. Events which, it is felt, ought not to have happened are left unmentioned and ultimately denied. [6] In 1927 Chiang Kai-Shek boiled hundreds of Communists alive, and yet within ten years he had become one of the heroes of the Left. The re-alignment of world politics had brought him into the anti-Fascist camp, and so it was felt that the boiling of the Communists ‘didn’t count’, or perhaps had not happened. The primary aim of propaganda is, of course, to influence contemporary opinion, but those who rewrite history do probably believe with part of their minds that they are actually thrusting facts into the past. When one considers the elaborate forgeries that have been committed in order to show that Trotsky did not play a valuable part in the Russian civil war, it is difficult to feel that the people responsible are merely lying. More probably they feel that their own version was what happened in the sight of God, and that one is justified in rearranging the records accordingly.

Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported – battles, massacres, famines, revolutions – tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connexion with the physical world.

I have examined as best as I can the mental habits which are common to all forms of nationalism. The next thing is to classify those forms, but obviously this cannot be done comprehensively. Nationalism is an enormous subject. The world is tormented by innumerable delusions and hatreds which cut across one another in an extremely complex way, and some of the most sinister of them have not yet impinged on the European consciousness. In this essay I am concerned with nationalism as it occurs among the English intelligentsia. In them, much more than in ordinary English people, it is unmixed with patriotism and can therefore can be studied pure. Below are listed the varieties of nationalism now flourishing among English intellectuals, with such comments as seem to be needed. It is convenient to use three headings, Positive, Transferred and Negative, though some varieties will fit into more than one category:

Positive Nationalism

1. Neo-Toryism. Exemplified by such people as Lord Elton, A. P. Herbert, G. M. Young, Professor Pickthorn, by the literature of the Tory Reform Committee, and by such magazines as the New English Review and the Nineteenth Century and After . The real motive force of neo-Toryism, giving it its nationalistic character and differentiating it from ordinary Conservatism, is the desire not to recognize that British power and influence have declined. Even those who are realistic enough to see that Britain’s military position is not what it was, tend to claim that ‘English ideas’ (usually left undefined) must dominate the world. All neo-Tories are anti-Russian, but sometimes the main emphasis is anti-American. The significant thing is that this school of thought seems to be gaining ground among youngish intellectual, sometimes ex-Communists, who have passed through the usual process of disillusionment and become disillusioned with that. The anglophobe who suddenly becomes violently pro-British is a fairly common figure. Writers who illustrate this tendency are F. A. Voigt, Malcolm Muggeridge, Evelyn Waugh, Hugh Kingsmill, and a psychologically similar development can be observed in T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and various of their followers.

2. Celtic Nationalism. Welsh, Irish and Scottish nationalism have points of difference but are alike in their anti-English orientation. Members of all three movements have opposed the war while continuing to describe themselves as pro-Russian, and the lunatic fringe has even contrived to be simultaneously pro-Russian and pro-Nazi. But Celtic nationalism is not the same thing as anglophobia. Its motive force is a belief in the past and future greatness of the Celtic peoples, and it has a strong tinge of racialism. The Celt is supposed to be spiritually superior to the Saxon – simpler, more creative, less vulgar, less snobbish, etc. – but the usual power hunger is there under the surface. One symptom of it is the delusion that Eire, Scotland or even Wales could preserve its independence unaided and owes nothing to British protection. Among writers, good examples of this school of thought are Hugh McDiarmid and Sean O’Casey. No modern Irish writer, even of the stature of Yeats or Joyce, is completely free from traces of nationalism.

3. Zionism. This has the unusual characteristics of a nationalist movement, but the American variant of it seems to be more violent and malignant than the British. I classify it under Direct and not Transferred nationalism because it flourishes almost exclusively among the Jews themselves. In England, for several rather incongruous reasons, the intelligentsia are mostly pro-Jew on the Palestine issue, but they do not feel strongly about it. All English people of goodwill are also pro-Jew in the sense of disapproving of Nazi persecution. But any actual nationalistic loyalty, or belief in the innate superiority of Jews, is hardly to be found among Gentiles:

Transferred Nationalism

1. Communism

2. Political Catholicism

3. Colour Feeling. The old-style contemptuous attitude towards ‘natives’ has been much weakened in England, and various pseudo-scientific theories emphasizing the superiority of the white race have been abandoned. [7] Among the intelligentsia, colour feeling only occurs in the transposed form, that is, as a belief in the innate superiority of the coloured races. This is now increasingly common among English intellectuals, probably resulting more often from masochism and sexual frustration than from contact with the Oriental and Negro nationalist movements. Even among those who do not feel strongly on the colour question, snobbery and imitation have a powerful influence. Almost any English intellectual would be scandalized by the claim that the white races are superior to the coloured, whereas the opposite claim would seem to him unexceptionable even if he disagreed with it. Nationalistic attachment to the coloured races is usually mixed up with the belief that their sex lives are superior, and there is a large underground mythology about the sexual prowess of Negroes.

4. Class Feeling. Among upper-class and middle-class intellectuals, only in the transposed form – i.e. as a belief in the superiority of the proletariat. Here again, inside the intelligentsia, the pressure of public opinion is overwhelming. Nationalistic loyalty towards the proletariat, and most vicious theoretical hatred of the bourgeoisie, can and often do co-exist with ordinary snobbishness in everyday life.

5. Pacifism. The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of the western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransferred.

Negative Nationalism

1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.

2. Anti-Semitism. There is little evidence about this at present, because the Nazi persecutions have made it necessary for any thinking person to side with the Jews against their oppressors. Anyone educated enough to have heard the word ‘antisemitism’ claims as a matter of course to be free of it, and anti-Jewish remarks are carefully eliminated from all classes of literature. Actually, antisemitism appears to be widespread, even among intellectuals, and the general conspiracy of silence probably helps exacerbate it. People of Left opinions are not immune to it, and their attitude is sometimes affected by the fact that Trotskyists and Anarchists tend to be Jews. But antisemitism comes more naturally to people of Conservative tendency, who suspect Jews of weakening national morale and diluting the national culture. Neo-Tories and political Catholics are always liable to succumb to antisemitism, at least intermittently.

3. Trotskyism. This word is used so loosely as to include Anarchists, democratic Socialists and even Liberals. I use it here to mean a doctrinaire Marxist whose main motive is hostility to the Stalin régime. Trotskyism can be better studied in obscure pamphlets or in papers like the Socialist Appeal than in the works of Trotsky himself, who was by no means a man of one idea. Although in some places, for instance in the United States, Trotskyism is able to attract a fairly large number of adherents and develop into an organized movement with a petty fuehrer of its own, its inspiration is essentially negative. The Trotskyist is against Stalin just as the Communist is for him, and, like the majority of Communists, he wants not so much to alter the external world as to feel that the battle for prestige is going in his own favour. In each case there is the same obsessive fixation on a single subject, the same inability to form a genuinely rational opinion based on probabilities. The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a persecuted minority, and that the accusation usually made against them, i.e. of collaborating with the Fascists, is absolutely false, creates an impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally superior to Communism; but it is doubtful whether there is much difference. The most typical Trotskyists, in any case, are ex-Communists, and no one arrives at Trotskyism except via one of the left-wing movements. No Communist, unless tethered to his party by years of habit, is secure against a sudden lapse into Trotskyism. The opposite process does not seem to happen equally often, though there is no clear reason why it should not.

In the classification I have attempted above, it will seem that I have often exaggerated, oversimplified, made unwarranted assumptions and have left out of account the existence of ordinarily decent motives. This was inevitable, because in this essay I am trying to isolate and identify tendencies which exist in all our minds and pervert our thinking, without necessarily occurring in a pure state or operating continuously. It is important at this point to correct the over-simplified picture which I have been obliged to make. To begin with, one has no right to assume that everyone , or even every intellectual, is infected by nationalism. Secondly, nationalism can be intermittent and limited. An intelligent man may half-succumb to a belief which attracts him but which he knows to be absurd, and he may keep it out of his mind for long periods, only reverting to it in moments of anger or sentimentality, or when he is certain that no important issues are involved. Thirdly, a nationalistic creed may be adopted in good faith from non-nationalistic motives. Fourthly, several kinds of nationalism, even kinds that cancel out, can co-exist in the same person.

All the way through I have said, ‘the nationalist does this’ or ‘the nationalist does that’, using for purposes of illustration the extreme, barely sane type of nationalist who has no neutral areas in his mind and no interest in anything except the struggle for power. Actually such people are fairly common, but they are not worth the powder and shot. In real life Lord Elton, D. N. Pritt, Lady Houston, Ezra Pound, Lord Vanisttart, Father Coughlin and all the rest of their dreary tribe have to be fought against, but their intellectual deficiencies hardly need pointing out. Monomania is not interesting, and the fact that no nationalist of the more bigoted kind can write a book which still seems worth reading after a lapse of years has a certain deodorizing effect. But when one has admitted that nationalism has not triumphed everywhere, that there are still people whose judgements are not at the mercy of their desires, the fact does remain that the pressing problems – India, Poland, Palestine, the Spanish Civil War, the Moscow trials, the American Negroes, the Russo-German Pact or what have you – cannot be, or at least never are, discussed upon a reasonable level. The Eltons and Pritts and Coughlins, each of them simply an enormous mouth bellowing the same lie over and over again, are obviously extreme cases, but we deceive ourselves if we do not realize that we can all resemble them in unguarded moments. Let a certain note be struck, let this or that corn be trodden on – and it may be a corn whose very existence has been unsuspected hitherto — and the most fair-minded and sweet-tempered person may suddenly be transformed into a vicious partisan, anxious only to ‘score’ over his adversary and indifferent as to how many lies he tells or how many logical errors he commits in doing so. When Lloyd George, who was an opponent of the Boer War, announced in the House of Commons that the British communiqués, if one added them together, claimed the killing of more Boers than the whole Boer nation contained, it is recorded that Arthur Balfour rose to his feet and shouted ‘Cad!’ Very few people are proof against lapses of this type. The Negro snubbed by a white woman, the Englishman who hears England ignorantly criticized by an American, the Catholic apologist reminded of the Spanish Armada, will all react in much the same way. One prod to the nerve of nationalism, and the intellectual decencies can vanish, the past can be altered, and the plainest facts can be denied.

If one harbours anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. Here are just a few examples. I list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts:

British Tory:  Britain will come out of this war with reduced power and prestige.

Communist:  If she had not been aided by Britain and America, Russia would have been defeated by Germany.

Irish Nationalist:  Eire can only remain independent because of British protection.

Trotskyist:  The Stalin régime is accepted by the Russian masses.

Pacifist:  Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.

All of these facts are grossly obvious if one’s emotions do not happen to be involved: but to the kind of person named in each case they are also intolerable , and so they have to be denied, and false theories constructed upon their denial. I come back to the astonishing failure of military prediction in the present war. It is, I think, true to say that the intelligentsia have been more wrong about the progress of the war than the common people, and that they were more swayed by partisan feelings. The average intellectual of the Left believed, for instance, that the war was lost in 1940, that the Germans were bound to overrun Egypt in 1942, that the Japanese would never be driven out of the lands they had conquered, and that the Anglo-American bombing offensive was making no impression on Germany. He could believe these things because his hatred for the British ruling class forbade him to admit that British plans could succeed. There is no limit to the follies that can be swallowed if one is under the influence of feelings of this kind. I have heard it confidently stated, for instance, that the American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution. One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool. When Hitler invaded Russia, the officials of the M.O.I. issued ‘as background’ a warning that Russia might be expected to collapse in six weeks. On the other hand the Communists regarded every phase of the war as a Russian victory, even when the Russians were driven back almost to the Caspian Sea and had lost several million prisoners. There is no need to multiply instances. The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged. And, as I have pointed out already, the sense of right and wrong becomes unhinged also. There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case, even if one admits in an intellectual sense that it is unjustified – still one cannot feel that it is wrong. Loyalty is involved, and so pity ceases to function.

The reason for the rise and spread of nationalism is far too big a question to be raised here. It is enough to say that, in the forms in which it appears among English intellectuals, it is a distorted reflection of the frightful battles actually happening in the external world, and that its worst follies have been made possible by the breakdown of patriotism and religious belief. If one follows up this train of thought, one is in danger of being led into a species of Conservatism, or into political quietism. It can be plausibly argued, for instance – it is even probably true – that patriotism is an inoculation against nationalism, that monarchy is a guard against dictatorship, and that organized religion is a guard against superstition. Or again, it can be argued that no unbiased outlook is possible, that all creeds and causes involve the same lies, follies, and barbarities; and this is often advanced as a reason for keeping out of politics altogether. I do not accept this argument, if only because in the modern world no one describable as an intellectual can keep out of politics in the sense of not caring about them. I think one must engage in politics – using the word in a wide sense – and that one must have preferences: that is, one must recognize that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one’s own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias. If you hate and fear Russia, if you are jealous of the wealth and power of America, if you despise Jews, if you have a sentiment of inferiority towards the British ruling class, you cannot get rid of those feelings simply by taking thought. But you can at least recognize that you have them, and prevent them from contaminating your mental processes. The emotional urges which are inescapable, and are perhaps even necessary to political action, should be able to exist side by side with an acceptance of reality. But this, I repeat, needs a moral effort, and contemporary English literature, so far as it is alive at all to the major issues of our time, shows how few of us are prepared to make it.

Author’s Notes

Polemic , GB – London, 1945

This material remains under copyright in some jurisdictions, including the US, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Orwell Estate .

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Essay on Nationalism

Nationalism is an ideology that fosters unity and a sense of responsibility towards the nation, among a group of people. Nationalism plays a significant role in the progress and prosperity of a nation.

Short and Long Essays on Nationalism in English

I have given below three essays of 100 – 120 Words, 250 Words, 500 Words and 600 Words limit on Nationalism, for my readers.

Nationalism Essay 10 Lines (100 – 150 Words)

1) A nation’s loyalty and devotion to its citizens may be defined simply as nationalism.

2) Our nation’s unity and integrity are strengthened by nationalism.

3) Nationalism is putting the country above all else.

4) Nationalism was a major component of the Indian independence movement.

5) Nationalism initially sparked several movements and reforms.

6) New nations are built on the basis of nationalism.

7) Nationalism keeps peace, harmony, and cooperation between religious groups.

8) Nations with nationalism are less likely to battle within themselves.

9) Nationalism protects the country from globalization-related stuff like capitalism and colonialism.

10) Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel was the nation’s greatest nationalist who integrated the princely states.

Essay 1 (250 Words) – Nationalism and its Types

Introduction

Nationalism is an ideology that unites the people of a nation, who had the interest of the nation in mind. It is a feeling that fosters unity and encourages people to consider themselves as one unit and inspires them to keep the theory of nation before self.

Important Types of Nationalism

There are several types of nationalism. We will discuss below some important types of nationalism –

• Civic Nationalism

This form of nationalism represents the political prowess of people. The ideals of civic nationalism are at the core of successful democracies, like America and India, to state few examples.

• Cultural Nationalism

Cultural nationalism has been described as the nationalism originating from the cultural values of a particular ethnic group. People in a cultural type of nationalism share each other’s cultural values, keeping the overall interest of the nation in mind.

• Revolutionary Nationalism

The second name of revolutionary nationalism is radical nationalism and it resembles people united for a noble cause or a future destiny in mind. People united to fight external aggression are an example of revolutionary nationalism. Another example is people united to fight against the unjust practices of their own government.

• Liberal Nationalism

This kind of nationalism infuses liberal values among the citizens and foster mutual respect for the liberty of each other.

Nationalism is fundamental to a nation’s unity and progress. The nation is safe and will progress as long as nationalism fosters among its citizens. It is indeed at the core of the interest of the nation and values by nationalistic citizens.

Essay 2 (400 Words) – Definition and Key Features of Nationalism

Nationalism is an ideology that seeks to foster national interest in every citizen. It encourages them to keep national interest above self. People value national issues more than their own interests, in nationalistic sentiment. In the essay, we will know the true definition of nationalism and its key features as well.

Definition of Nationalism

Nationalism is at the core of any free nation and its governance. In fact, in a true sense, nationalism cannot be separated from independence or self-governance. It is a feeling that encourages people to consider their nation as the epicenter of their existence. They keep national interest at the helm of every activity.

It is also related to freedom. Some believe that nationalism is a state when a particular group of people stays free, away from external influences of any kind.

Key Features of Nationalism

Below are some of the important key features of nationalism –

• Concept of Oneness

The unity of the masses is at the core of the concept of nationalism. Nationalism and unity are inseparable. For nationalism to exist, people from different backgrounds must be united together. The reverse also holds true, that is if the people are united then nationalism will foster among them, come what may.

• Accountability

Nationalism develops a sense of responsibility among the people, for others as well as for the nation. The people hold themselves accountable for the state of the nation and its people. This in turn fosters a sense of responsibility that helps in the progress of the nation.

• Clear Demarcation of Boundaries

Another important feature of nationalism is a clear demarcation of boundaries. Unless the boundaries i.e. limits of a nation are clearly defined, nationalism cannot be feasibly implemented. People need to have a clear picture of what constitutes their own land, for nationalism to foster among them.

• National Interest at the Core

Another characteristic of nationalism is that it keeps national interest at the core of every activity. Citizens participate in their everyday activities keeping in mind the interest of the nation. Where there is nationalism, there has to the interest of the nation at the apex.

Nationalism is an ideology that must be fostered in the nations at all costs. It helps not only the nations to grow but also keeps them secure and people united. A nation progresses only when nationalism remains at the core of the principles of its people.

Essay 3 (500 – 600 Words) – Nationalism and its Importance

The word ‘Nationalism’ is used widely whenever there is a need to evoke national sentiments among the masses and to unite them in the national interest. Today, in this essay we will understand the meaning of nationalism and its importance for a nation.

What is Nationalism?

Nationalism could be understood as a sentiment that binds people of land together and compels them to act in the national interest. It is a sentiment that makes people to keep service to the nation over self.

From a larger perspective, it could also be understood as the national sentiment that binds the people of different caste, creed, religion, and culture, together. They stay united to protect their nation from external threats as well as to contribute to its growth.

Nationalism fosters the citizens a responsibility to preserve their national heritage and culture. It encourages the preservation of national values and heritage.

Importance of Nationalism

Nationalism is a very important ideology that helps a nation stay secure and also make consistent progress. When the people of a nation are not united by nationalism, it becomes vulnerable to several threats. Below discussed is some importance of nationalism.

• Fosters Unity

Nationalism binds the people of a country together. People of different religions, castes, and cultures are bind together for the national interest. They stay united and face any threat to the nation with unity. Nationalism is the ideology that binds the people together, in the national interest.

• Preserves National Heritage

Nationalism also fosters a sense of accountability among the citizens towards their national heritage. People tend to preserve their culture and values, keeping in mind a larger objective of preserving their national heritage.

• Keeps National Threats at Bay

Nationalism helps in keeping the external threats outside the country. When people are united for the cause of securing their nation, then no power can intrude into its boundary. National also helps to deal with internal conflicts and law and order situations. People who value nationalism will have fewer instances of religious or other conflicts.

• Helps in Nation’s Growth

The concept of nationalism helps in the economical and cultural development of a nation. A country where people value nationalism progresses steadily. People understand their responsibility towards the country and fellow citizens; thereby, helping the nation grow.

• Fosters Democracy

Nationalism plays a crucial role in preserving democratic principles. Democracy is successful only when people are united despite several demographic differences between them. People belonging to different religions and castes take part in the electoral process to form a democratic government that preserves their interests. Nationalism is at the core of democratic governance and its functioning.

• Strengthen People

Nationalism is also the greatest strength of the people. There have been many revolutions in the history that were fuelled by nationalistic fervor. People who value nationalism are vocal about their own rights and privileges as well as the rights and privileges of others. Nationalism had proved to the game changer when it comes to independence and sovereignty. Many countries including India successfully toppled the colonial governments, only after nationalism was induced in the ideology of its people. India was able to gain complete independence from British Rule after two hundred years, only due to nationalism fostered into its people by political leaders and their movements.

Nationalism plays a significant role in the growth of a nation and its people. It is fundamental to democratic principles and ensures fair and people-centric governance. It also encourages national values and unites people from various backgrounds, for the growth of the nation as well as for it safety.

FAQs: Frequently asked Questions

Ans . It is the strong feeling of patriotism and love by the masses for the nation.

Ans . The feeling of nationalism promotes unity among the people of a nation.

Ans . The emergence of nationalism in India was in the 19th century.

Ans . The Moderates i.e. a group of political leaders was the first nationalist in India.

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World History Project AP®

Course: world history project ap®   >   unit 5.

• READ: The Atlantic Revolutions
• BEFORE YOU WATCH: The Haitian Revolution
• WATCH: The Haitian Revolution
• READ: West Africa in an Age of Revolution
• READ: Manuela Sáenz, Jonotas, and Natan – Graphic Biography

READ: Origins and Impacts of Nationalism

• BEFORE YOU WATCH: Nationalism
• WATCH: Nationalism
• READ: Ethnic Nationalism
• READ: Rifa’a al-Tahtawi – Graphic Biography
• READ: The World Revolution of 1848

First read: preview and skimming for gist

Second read: key ideas and understanding content.

• What is a nation? Are nations natural or biological?
• Why does the author describe nations as an “imagined communities”?
• How did French military victories contribute to the rise of nationalism in France and elsewhere?
• In what context did nationalism take hold in Europe? In the Americas?
• What factors helped nationalism take hold in Germany and Italy?

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

• To what extent does this article explain the intellectual and ideological context in which revolutions swept the Atlantic world from 1750 to 1900?
• What is the author’s main argument about nationalism? Do you find it convincing? Why or why not?
• What are some of the ways in which nationalism helped liberate people or bring about positive political change in this era? Can you predict any potential problems or challenges that nationalism might also bring? If so, what are they?

Origins and Impacts of Nationalism

What exactly is nationalism, other reasons..., conclusions and future differences, want to join the conversation.

Essay on Nationalism in English for Children and Students

Table of Contents

Essay on Nationalism: India is a land of cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity. Nationalism is the only thread that binds the people together in the thread of oneness, despite their belonging to different cultural-ethnic backgrounds. It plays an important role in uniting all Indians from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.

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Target Exam ---

Students are supposed to write essays on nationalism in various examination and competitions. Here we are providing essays of varying words-length – 100, 150, 200, 250, 300 and 400 words – and they can take their pick as per their needs to articulate their sense of pride in the oneness of their vast, beautiful and strong nation.

Long and Short Nationalism Essay in English

Below we have provided short and long essay on nationalism in English. These essays have been written in simple English language to avoid any complications arising due to complex words and also to ensure that you easily get an insight on the subject.

These nationalism essay have been written covering all the vital facts on nationalism. After going through the essays you will understand the meaning of nationalism and its significance in protecting the freedom and integrity of India.

You can use these essays on your several school or college essay writing, debate competitions.

Also Check: Essay on India

Essay on Nationalism 100 words

Nationalism means the spirit of devotion to the nation, which must permeate the hearts and minds of every citizen of the country. This is the reason why national anthem is played in educational institutions, and now even in cinema halls before the start of the movies, and the curriculum is enriched with the life stories about the nation’s great sons, heroes and the freedom fighters.

Nationalism is the feeling which gives courage and strength to the soldiers to guard the borders of their country. If the citizens stand united despite being the followers of different religions, speaking different languages, and practicing diverse cultures of their regions, no internal or external threat can harm their country. India is a prominent example of this all-pervasive sense of nationalism that has always served the nation well.

Essay on Nationalism 150 words

Nationalism is a concept according to which the nation is considered to be supreme – deserving the highest priority. Nationalism is an ideology that promotes the shared identity of the citizens of any country. For a nation’s progress and prosperity, it is imperative that its citizens rise above their regional identities and strengthen the sense of pride in their nation.

There are many countries, including India which are culturally, religiously and linguistically diverse and in these countries the sense of nationalism helps achieve unity in diversity. For the development of India, it is imperative that its citizens work together despite being different in their thoughts and ideas and it can be made possible only through developing a sense of nationalism among them.

Indians have a deep sense of nationalism and this is the reason why they always stand untied when it comes to respecting and honouring their national flag, national anthem and national symbols, which all leads towards preservation of the unity and integrity of the country.

Also Check: Essay on Patriotism

Essay on Nationalism 200 words

Nationalism means rising about narrow identities of caste, religion and regions to feel a deep sense of pride in our nation. Lord Ram rightly told brother Lakshman after defeating Ravan that the famed golden city of Lanka hardly appeals to him as Janani janmabhoomischa swargadapi gariyasi (Mother and motherland are superior to heaven).

The idea of nationalism in India grew during the Independence movement. This was a time when people from all different areas, castes, religions, and so on joined together to fight against British rule for freedom. So, nationalism can be described as the shared love and loyalty of all citizens toward their country.

Our country does not practice any sense of discrimination to any citizen as they enjoy all rights and privileges. It is the duty of all of us to foster the unity and integrity of India by a sense of nationalism that transcends all barriers of region, religion and language.

It was this overriding spirit of nationalism that won India freedom from the British after years of hard struggle and innumerable sacrifices. At that time India was divided into several princely states but it stood as one nation in the struggle for freedom. We have to preserve and protect this freedom as even seven decades after independence; there are threats to national security and unity from the separatist and secessionist forces within and outside India. Only a deep-rooted feeling of nationalism can save India from any further division in the name of right to self-determination in Kashmir or insurgent movements in North-East India.

Essay on Nationalism 250 words

Nationalism means that we carry in our hearts, respect, love and gratitude for our motherland. Although this sense is bestowed on us naturally, but due to some external causes, or may be due to a little ignorance or vicious propaganda, there have been movements espousing anti-national feelings such as the ones witnessed in Kashmir or North-East India. But thanks to the unwavering sense of nationalism in its citizens, India has stood firm as one nation, foiling the designs of separatist forces.

Also Check: Essay on Importance of Patriotism

Putting the nation first

As a mother gives birth to her children and overpowers many obstacles to extend love and care on them, our nation also does the same for us. Just like a mother, our motherland also bears the pain while producing means of survival and nourishment for all of us. Scholars have said all the vegetation, rivers and other natural resources of the place where we take birth act as the greatest gifts to live a happy and peaceful existence. It is the affection and the sense of honour towards our motherland that makes us stand strongly in front of the other nations around the world.

In fact, a nation is born only when all citizens living in its boundary share a sense of oneness in cultural heritage and involvement with each other. It is this undiluted sense of nationalism that binds India in one thread from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. The feeling of nationalism has always prevailed over differences of cast, creed and religion in a vast country like India. Indians justifiably take pride in living in the largest democracy of the world, known for its values of peace, human brotherhood and collective progress.

Essay on Nationalism 300 words

The kind of love, affection and the blessings that a mother showers on her baby while nursing him is incomparable and the same is true with our motherland. Just like a mother who can never think of anything other than the betterment of her children, our nation also showers motherly love on us, without expecting anything in return from us. But it is imperative for every Indian to have a sense of pride and gratitude towards the nation, in other words, practice nationalism in words and deeds.

Also Check: Essay on Democracy in India

India is one nation, despite religious and regional diversity

Nationalism binds us all in a spirit of oneness, despite all of us having different customs, holding different beliefs, observing different festivals and speaking in different languages. It is the sense of nationalism that protects the nation against all threats and dangers to its unity and integrity. We can have our different identities as people living in culturally and linguistically distinct states, but stand together as one under one flag, national anthem and national emblem. We can take our place with pride among citizens of the world as proud and loyal citizens of the largest democracy of the world.

The importance of our motherland surpasses all other considerations of caste, creed, and religion. It is only through this deep sense of nationalism and patriotism that we can safeguard our freedom that we achieved after supreme sacrifices and sufferings by millions of sons and daughters of India. Let us never dilute the spirit of nationalism to repay our debts to our motherland.

There are some forces at work which want to weaken the country by spreading separatist feelings and cries for azadi (as witnessed in troubled parts of Kashmir and North-East India). It is unfortunate that some educational institutions in India were recently in the thick of anti-India sloganeering and protests with cries of tearing apart India rending the air. Only an unwavering sense of nationalism can save the country from falling a prey to the evil designs of anti-India forces.

Essay on Nationalism 400 words

A sense of attachment and dedication towards the country in which one resides is called nationalism. Nationalism is the only reason which keeps every citizen of a country united despite their differences on linguistic, ethnicity and cultural fronts.

Also Check: Essay on Fundamental Rights

Equating nation with mother

Not only in our country but in the entire world, the nation is commonly treated as mother, because as a mother does for her children a nation cares for its citizen and rears and support them with the help of various natural resources without which requirements and purpose of life cannot be completed. It has been observed that during the times of conflicts and war, common citizens of the nation also get united and support their soldiers and the government.

Nationalism binds people in one thread

Nationalism is a collective sense of idea, the power of which can be sensed through the reality that the people living in the country’s borders ignore their differences and give importance to the loyalty towards the nation. Even they do not hesitate to give supreme sacrifice for their nation if it becomes necessary for the survival of their nation. Only because of the sense of nationalism, the people of different part of a country who may be completely unknown to each other get united, develop consensus and also discuss together on the issues related to their nation and find a common solution.

Nationalism and Globalization

According to some scholars, the process of globalization has influenced the nationalist thinking up to a major extent and now because of it the sense of national borders as well as the nationalism no longer exit and it has become a challenge to be handled. They argue that globalization and technological progress, such as internet and mobile phones have together turned the world into a global village and thus there is no sense of nationalism as a core value. However, this interpretation of nationalism is immaterial.

Also Check: Essay on Social Media

For the progress of any nation it is important that its citizen keep alive the sense of nationalism within them. Observing keenly the importance of developing sense of nationalism and spirit of love for their country in their citizens, every government around the world essentially organize their national festivals in which honouring the national flag is an important activity. Overall, the progress of any nation largely depends on the sense of nationalism in their citizens which is an important feeling to bind all the citizens together despite them hailing from different religions, castes, or social strata.

Also Check: Essay on Freedom of Speech

Essay on Nationalism FAQs

What is nationalism in 150 words.

Nationalism is a strong love and loyalty towards one's own country. It involves a deep connection to the nation's history, culture, and a sense of pride in its achievements.

What is nationalism in short notes?

Nationalism is a deep affection and allegiance to one's own country, fostering a sense of unity and shared identity among its people.

What is nationalism in few words?

Nationalism is a strong love for and devotion to one's own nation, promoting a sense of belonging and pride among its citizens.

How do you write a nationalism essay?

To write a nationalism essay, start by defining nationalism, discuss its impact on society, and explore examples. Emphasize the positive aspects of fostering unity while acknowledging potential challenges.

What is the topic of nationalism?

The topic of nationalism revolves around the love, loyalty, and pride individuals feel for their own country. It explores how this sentiment shapes societies and influences global dynamics.

What are the 10 types of nationalism?

The 10 types of nationalism include civic nationalism, ethnic nationalism, cultural nationalism, religious nationalism, liberal nationalism, expansionist nationalism, anti-colonial nationalism, territorial nationalism, left-wing nationalism, and right-wing nationalism.

Is nationalism in India essay?

Yes, an essay on nationalism in India would discuss the strong sense of patriotism, unity in diversity, and the historical struggle for independence that shaped India's nationalistic identity.

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Short essay on Nationalism VS Internationalism

Our era is an era of nation-states that have emerged out of the process of struggle against the colonial rule of imperialist powers. The struggle had a global character because war of independence was worldwide to win sovereignty by overthrowing imperialist regimes. The downfall of imperialism began with the Czariat Empire in 1917, during the First World War (1914-18), when Communist Revolution took place in Russia resulting in emancipation of several states that were annexed by Czar in course of time.

Thus as an aftermath of the Second World War (1939-45), the Great British Empire crippled and bowing to the national movement affected transfer of power in 1947 in India with which began an era of end of British rule in its colonies in Asia and Africa, one after another. As such, the end of colonialism is marked by rise of nationalism as an international phenomenon.

Because of this situation, all other colonial and imperialist power of Europe -France, Germany, Holland, Belgium, Portugal, – who are confronting national movements in their colonies in Asia and Africa, also had to pull out from their respective colonies thus causing rise of more nation-states, including in Eastern Europe.

Now, let us come to the very concept of nationalism Broadly speaking it includes identical sentiments over allegiance to the state, traditional cultural heritage unity among the people, territorial integrity and willful assertion of sovereignty of whole the nation. In a nutshell therefore constituents of the nation are the nationalities that are integrated emotionally, economically and socially and uphold common identity.

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This concept it is very important to note that the race, religion, language and culture determine nationalities or group of people but not the nation Afghans, Iranians and Arabs have a very strong bond of religion – i.e Islam, but are different nations. Similarly, the entire Europe i overwhelmingly Christian, but splits in different nations. So also is the case of Buddhists who are Chinese, Vietnamese and Koreans. That Cambodians, Sri Lankans and so on.

One thing very important and highly remarkable is that nationalism is itself is not antagonistic to other fellow nations. But under certain circumstances it may assume an aggressive posture against other nations. In such cases it could be termed as ‘aggressive nationalism’ and mc prove suicidal also. The Nazi regime headed by Adolf Hitler is an example.

Hitler assumed a posture of superior nations in the continent presuming Germans as born to rule over the countries. This led to his downfall and Germany was defeated in war and bifurcated.

In the manner nationalism emerged as a global phenomenon in course of struggle against colonialism, it influenced considerably the ‘shaping’ and norms of internationalism is based on fraternity and cooperation among the nations.

However, the accepted norms of internationalism include recognition of the right of all the nations to self-determinations, national sovereignty and security, cultural peace, socioeconomic progress and defend the country’s borders against external aggression. Non­interference into the internal affairs of one another is also included in these norms.

All this goes to show that there is no room for antagonism between nationalism and internationalism. The leader of the Russian Revolution V. I. Lenin had also observed to the effect in the same context that there is no internationalism without nationalism as the later is a constituent of the former.

The present era we have been living in is the era of bloom of internationalism. There were certain very important factors that have richly contributed to this growth. These include Russian Revolution and World Communist Movement, United Nations Organization (UNO), Non-aligned movement, (NAM), and British Common Wealth of Nations.

Recently many other organizations have emerged, though for economic purposes, yet they are based on the principle of internationalism. All these are remarkable for, international brotherhood, economic co-operations, scientific and technological cooperation and cultural exchanges among the nations. Development of tourism as an international phenomenon has also played a very important role in bringing the nations of the world closer to one another.

The recent spate of international terrorism is a danger to the spirit of internationalism. A strong support of all the nations of the world is needed to eliminate this trend of terrorism, so that the patrons of this horrendous evil who are the bitter enemies of humanity be isolated and punished.

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Short Essay on Nationalism

Nationalism is a concept that involves a feeling of extremely strong attachment towards one’s own country.

Due to one or more than one object factors like race, religion, language, literature, culture etc., there grows in a people a strong feeling of like-mindedness which endows them with the quality of nationality.

This feeling of oneness prompts every member of the group to feel themselves as equal partners in the pleasure and regret, justice and injustice, pride and humiliation of the entire people. In such a situation, in their feeling of nationality mingled with their patriotism grows into a political ideology, it is called nationalism.

Thus, nationalism finds expression through political aspirations. When the sense of self-identity increases, every nation raises the demand for establishing its own state. Materialization of this demand results in the establishment of the nation-state.

Nationalism is a great democratic ideal which continues to live as the strongest force and continues to inspire struggle for national liberation in different parts of the globe.

It stands for the nation-state and love for the nation-state, and advocates that every nationality has a right to have its own state.

It maintains that every distinct human group possesses some special qualities which must be preserved and developed for the common good of humanity. This can be achieved only if that group is free to develop its own laws and institutions.

Actually, the great ideal of nationalism—live and let live—has opened the gate of human development. This particular sense of unity has enriched the world’s storehouse of knowledge by giving inspiration man to create newer arts, literature, fine arts, etc.

National wealth used for the common interest has established man’s legitimate rights at the international forum by paving the way for his economic emancipation.

Merits and Demerits

Merits of Nationalism

• Useful for overall national development.
• Forerunner of national independence.
• Useful to establish democracy.
• Extension of co-operation and fraternity.
• Ensuring of internal stability.
• All-round development of human civilisation.
• Lessening of the possibility of war.
• Complementary to internationalism.

Demerits of Nationalism

• Distorted form of nationalism.
• Creator of imperialism.
• Propaganda for racism.
• Against healthy culture.
• Source of misdeed and misfortune.
• Anti-democratic.
• Against internationalism.
• Against world peace.

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"Racism, Nationalism and Xenophobia" - 7th International Interdisciplinary Conference

Conference online: 23-24 May 2024

All details:  https://www.inmindsupport.com/racism-conference

Scientific Committee:

Professor Wojciech Owczarski – University of Gdańsk, Poland

Professor Paulo Endo – University of São Paulo, Brazil

CALL FOR PAPERS

          It is widely known that ideologies of racism, nationalism, and xenophobia are dangerous and spread all over the world. We want to examine these terms as much as possible, from many perspectives and variable aspects: in politics, society, psychology, culture, and many more. We also want to devote considerable attention to how the phenomena of racism, nationalism and xenophobia are represented in artistic practices: in literature, film, theatre or visual arts.​           

         Our first conference on racism, nationalism and xenophobia took place in Warsaw, in March 2016. The second edition was held in June 2018 and the next ones in 2020, 2021, 2023 and 2023. We hosted over 180 scholars representing universities and research institutions from all over the world.​

          We invite researchers representing various academic disciplines: history, politics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, economics, law, literary studies, theatre studies, film studies, fine arts, design, memory studies, migration studies, consciousness studies, dream studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, medical sciences, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, cognitive sciences et al.​

​Different forms of presentations are encouraged, including case studies, theoretical investigations, problem-oriented arguments, and comparative analyses.

We will be happy to hear from both experienced scholars and young academics at the start of their careers, as well as doctoral students. We also invite all persons interested in participating in the conference as listeners, without giving a presentation.

 We hope that due to its interdisciplinary nature, the conference will bring many interesting observations on and discussions about the role of racism, nationalism and xenophobia in the past and in the present-day world. 

         Our repertoire of suggested topics includes but is not restricted to:

I. Politics and History

- colonialism/ postcolonialism

- anti-semitism: past and present

- islamophobia and terrorism

- orientalism

- imperialism

- crimes against humanity

- violations of human rights

- racism, nationalism and political correctness

- nationalism and patriotism

- xenophobia and cosmopolitism

- racism, nationalism and religion

II. Anthropology and Philosophy  

- ideologies of racism

- nationalism and “will of power”

- cultural determinants of racism, nationalism, and xenophobia

- nationalist nations

- xenophobic societies

- racist generations

III. Psychology

- stereotypes and prejudices

- racist myths and phantasms

- racism and scapegoat mechanism  

- xenophobia and sense of guilt

- nationalism and narcissism

- projection and repression

- individual and social proneness to hate ideology

- therapy for victims of discrimination

IV. Memory and Protection of Human Rights

- organization of human rights protection

- education against racism, nationalism and xenophobia

- memory in the service of education

- memorial places

- solidarity with victims of violence

- empathy with the Other

V. Literature and Arts

- racism, nationalism and xenophobia in literature

- racism, nationalism and xenophobia in film

- racism, nationalism and xenophobia in theatre

- literature and art against hate ideology

- racist artists

​Please submit abstracts (no longer than 300 words) of your proposed 20-minute presentations, together with a short biographical note, by 5 May 2024 to:  [email protected]