Nationalism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

A nation is a group that identifies itself as such, based on a shared understanding of a common culture, history, land, and descent. Nationalism is the mobilization of a nation in pursuit of political goals. These typically include national survival and self-rule (meaning that the rulers come from the same nation as the ruled). Self-rule usually means having a sovereign state of one’s own. The state, according to German scholar Max Weber, is an institution claiming to exercise a monopoly of the legitimate use of force over a given territory, and it is recognized by other states. Most states are unitary, with a single center of authority, but some are federal—having a hierarchy of units with shared sovereignty. Ninety percent of the states currently in existence are unitary.

After state sovereignty has been achieved, “nationalist” politics may involve particular concern for national defense against threats external and internal, electoral appeals based on national purity and betrayal, or defense of the rights of compatriots outside the state’s borders. Nationalist policies may include state ownership of economic assets, purging the country of minorities, or placing restrictions on immigrants. Current novelties include “resource nationalism” (such as that of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela) and “consumer nationalism” (e.g., Indian pride in Indian products).

Nationalism has a bad name. It is a word that has strongly negative connotations in the English language. It implies an excessive, irrational commitment to advancing the interests of one’s own nation at the expense of others. Adolf Hitler is the prime example of nationalism pushed to the extreme. When a journalist asked if he intended to nationalize private industry, Hitler famously replied that he intended to “nationalize” the German people. Fascism effectively stripped nationalism of its place in the liberal worldview. (The word patriotism, meaning love of one’s country, has more positive resonance, at least for the mainstream of American society.) And yet the nation-state is still the basic building block of the international state system. It has beaten out rival formations, such as the small city-state and the multinational empire. In 1919, the new global community of states chose to call itself the League of Nations, and then in 1945 the United Nations.

Nationalism is compatible with a wide variety of political positions: forward looking or backward looking, liberal or illiberal, egalitarian or racist. Nationalism was born as a philosophy of liberation. In 1789 the French people rose up against their king and demanded the right to rule themselves. Prior to the existence of nationalism, people were aware of themselves as being from a particular place, being a member of a particular religious group, and being subject to a certain hierarchy of rule (typically, a dynastic monarchy). But they were not aware of themselves as a nation in the modern sense. As John Stuart Mill noted, in order for a people to rule itself (the literal meaning of “democracy” in Greek), you have to first define who are “the people.” And the people were the citizens of France—the French nation. The American republic was born at about the same time, but that emancipatory project focused on the rights of the individual, and of the states, without a clear sense of a nation as a collective actor. It was only later that the Americans started to think of themselves as a nation—or, as Seymour Martin Lipset put it, the “first new nation,” based on a written constitution and not a national community.

In the course of the nineteenth century, spreading the rights of man was linked to spreading the rights of nations to rule themselves. Even though Napoleon’s attempt to redraw the map of Europe was rebuffed, the Napoleonic wars led to the formation of a wave of nation-states in Latin America. In the 1820s the Greeks won their independence from the Ottoman Empire, but the Holy Alliance of Austria, Prussia, and Russia managed to beat back the tide of nationalism in the 1848 revolutions. Nationalism triumphed with the unifications of Italy (1870) and Germany (1871). But increasingly nationalism was being used by conservative rulers to suppress the rights of national minorities and to build support for their regimes in the face of challenges from liberal and socialist popular movements.

The surge of nationalism in the European states coincided with their colonial expansion. A nation’s right to rule itself apparently included the right to rule other peoples, especially if they were of a different race or religion.World War I (1914– 1918) was a body blow to imperialism, knocking down the Ottoman, Hapsburg, German, and Russian empires. In their place, a dozen new nation-states sprang up in central Europe, in line with President Woodrow Wilson’s recognition of the interests of peoples under imperial rule. Even Vladimir Lenin, sensing the spirit of the times, paid lip service to national self-determination, and the Soviet Union was created as a federation of sovereign republics. Anticolonial movements in the British, Dutch, and French empires rallied to the call of national liberation, but they had to wait until World War II (1939–1945) had weakened their colonial masters.

The charter of the United Nations, approved in 1945, recognized “the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.” The United States—a noncolonial power—was now the dominant world player, and it encouraged the European states to dismantle their empires. Independence came speedily in India and Indonesia, but not without bloodshed. In Vietnam and Algeria, it required protracted wars. During the cold war, both sides appealed to nationalism in a bid to undermine the sphere of influence of their adversaries. The United States protested the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, as exemplified by the USSR’s crushing of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. The 1959 Cuban revolution against dictatorial rule took the form of a nationalist movement under communist leadership, endorsed by the Soviet Union.

The End Of Nationalism?

After the cold war abruptly ended in 1991, the West expected that the nations formerly under Soviet control would become democracies, and the past century of polarizing nationalism and state conflict would give way to a new era of international cooperation and respect for human rights. That was not to be. Nationalism was in fact a crucial force in causing the Soviet collapse, and the shift toward democracy coincided with an increase, not a decrease, in nationalist mobilization. Polish resistance against Soviet rule, which took the form of the Solidarity workers’ movement, was a direct continuation of the nationalist projects of the nineteenth century. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been sovereign states after 1918 until their occupation by the USSR in 1940. Once glasnost started to take hold in 1987, they began agitating for their independence. Other nationalist conflicts erupted across the length and breadth of the Soviet Union: Kazakhs rioted because an ethnic Russian was appointed their party boss; Armenians living in the province of Nagorno Karabakh fought for freedom from rule by Azerbaijan.

A similar fratricidal logic played out in Yugoslavia in 1991. One after another, the republics of the Yugoslav federation declared their independence: Slovenia, Croatia, and then Bosnia. The Serbian minorities living in the latter two regions rose in revolt and received military support from the rump Yugoslavia. Brutal fighting caused 200,000 deaths while millions fled their homes; finally fighting was stopped by a U.S.-led military intervention in 1995. A new phrase entered the English language: “ethnic cleansing.”

The bloodbath in Yugoslavia forced Western elites to reexamine the question of nationalism. How was it possible, in this globally connected world, for this nineteenth-century philosophy to mobilize people to acts of extreme violence? The former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were not isolated examples. All around the globe, nationalist conflicts were erupting. The struggle for power between Tutsis and Hutus triggered the horrific genocide in Rwanda in 1994. There were secessionist conflicts under way in Asia (Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Philippines) and Africa (Eritrea and Sudan). The Arab-Israeli conflict—a battle between competing nationalisms—showed no sign of resolution. The Gulf War (1990–1991) was fought to restore sovereignty to Kuwait and also created de facto self-rule for the Kurds of northern Iraq. Even Latin America was not immune to these trends. A new assertiveness by indigenous peoples fueled regional insurrections from Mexico to Bolivia.

The Quest For Statehood

National self-determination is fine in the abstract. The problems start when it comes to deciding which nation gets sovereignty over which territory. There are more than 6,000 groups that can be identified as “nations” in the world of 2008 (based primarily on having a distinct language). But only 192 states are recognized as sovereign by the United Nations. Clearly, not every nation can have its own state. And what happens if two or more nations claim the same territory (as do the Israelis and Palestinians)? The global distribution of ethnic groups has a long tail: The eighty-three most commonly spoken languages are spoken in 80 percent of the world’s population. The nation-state system is well established in Europe and East Asia, where more than 70 percent of the population belongs to the nation after which the state is named. In most states of the Americas and the Middle East, the largest national group ranges from 40 to 90 percent of the population. In Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, such national homogeneity is quite rare. In sub-Saharan Africa, the largest ethnic group often amounts to less than 30 percent of the population of a state.

For all the talk of self-determination, the international state system that emerged in the twentieth century was extraordinarily reluctant to permit secession. Only a handful of states managed to secede: Norway (1905), Iceland (1918), Ireland (1921), Singapore (1965), Bangladesh (1971), and Eritrea (1993). The vast majority of new states were born from the dissolution of multinational empires. The three socialist federations (the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia) broke up into the preexisting republics that had made up the federation. The sole exception is Kosovo, an Albanian-populated region that had been subordinated to Serbia and that declared independence in February 2008.There are four regions inside the former Soviet Union (Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, and Trans-Dniester) that have established de facto self-rule but have not been recognized as sovereign by any other country.

The largest group currently denied self-rule is probably the Kurds, whose twenty to twenty-five million members are scattered across Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Taiwan has self-rule, but not international recognition. There are dozens of large ethnic groups within China and India that speak distinct languages, but they are not pursuing independent statehood. Secessionist movements are confined to proportionally small groups, such as the Sikhs in Punjab, Uighurs in Sinkiang, and Tibetans in Tibet.

Ethnicity can be defined as a subjective sense of group belonging. It is subjective in that it cannot be pinned down to objective criteria. If some people see themselves as a group and behave accordingly, the group exists. An ethnic group that develops political aspiration to self-rule becomes a nation. Ethnicity involves the perception of sharing the following characteristics: a specific territory (a homeland, which may or may not be where the group now lives), history (formative events, wars, heroes, what Austrian socialist thinker Otto Bauer called a “community of fate”), descent (links by ties of family, of “blood,” perhaps extending to racial categories), culture (customs, food, rituals, clothing, etc.), language, and religion.

Any given nation will exhibit most but not all these attributes. For example, Irish nationalism was a potent force in the nineteenth century, even though by then 90 percent of the Irish spoke only English. Analysts disagree about whether these attributes constitute a “core” identity or merely an outward appearance. Are they innate or learned? Are they fixed or transient? Anthropologist Fredrik Barth argues that ethnicity is a boundary phenomenon, the product of interactions between groups rather than the expression of the group’s inner core. Ethnic groups evolve through the selection of markers that serve to distinguish them from neighboring groups. David Laitin argues that language is a handy marker, because it is flexible (it can be learned) but not too flexible, (it takes time to learn).

Competing Theories

There is a broad spectrum of theories about nationalism. They generally agree about the facts in the historical record but disagree about how to explain the rise and persistence of nationalism.

Primordialism. Primordialism, now known as perennialism, is best represented in the works of Anthony Smith. Primordialists see ethnicity as an enduring and natural feature of human existence, one that preceded the arrival of the modern state. They cite evidence for the emergence of French and English identities as early as the ninth century. The term nation originated in the thirteenth century, when church delegates to the 1274 Council of Lyons were grouped by “nation.” Nationalists themselves often invoke the premodern origins of their nations. Religious conflicts, such as that between Christianity and Islam, were key to the evolution of nations such as Spain, Poland, and Serbia. Primordialism has been criticized by writers, such as Robert Kaplan, who talk about “tribal hatreds” or “ancient enmities” when trying to explain modern conflicts. Ethnic identities are not fixed; they can shift quickly in response a changing political environment.

Walker Connor argues that all nationalists deploy the rhetoric of “blood” to some degree—a bloodline or blood sacrifice. This leads into sociobiological approaches, which see ethnicity as hardwired into our genetic code. Sacrifice for the kin group may be rational for evolutionary survival. Even nonhuman primates display intense group solidarity and xenophobia. Psychological experiments show an alarming propensity for human subjects to spontaneously develop group loyalty and antagonism toward the “other.” However, in communities of more than 5,000 people, it is impossible to sustain links based on actual kinship, so people switch to mythical kinship, the nation.

Structuralism. Structuralists tend to explain away nationalism by treating it as a by-product of the functional requirements of some deeper social mechanism. Echoing Karl Marx, Ernst Gellner, and Eric Hobsbawm tie nationalism to the rise of capitalism. Gellner argues that industrialization requires a mobile workforce capable of learning new skills and trained through a public education system. It is more efficient to have one language. Hence, the state-sponsored education system forges a common national identity. Nationalism has the political advantage of diverting the workers from overthrowing capitalism into hostility toward other ethnic groups and nations. Michael Hechter notes the role that ethnicity plays even in mature capitalist economies in segmenting the workforce. Minorities who play a “middleman” role, such as the Jews in Europe, Indians in East Africa, or Chinese in Indonesia, have often been the target of pogroms.

Donald Horowitz argues that ethnic conflict in developing countries is driven by status anxiety, triggered by social changes such as urban migration that accompany economic development. Ethnic groups want to rule themselves, because it confers status and brings jobs and economic favors. It is often easy for the catchall anticolonial movement to be captured by the dominant ethnic group, who then rule in their own interest. In some societies, a multiethnic coalition may take root and survive for decades, as in Malaysia. In other cases, an ethnic minority that feels itself persistently excluded from power will rebel, as with the Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Instrumentalism. Instrumentalists see nationalism as a tool used by elites to pursue their own economic or political goals. In sixteenth-century England, monarchs appealed to nationalism to undercut the nobles and strengthen their own rule. Rising elites in nineteenth-century Europe used it to build a political coalition to dislodge the multinational empires. Jack Snyder notes that the spread of democracy has often coincided with an increase in nationalism. In countries such as Yugoslavia making a transition from authoritarian rule to competitive elections, it is easy for politicians to attract votes by appealing to the simple fact of ethnic identity. (“Vote for me because I will defend the Serbs.”) If an excluded ethnic group turns to violence, then the logic of polarization becomes even more deadly. Those who favor compromise with the other side are condemned as traitors, perhaps even assassinated.

Rational choice theorists such as Hechter and David Laitin approach nationalism as a collective phenomenon rooted in the rational pursuit of individual self-interest. The incentive structures provided by political institutions are crucially important in channeling nationalism in one direction or another. For example, Russians living in the Baltic states after 1991 did not turn to violence to protect their group interests, because they faced strong incentives to assimilate and become citizens, which would bring higher living standards and a European Union passport. Nationalism is the product of social institutions and is not reducible to individual choices. For example, even though personal relations between ethnic groups in Bosnia prior to 1991 were typically good (with intermarriage quite common), the changing political environment forced most people to behave in new, ethnically exclusive ways.

Deconstructionism. Deconstructionists such as Benedict Anderson argue that ethnicity and nationalism are essentially artificial constructs, imagined communities that arose in the new media that accompanied economic modernization. The rise of mass literacy and the spread of newspapers made it possible for people to imagine nations into existence. In contrast to primordialists and structuralists, who stress the European roots of nationalism, Anderson points to the role of colonialism and the early emergence of nation-states in Latin America. He also draws on the case of Indonesia, which forged a new nation out of a vast, diverse archipelago and created a new artificial language for its colonial bureaucracy in 1928. But contra the postmodernists, it is important to note that Anderson is not describing “imaginary” communities. Once the community is imagined into existence, the social movements and states that result are real.

Current Debates

Nationalism may be particularly hard for Americans to understand, since the United States is an immigrant society (where every group except Native Americans came from somewhere else) and unique in basing itself on a set of political principles, a social contract. These two factors mean that Americans tend to see national identity as voluntary and inclusive. Most nationalist conflicts around the world tend to be coercive and exclusionary. Rogers Brubaker and Liah Greenfeld have explored the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism. Civic nationalism—as in America, Britain, or France—is inclusive, based on the assimilation of people of diverse ethnic backgrounds into a common culture and including strong guarantees for individual rights. Ethnic nationalism, such as that of Germany or Japan, stresses the group over the individual and ties the nation to a specific ethnic identity, making it hard for immigrants to acquire citizenship. Critics argue that even the “civic” nations do in fact have an ethnic core—note the long denial of civil rights to African Americans in the United States and the problems that France is now encountering with absorbing its Muslim minority. Also, in recent decades, the two models have converged, with the embrace of various forms of multiculturalism. In the United States, there has been a shift from talking about the “melting pot” to the “salad bowl.” The United Kingdom has pursued multiculturalism, trying to bring racial and religious minorities into the media, political parties, and educational system. France has stuck with its assimilationist approach, while Germany has generally pursued a “separation” model, recognizing that the minorities (mainly Turks) are part of society but not adapting the national culture to bring them into the mainstream.

To what extent can a liberal society recognize and protect group rights without violating individual rights (or the rights of other groups)? Will Kymlicka argues that society has a specific moral obligation to respect the rights of indigenous groups (now called “first peoples” in Canada) over immigrants. U.S. law has long recognized the “sovereignty” of the Native American nations, and similar steps have been taken in recent decades in Canada and Australia.

There has been a lively debate over whether skillful constitutional design can head off ethnic conflict. Does a federal structure give ethnic minorities the security they need? Or does it merely provide a framework for them to consolidate their political power and ratchet up their nationalist demands? Canada is still struggling to contain the demands of the French-speaking Quebecois, who came within a hair’s breadth (0.58 percent) of voting for secession in a 1995 referendum. The ethnic federations of Czechoslovakia,Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union collapsed as soon as they started to democratize. India is the prime example of a multiethnic society that has been able to satisfy group demands within a democratic federation, though periodic outbreaks of “communal violence” between Hindus and Muslims continue to occur.

Arend Lijphart advanced a consociational model, based on the Dutch case, involving power sharing between the leading groups. Such arrangements are difficult to craft and quite rare in practice. Often, politicians who propose power sharing lose the support of their own ethnic groups. The first edition of Robert Dahl’s influential Polyarchy, published in 1971, included Lebanon and Sri Lanka as successful examples, but this proved premature, as both countries descended into violence soon thereafter. Belgium, another common example, is looking more and more precarious as the two communities of Flems and Walloons are politically deadlocked. South Africa seems to be turning out well, with elements of federalism and consociationalism, but the most important institution in South Africa is the single dominant ruling party, the African National Congress, something that does not feature in the consociational or federal models. There are of course many cases of ethnic minorities living more or less peacefully and harmoniously within multiethnic states, but these minorities usually have little or no access to state power.

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