Nationalism

Loyalty to one's people is ancient, but nationalism — the doctrine that humanity divides into nations and each nation deserves its own state — is modern. Most historians date it to late-18th-century Europe, around the French Revolution.

The French Revolution making 'the nation' sovereign; Napoleon's wars spreading — and provoking — national feeling across Europe; Romanticism (Herder) exalting language and folk culture; and print, mass schooling, and conscription binding strangers into one imagined people.

Rousseau and Herder as intellectual sources; Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation; Mazzini, the apostle of national self-determination; Renan, who defined the nation as a 'daily plebiscite.' It was carried mostly by poets, teachers, and states — it has no single canon.

Through the 19th-century unifications (Italy, Germany); the collapse of empires after 1918 under the banner of self-determination; and decolonization after 1945, when anti-colonial movements everywhere adopted it. Today nearly every state on earth presents itself as a nation-state.

In form, it is effectively universal: the roughly 193 UN member states organize humanity as nations. The intensity of nationalist feeling varies widely and is measured by surveys, not membership.

1789; the 1848 'springtime of peoples'; the unifications of Italy (1861) and Germany (1871); self-determination in 1918; fascism's extreme nationalism and the Second World War; decolonization; and the nationalist revivals since 1989 and in the present decade.

Nationalists say the great wrong is a people denied its own life: ruled by foreigners or empires, its language and culture pushed aside, its members left rootless. Mazzini taught that humanity is disfigured whenever a nation is enslaved.

From domination: empires ruling peoples without their consent, conquerors erasing cultures, and — in modern accounts like Hazony's — universal projects that override nations. Injustice begins when one people decides for another.

A social and political break: the borders of states do not match the communities people actually belong to, so millions live under governments not their own. Gellner defined nationalism precisely as the demand that the political unit and the national unit coincide; moderns like Tamir add the loneliness of people stripped of communal roots.

Self-determination: every nation free to govern itself, keep its language and culture, and shape its own laws — a world of independent nation-states rather than empires. Mill argued that free institutions work best where government and nationality coincide.

First awakening, then liberation, then building: scholars and poets revive the language and history; movements mobilize the people; the nation wins statehood or unification; schools, armies, and institutions then bind it together. Hroch traced this staged path across Europe's small nations.

Partly. Each nation's problem can be solved by independence, but Gellner noted there are far more potential nations than possible states, and peoples are intermingled — so the principle can never be satisfied for everyone at once. Liberal nationalists answer with autonomy and minority rights short of statehood.

The person gains dignity and belonging — a story larger than one life; society gains the solidarity that makes democracy and shared sacrifice possible; and the world, in Mazzini's vision, becomes a family of free nations each serving humanity in its own way.

It names no single final source. Truth about the nation is found in its shared history, language, and culture, and — for civic nationalists like Renan — in the living will of its people, the 'daily plebiscite.' It claims no revelation.

On tradition, shared history, and sentiment, supported by historical scholarship — not on revelation. Herder pointed to language and folk culture as the evidence of nationhood; Renan pointed to memory and consent.

Nationalists argue the nation is confirmed by lived experience: people everywhere feel it, sacrifice for it, and organize by it, and Smith's ethno-symbolism finds real ethnic pasts beneath modern nations. Critics answer that strong feeling proves attachment, not truth.

It has no formal test; national narratives are checked, when they are checked, by ordinary historical evidence. Renan himself admitted that nations remember selectively — forgetting, he wrote, is part of nation-making — and historians have shown many 'ancient' traditions to be recent inventions.

Nationalism takes no position; its followers draw morality from their religions and philosophies. Its own distinctive claim is narrower: that special duties to one's compatriots are morally real, a claim defended philosophically by Miller and Tamir.

It makes no claim either way; questions beyond the physical world are left to its members' faiths. Scholars note, however, that nationalism often borrows the forms of religion — sacred flags, martyrs, shrines of unknown soldiers — without stating any metaphysics.

Open — there is no fixed creed. Every generation redefines the nation, and the doctrine itself has civic, ethnic, liberal, religious, and populist readings; Renan's point was precisely that the nation must be re-chosen daily.

No scripture. Its working canon: Herder on language and Volk, Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation, Mazzini's The Duties of Man, Renan's What Is a Nation?, and Mill's chapter on nationality; alongside them, anthems, declarations of independence, and national histories function as founding texts.

As ordinary lectures, essays, and pamphlets of the 18th–20th centuries, spread by print, schools, and universities — no canonization, no guarded transmission. Anderson argued that print itself, reaching strangers in one language, is what first made nations imaginable.

No divine claim is made for any nationalist text. Their authority is that of persuasive human argument and of the movements that adopted them — nothing more is claimed, so preservation is an ordinary publishing matter.

The themes: the nation as bearer of language, memory, and culture; its right to govern itself; the member's duties to it. The style ranges from Romantic exhortation in Fichte and Mazzini, to Renan's cool lecture, to the analytic social science of Gellner and Anderson.

That humanity is naturally made of nations; that each nation deserves self-government; that individuals owe loyalty and service to their own; and that a nation's language and culture are worth preserving. Mill stated plainly that free institutions are next to impossible in a country of several nationalities.

As political argument, not scripture — there is no literal-or-symbolic divide. Historians read the texts in their contexts; movements have read them selectively, quoting Fichte both for liberation and for chauvinism.

An academic field grew around them: modernists (Gellner, Anderson, Hobsbawm) who hold nations to be products of modernity; ethno-symbolists (Smith) who trace them to older ethnic cores; and normative schools — liberal nationalism (Tamir, Miller) and conservative defenses (Hazony).

The texts are modern publications, well preserved; the disputes are over meaning, not wording — whether Fichte's Addresses prefigure chauvinism, how far Renan's civic definition was sincere, and which thinker truly speaks for the tradition.

They present themselves as human argument and appeal: Mazzini addressed Italian workingmen, Fichte his defeated nation, Renan a scholarly audience. None claims more than an author's authority, and each asks to be judged by history and conscience.

Nationalism takes no position on God; it is a political doctrine, and its followers include believers of every faith and none. Scholars from Hayes to Anderson note that it often functions like a religion — sacred symbols, martyrs, immortality through the nation — without ever stating a theology.

It offers no doctrine; that is left to its members' religions. When Romantics like Herder spoke of a people's 'spirit' (Volksgeist), they meant its shared culture and character, not a metaphysical claim.

No claim is made about the human soul. Renan did call the nation 'a soul, a spiritual principle' — but he meant shared memories and present consent, a metaphor for community, not an account of souls.

It has no theory of consciousness. Its texts speak only of 'national consciousness' — a people's shared awareness of being one — which historians and sociologists study as a social fact, not a claim about the mind.

It gives no philosophical answer, but it insists that nationality is one of the deepest, most lasting strands of a person: you are born into a language, a history, and a people, and these usually accompany you for life. Tamir argues this membership is part of what constitutes the self.

It takes no stand on good or sinful. Its distinctive claim, from Herder onward, is that humans are born into peoples — culture-bearing communities — and cannot flourish as rootless individuals.

It has no doctrine of free will versus fate, but the question splits its two great wings: civic nationalists follow Renan — the nation is chosen daily, by consent — while ethnic nationalists treat nationality as inherited, something no one chooses.

No position; it is a theory of political community, not of mind and body. Such questions are left to its members' religions and philosophies.

It offers no answer; the question lies outside its scope entirely. Political theorists class nationalism as a 'thin' ideology that must borrow such answers from fuller worldviews.

It has no teaching on the universe's beginning; its followers take their answers from science or from their religions. Its own story begins much later — with peoples, languages, and states.

Nationalism brings no complete moral code; followers keep the ethics of their religion or philosophy. What it adds is one claim: we owe more to our compatriots than to strangers, and such partiality is right — a position argued carefully by Miller and Tamir.

Loyalty, solidarity, courage in the nation's defense, public service, and love of its language, land, and story. Mazzini put duty before rights: life's worth is measured by what one gives the nation and, through it, humanity.

Treason above all — aiding the nation's enemies, betraying its secrets, desecrating its symbols. Civic versions also condemn putting party, class, or self above country; ethnic versions have added harsher bans, such as marrying or mixing outside the group, which civic nationalists reject.

Flying the flag, singing the anthem, keeping national holidays and days of remembrance, military or civic service, and teaching children the national language and history. Billig showed how countless small daily signs — coins, maps, the word 'we' in the news — quietly renew the nation.

Fellow nationals are treated as an extended family: work is a contribution to the common life, hardship is borne together — most visibly in war — and community runs through national institutions, from schools to the welfare state. Miller argues this shared identity is what makes strangers willing to sacrifice for one another.

The devoted patriot: one who serves the nation in work and, if needed, in arms, keeps its language and memory alive, and passes them to the next generation. Its monuments say it plainly — the founder, the national poet, and the unknown soldier are the figures it honors most.

There is no doctrine of sin or forgiveness. Offenses against the nation are handled by law — treason trials — or by public disgrace and, sometimes, rehabilitation; nations themselves answer for collective wrongs through apologies, memorials, and rewritten textbooks.

It gives no complete answer, but it teaches that a life gains meaning by belonging to, and serving, a people whose story began before you and continues after you. Mazzini taught that the nation is the workshop in which each person serves humanity.

Honestly: nationalism does not say; it has no teaching on death, and its followers keep their religions' answers. What it offers instead is remembrance — the fallen live on in the nation's memory — and Anderson observed that its cenotaphs and tombs of unknown soldiers speak of immortality without naming any afterlife.

Not salvation. It promises dignity and freedom from foreign rule, a home where your language is spoken and your dead are honored, and the continuity of your people across generations.

For the individual it names no final destination — that is left to religion. For humanity, Mazzini hoped for a fraternity of free nations at peace, each with its own mission; others, like Hazony, expect a permanent plurality of nations rather than any final unity.

None of the three: no final judgment, no cosmic cycles, no doctrine of the self's end. Its closest idiom is 'the judgment of history' — nations are vindicated or condemned by what they become; it offers continuity, not personal immortality.

As powerful belonging: pride on independence days and in victories, shared grief at national tragedies, instant fellowship with strangers who carry the same passport or sing the same anthem. Anderson called it a deep horizontal comradeship — felt most intensely in war, sport, and exile.

The crucial divide is civic versus ethnic, drawn classically by Kohn: civic nationalism defines the nation by citizenship and consent, ethnic nationalism by descent and language. Around it cluster cultural, religious, liberal, anti-colonial, and right-wing populist variants.

Completely — each nationalism is built from its own culture's materials: religion in Poland or Iran, language in Catalonia or Quebec, anti-colonial liberation across Africa and Asia. Chatterjee showed how colonized peoples reworked the European model into something their own.

Who belongs — citizenship or blood; the place of minorities and immigrants; whether the nation needs its own state or only autonomy; the role of religion; and whether pooling sovereignty, as in the European Union, betrays the nation or serves it. Tamir and Hazony, both defenders, disagree sharply on where its limits lie.

From misunderstanding, defenders say: equating all nationalism with chauvinism or fascism, when love of one's own need not mean hatred of others. From real disagreement: Nussbaum's cosmopolitan objection that birthplace is morally arbitrary, and the historical charge that national feeling repeatedly turns exclusionary — a risk serious nationalists concede and try to guard against.

It supplies the name you carry, the history you learn, the calendar you keep, and the heroes you honor; it decides what language children study, whom the community mourns, and where solidarity flows. Miller argues it is precisely this shared identity that sustains democratic trust and the welfare state.

With science there is little friction — it makes no claims science could test, and Gellner argued it is itself a product of industrial modernity. The real negotiation is with globalization: trade, migration, and supranational bodies; some nationalists adapt, others resist, and that is today's live debate.

A sovereign nation-state: a people governing itself, with laws made by its own institutions out of its own traditions and interests — never handed down by empire or foreign power. Historically it has coexisted with monarchy, democracy, and dictatorship, but its classic thinkers tied it to popular sovereignty: the nation itself is the source of law.

It has no constitutional doctrine of its own. Its popular-sovereignty strand holds that rulers serve the nation and may be resisted when they betray it — nationalist revolutions were fought on exactly that ground. The honest record adds the opposite use: rulers have silenced opponents by branding them anti-national, a danger critics like Kedourie documented.

No shared doctrine. Historically its imagery cast men as the nation's soldiers and women as its mothers and keepers of culture; national movements have both mobilized women — many won the vote through national service and anti-colonial struggle — and confined them to symbolic roles. Scholarship on gender and nation reports both sides of this record.

This is where its two wings part decisively. Civic nationalism offers full and equal citizenship to everyone who joins the political community, whatever their origin or belief; ethnic nationalism has ranged from tolerated minority status to discrimination, expulsion, and worse. The honest record includes both minority-rights protections written by nationalists and ethnic cleansing carried out by them; liberal nationalists like Tamir insist a national state is obligated to protect its minorities.

For national defense and liberation: wars of independence and defense of the homeland are its paradigm just causes, and conscription is the duty it asks. It must also be said that aggression and conquest have been justified in national terms; civic theorists condemn that as the doctrine's corruption, and just-war thinkers like Walzer ground the defense of national communities in strict limits.

Leaving is ordinary: modern states recognize emigration and change of citizenship, and the right to leave any country is written into the Universal Declaration. Nationalism's harsh word — traitor — is reserved for aiding the nation's enemies, though closed regimes have punished exit itself; diasporas, meanwhile, are often embraced as the nation abroad, what Anderson called long-distance nationalism.

Three arguments. Its emancipatory record: decolonization freed most of humanity under the banner of self-determination, now written into the UN Charter. Its democratic argument: self-rule and the welfare state seem to need bounded solidarity — people accept majority decisions and redistribution among those they count as 'us' (Tamir, Miller). And its human argument: belonging to a people meets a deep need that thinner identities have not replaced.

The objections are famous and real: Tagore called the nation a machine that grinds moral man; Orwell described nationalism as the habit of placing your nation beyond good and evil; Einstein dismissed it as an infantile disease; Nussbaum argues birthplace is morally arbitrary; and fascism stands as the charge that the doctrine ends in catastrophe. Its best answers: patriotism is not chauvinism (Viroli); fascism was imperial conquest that destroyed nations — a betrayal of self-determination, not its fruit (Tamir, Hazony); and duties to humanity are best delivered through functioning national communities (Miller).

Mostly, with one known strain: if every nation deserves its own state, but peoples are intermingled and potential nations far outnumber viable states, the principle cannot be satisfied for all — one people's self-determination can mean another's minority status. Defenders answer with federalism, autonomy, and minority rights short of statehood; critics reply that the tension has repeatedly been resolved by force instead.

Its political prediction has held remarkably: legitimacy worldwide now flows to states that claim to embody nations. Its picture of humanity as divided into ancient, natural nations is the disputed part: modernists showed many nations and their 'age-old' traditions to be recent constructions, while ethno-symbolists answer that they grow from real, older ethnic cores. Everyday experience — how readily people feel and die for nations — is evidence both sides claim.

No — and almost no one tries. Nationalism is a 'thin' doctrine: it answers political questions only, so every nationalist borrows a fuller worldview — a religion, liberalism, socialism — for God, morality, and death. Daily life crosses it constantly too: people trade, marry, and migrate across nations without a second thought, which Billig notes coexists easily with routine national loyalty.

Its achievements are enormous: decolonization and the independence of most of today's states, the unifications of Italy and Germany, revived languages, and the bounded solidarity behind democracy and the welfare state. Its harms are equally documented: nationalist fervor helped fuel the world wars, and ethnic cleansing and genocide — from the Armenian genocide to the Holocaust — were carried out in the nation's name. Defenders answer that these crimes came from ethnic supremacism and imperial ambition, corruptions the civic tradition itself condemns; critics like Kedourie reply that the line between the doctrine and its corruption has proved thin in practice. Both records stand.

As a loyalty, it rarely states a test for itself, and honest observers say most nationalists treat it as beyond disproof. Parts of it are testable, though: if stable democracy and generous welfare flourished just as well in post-national units — the European Union is the running experiment — the solidarity argument would weaken; and if national identities dissolved under globalization, its picture of durable nations would fail. Mill's classic claim, that free institutions need a shared nationality, is checked against multinational democracies like Switzerland and India — a debate still open. A fair person could walk away if belonging proved deliverable without nations, at no cost to freedom or solidarity.