Nationalism

The term nationalism covers an imprecise range of meanings that have changed over the course of time. It includes concepts which vary according to what is being analyzed—politics, economics, culture, sociology, morality, and so on. However, nationalism is above all an historical phenomenon, with a different function in each age, hence the diversity of interpretation which has accompanied historical change. Other, "essentialist" interpretations of nationalism are possible, which are historic and which are produced without the intervention of conscious rationality: these regard nationalism as a feeling of community supported by cultural, ethnological, and sociological uniformity, with a common origin (race), a common language, and a common religion. However, because nations are the result of large, complex historical processes, none of them last forever, and as a result, all have a beginning and an end.

Nationalism is originally a European phenomenon that spread through the Western world, but it has become universal, expanding to the Islamic world, post-Communist societies, and the former colonial countries of Africa and Asia. The relationship between nationalism and the state exists in two spheres—political and economic. The term nationalism first appeared at the beginning of the eighteenth century in works by English political writers, who saw it as a European reaction to the old universal hereditary order of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church and as a sign of the disintegration, beginning at the end of the Middle Ages, of the old feudal social order and the breakdown of cultural uniformity maintained by the common heritage of Roman Christianity, and the acceptance by Protestantism of the vernacular and the formation of "national churches" as means of religious expression. In a sense, the beginnings of nationalism arose in the modern age in the context of religious clashes, as was the case in Holland and Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, respectively.

The phenomenon of nationalism is closely linked to the formation of European nations and the emergence of the modern state between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. As a result, in terms of its origins, nationalism describes two phenomena, which were at first contradictory, yet with the creation of the nation-state ended up being complementary. On the one hand, nationalism determines the attitude of members of a nation with regard to their national identity in adapting to a cultural or ethnic community; on the other hand, nationalism describes the actions of a community via a unitary state exercising its political sovereignty. In a certain sense, this is the meaning of the commonly accepted definition provided by Ernest Gellner, who regards nationalism as "the principle which holds that the political and national unit should be congruent" (Gellner).

In the first instance the formation of the modern state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was without any national implication. As described by Machiavelli, Bodin, or Hobbes, the state developed as a centralized political entity that exercised its sovereignty according to the dictates of a prince or ruler, irrespective of the peoples, languages, creeds, or cultures of which it consisted. Nonetheless, nascent modern multinational states, such as Spain, England, France, and so on, soon developed embryonic models of the nation-state in which the strict demarcation of borders and the strengthening of individual, unitary, indivisible sovereignty became high-priority objectives. Several states were symbolically represented by their ruling royal families—the Tudors, the Valois, the Habsburgs, the Bourbons—and sought to homogenize their populations, allowing them no political decision-making power and reducing them to mere subjects. It is a state which, via the practice of mercantilism during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries introduced the principles of "national economy," where each state seeks complete freedom from any foreign economic influence. Because a state would not be strong unless it was economically independent, the mercantilists favored accumulation of gold and silver stocks, which could be achieved with a permanent foreign trade surplus, for one nation's prosperity came at the expense of another's.

The end result of this practice is protectionism and autarky. The interests of nation-states are necessarily antagonistic; every state drives and develops xenophobic ideas and behavior and hatred of everything foreign in order to strengthen itself at all costs. In international terms it produces a bellicose attitude with continual trade wars and endless armed conflicts. Generally, mercantilist policies did not make nations richer; they only increased the already existing wealth of the ruling monarchies of the participating states. Later, in the twentieth century, under the economic theories recommending economic protectionism at all costs laid out in Friedrich List's "National System of Political Economy," economic nationalism became more aggressive and, indirectly, economic protectionism and political nationalism were to be among the original causes of the two world wars of that century.

Nationalism, a political and social ideology that identifies the idea of the nation with that of the state, sheds light upon the contemporary world. Nationalisms have been transformed into the notion which provides cohesion for the societies of European states and generally provides the principal legitmacy of political power. This is the kind of nationalism influenced by the French Revolution and by the European nationalist movements from the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the new nation-state, which arose from the liberal revolutions, loyalty to the monarchy or the king in absolute states was replaced by loyalty to the country. Henceforth, nationalism and patriotism were intertwined in a single category in which spontaneous collective emotions outweighed any other kind of political, ethical, or cultural assessment, making the country the first and last reason for existence. And it is in this sense that nationalism came to be seen with a moral ambiguity capable of causing nations to behave in the most just, exemplary, and ethically humane manner, or to commit collective aberrations of the most reprehensible kind in the name of patriotic nationalism. This was particularly true in those instances where state nationalism became dominant and was turned into a conservative and aggressive manifestation of the national conscience. Perfect examples of this are the Nazi and Fascist states.

There are many kinds of contemporary nationalism, and as a whole their characteristic feature is that they place the concept of the nation and the concept of the state under the same heading. In the first place, these include the revolutionary nationalisms, which arose as a result of the Jacobin patriotism of the French Revolution, and those that brought about Greek independence in 1829 and Belgian independence in 1830. Also called liberal nationalism, it coincides with the establishment of the capitalist economic system, and its main architect is the new bourgeoisie. This movement reached it peak in the middle of the nineteenth century with the unification nationalisms, which brought about the creation of Italy and Germany as unitary states influenced by the spirit of Romanticism, national literature, and recognition of a "popular spirit" (according to the German philosophical phrases of the period).

However, as the phenomenon of nationalism has become widespread, it has ceased to be a European phenomenon, becoming worldwide via its links with the great transformations that have occurred in modern history: the collapse of colonial and territorial empires, the world wars, and the decolonization of the Third World. The starting point for anticolonial nationalism lies in the U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776), which was followed at once by the nationalisms that resulted in the Spanish American republics at the beginning of the nineteenth century. With World War I, the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the fall of the Russian Empire, and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there emerged a separatist nationalism which stimulated the emerging nationalities of the peoples of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Baltic—Czechs, Serbs, Magyars, Croats, Bosnians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Romanians, and so on. At the same time it encouraged the development of a nascent nationalism amongst the Arabs, which was torn between the pan-Arabism inspired by Islam and ethnically based nationalism. Finally, in the wake of World War II, following the decolonization drive, the nationalisms, which would shape the new Third World states of Africa and Asia, flourished. In contrast to previous nationalist movements, which were for the most part inspired by a political outlook based on economic liberalism and democracy, in the decolonizing national and social liberation movements there could be clearly seen the influence of revolutionary communist thinking and practice, even though Marxist internationalist theory always kept its distance from nationalism, regarding it as bourgeois in character.

Although there are numerous examples of states which are the result of a mixture of races, languages, religions, and cultures, nonetheless, language, religion, race, territory, or some specific signs of cultural identity continue to be regarded as the ingredients which form the basis of nationalist ideologies. However, as John Breully has indicated in Nationalism and the State (1985), social and intellectual bases are increasingly decisive factors in the role of nationalist ideology, to the extent that it is considered that the feeling of national identity which arose at the beginning of the modern state with the mercantilist and protectionist policies was simply a contrived means of mobilizing and achieving popular support for advancing particular economic, political, cultural, or social interests which have little or nothing to do with loyalty of a particular people to the nation via patriotism. Seen in this way, nationalism resembles several reactionary political and social movements in their unsupportive nature.

SEE ALSO American System; Boycott; Imperialism; Imperial Preference; International Labour Organization;Mercantilism;Nanyang Brothers Tobacco.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Zimmer, Oliver. Nationalism in Europe, 1890–1940. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

Antonio-Miguel Bernal