NATIONALISM

Caroline Ford

Nationalism has been one of the most powerful forces shaping modern political life in Europe since at least the eighteenth century. It is therefore somewhat ironical that, unlike liberalism or socialism—the two other great "isms" of modern times—there has been a surprising lack of consensus regarding its definition, origins, and consequences. Insisting on nationalism's modernity, most historians from the nineteenth century onward have argued that nationalism is an ideology consisting of a rather inchoate body of ideas and that these ideas inform nationalism as a political and social movement affirming the sovereignty and integrity of discrete nation-states. That ideology was predicated, first, on the notion that the world is divided into nations, each with its own characteristics and destiny. Second, it assumes that the nation is the source of all political and social power. With the "cultural turn" in historical studies, nationalism has also come to be defined as a form of identification, as a collective consciousness, and as a discourse drawing on complex symbolic systems. Social historians have begun to emphasize the relationship between the development of national identities and other forms of collective identification, including class and gender.

The sheer diversity and variety of nationalist movements and ideologies in Europe during the past few centuries make it extremely difficult to classify nationalism politically—as a right- or left-wing phenomenon—over time or to establish its constituent elements in religion, culture, consent, or language. Nationalism assumed a variety of different territorial, ethnic, and cultural forms, and these forms frequently overlapped. Indeed, nationalism as a form of consciousness, as a body of ideas, and as a political movement is nebulous and protean, and it is perhaps in these very qualities that its power resides. How did nationalism come into being in Europe and how has it changed as a political movement between the eighteenth century and the present? Why has it so tenaciously endured, even as the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht and the promise of a new Europe without national frontiers seemed to herald its demise? Answers to these questions have been many and varied. How these questions have been answered (and the study of nationalism more generally) are in large part a reflection of the history of European nationalism itself.

THE EMERGENCE OF NATIONALISM: THE CONTEXT

Nationalism and the modern nation-state, as they emerged in Europe, were only thinkable and possible toward the end of the eighteenth century, as hierarchical societies predicated on vertical ties between the ruler and the ruled gave way to more egalitarian societies that were based on horizontal ties between "citizens." Until the end of the eighteenth century, most states in Europe were dynastic and predicated on a corporate social order based on privilege. European society was divided into three orders, consisting of those who fought, those who prayed, and those who worked, and each of these orders was accorded, or not accorded, as the case may have been, elaborate privileges (as members of a corporate body, rather than as individuals) by the monarch. This was a political society of subjects rather than citizens who had common legal rights and duties.

The abolition during the French Revolution (1789) of titles of nobility and of all special privileges attached to corporate bodies laid the groundwork for a society of citizens. This society resulted in a new relationship between the constituent members of a new political order, and indeed in the creation of the modern notion of citizenship, which instantly established a political world based on horizontal rather than vertical ties. While the process by which this society came into being in the monarchical states of Europe was uneven, it was more or less complete by the end of the nineteenth century and provided the structural underpinnings for the development of nationalism in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The emergence of nationalism at the end of the eighteenth century was also a by-product of the gradual secularization of European society and political institutions. The decline of the power of universal religious institutions—most notably the Roman Catholic Church—and of the loyalties they inspired both undermined the legitimacy of rule by divine right on the part of Catholic monarchs and opened avenues for other forms of spiritual and political allegiance. From the end of the seventeenth century, new conceptions of time and space, propagated during the scientific revolution, further challenged the certainties of religion and spawned new questions regarding relationships between different geographic areas and peoples.

Finally, the emergence and development of nationalism in the eighteenth century coincided with the spread of literacy and print capitalism, which served to integrate disparate populations through the medium of a common language and culture. The rise in levels of literacy, the spread of national educational initiatives, and the growing focus, particularly among literary elites, on language as a source of national cohesion served as integrative forces.

The development of nationalism in Europe occurred in a series of stages, beginning in the decades preceding the French Revolution, the wars of "liberation," and Napoleonic expansion, which served as a political catalyst for nationalist movements in areas of Europe that had largely been immune from nationalism's appeals. This first phase of European nationalism spanned a period from the 1760s to 1848. The second stage of European nationalism, which followed the defeat of the revolutions of 1848, coincided with German and Italian unification, the advent of mass politics, and the new imperialism of the late nineteenth century. World War I inaugurated a third stage in the development of nationalism in the twentieth century, as anticolonial movements in Europe's colonial empires increasingly began to assume a nationalist form, and as the nation-state became the dominant form of political organization in the world.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONALISM AND ITS HISTORY: STAGE 1, 1789–1848

Although some scholars (especially Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities) have argued that nationalism as a political phenomenon appeared first in the New World among Anglo settlers transplanted from their original homeland or among creoles, both of whom increasingly came to resent the culture of the metropole, it was firmly implanted in the Old World by the end of the eighteenth century. During its first phase, nationalism as a political and social movement was embraced by the middle classes and by literate elites and was largely an affair of the liberal left in Europe as a whole. Literate elites in western and central Europe set out to define the nation and to promote the national cause through the celebration of language and sometimes of religion or a shared historical past. In a fragmented central Europe, writers such as Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) focused on the importance of the German language in defining nationality, and indeed, language became the key element in defining national community. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1712–1778) writings on Corsica and Poland stressed the ways in which language and culture defined a nation's individual character, suggesting that it was only through their preservation and recovery that the nation could be maintained over time.

Governments early on also recognized the importance of linguistic uniformity for the modern nation-state. For a brief time, both at the end of the eighteenth century and then again at the end of the nineteenth, the French state, for example, made war on regional languages and dialects and attempted to impose a standardized French on its citizens through varying administrative mechanisms and public education. This was part of a larger universal "civilizing mission" unleashed by the French state, but it served, above all, the national cause. Indeed, language increasingly came to occupy a place in international territorial conflicts between states. This was manifested in disputes between Danes and Germans in Schleswig-Holstein in the 1860s.

During the course of the nineteenth century, language became increasingly important to definitions of nationality and played an important role in fostering national cohesion for several reasons. First, even in territorial states possessing a multiplicity of languages and dialects, the state's official sponsorship of a national language gave it a permanence and a sense of the eternal that it would not otherwise have acquired. This official language had the advantage, moreover, of being propagated through public education initiatives undertaken by most European states toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Jules Michelet (1798–1874) and Joseph-Ernest Renan (1823–1892) argued against the notion that language, religion, race, ethnicity, or geography were essential defining features of nationality, even as they stressed the importance of the nation as a "spiritual principle." They emphasized the binding power and importance of history or historical forgetting. More than any writer in the first half of the nineteenth century, Michelet, the historian, was instrumental in emphasizing the unconscious historical processes shaping nation formation. Indeed, Michelet indicated ways in which the French, who may not have conceived of themselves as such until the French Revolution, worked for many centuries to construct a cultural and physical fabric that came to define France in tangible terms. He suggested that the French and the French nation surely existed for centuries, even if the nation as a political unit did not come into being until the French Revolution. A shared history, however, contributed to an acceptance of a common territory or homeland by the time of the French Revolution. And that territory was comprised of citizens sharing a common historical memory. The early-nineteenth-century valorization of the Volk and of popular culture in western Europe was part of a larger attempt among intellectual elites to recover (or "invent") a common cultural and national past, and they sought to bring that past to a growing reading public. Some of this literary and historical work, which was pressed into the service of defining the nation, led to it being defined in terms of a kind of historical essentialism. This historicism, dedicated to uncovering a prenationalist past, allowed literary elites and political leaders to invoke an "eternal" France or Germany, whose "natural" national traits were endowed by history, language, and geography. As a certain kind of historical essentialism came to define national identities and to inform nationalist movements in the first half of the nineteenth century, the construction of ethnic identities along similar lines was not far away.

Popular protonationalism. As governments and literary elites debated the constituent elements of nationhood in the old states of Europe, including Britain and France, and in central Europe and the Italian Peninsula, where unified nation-states did not exist before the latter half of the nineteenth century, popular forms of protonationalism emerged. Much of this popular protonationalist sentiment was born, however, from armed conflict or war, rather than from a romantic attachment to language or a common historic past. Indeed war has been pivotal to the development of nationalism since the eighteenth century. The role of war in forging national sentiment became evident in the Battle of Valmy of 1792, when a poorly equipped French army faced a formidably trained Prussian force and resisted it behind the battle cry, "Vive la Nation!" This prompted Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) to proclaim that the battle marked a new epoch in human history. During the French Revolution, the levée en masse (mass levy of troops) of 1792, proclaimed in the name of the patrie en danger (the fatherland endangered), created Europe's first citizen army and justified itself in the name of a nation of citizens sharing common interests and concerns. The levée en masse drew on the experience of the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) and the dynastic rivalries between European states in the eighteenth century, particularly those between Britain and France. Thus, long before the nation-state in its modern form came into being, wars were beginning to be fought in its name, in the name of a patriotism that would soon find its expression in nationalism. Linda Colley's important work on the impact of the French revolutionary wars on the development of British nationalism suggests as much, as she explores the decisive role played by a series of eighteenth-century wars in fostering British patriotism: the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), and the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars (1792–1802 and 1803–1815). Prussia's defeat in the Battle of Jena in 1806 was a testament to the tenacious power of the national idea in a French army of citizens, rather than subjects.

War and revolution mobilized large numbers of people at home, who rallied to a domestic cause. Even though many of those who fought in the great wars of the eighteenth century were not yet citizens, countless numbers justified their participation in patriotic terms. This popular protonationalist sentiment was soon translated into more or less successful wars of liberation across the continent and led to the transformation of the map of Europe at the Congress of Vienna (1815). Moreover, this settlement was soon followed by a war of liberation against Ottoman rule, which led to the creation of a new kingdom of Greece in 1829. Belgium became an independent nation-state after its 1830 revolt, while Poland, an unsuccessful aspirant to national sovereignty, revolted in the same year, suffering defeat in the name of national self-determination.

From the French Revolution to 1848 nationalism tended to be linked to liberal, even democratic, left-wing movements, and culminated in the "national" revolutions of 1848 in central Europe and in the Italian Peninsula. In both regions nationalism was primarily a movement of liberal and republican intellectuals, who defined themselves against and opposed political organizations predicated on dynastic ties. Those who supported national unity in the Frankfurt parliament and in the Italian Peninsula failed to press their demands because of their lack of popular support, internal divisions, and, in the case of Italy, foreign intervention. German and Italian unification had to wait more than a decade after their initial failure.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONALISM AND ITS HISTORY: STAGE 2, 1848–1914

Nationalism as a movement and as an ideology changed decisively in Europe as a result of the revolution of 1848. The debacle of the revolutions of 1848 in central Europe and the Italian Peninsula indicated that if these two areas of Europe were to be unified, that process would (and did) come about largely through "blood and iron." The failure of that revolution and the realization among political elites, even those who supported monarchism, that nationalism could be harnessed for particular political purposes had a profound impact on its future trajectory. It was war and the stratagems of Prussia's chief minister, Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), that led to the unification of Germany in 1871, and it was the political aspirations of Camillo Benso, conte di Cavour (1810–1861) and Piedmont's rivalry with the Habsburgs that led to the unification of Italy by 1861. Increasingly, nationalism was linked to the designs of conservative elites during the course of the nineteenth century. Nationalism gradually became a mass phenomenon and, paradoxically, one that was linked to right-wing and sometimes antinationalist causes. The war in Schleswig-Holstein and the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, both of which laid the groundwork for German unification, have often been seen as an expression of Prussian patriotism rather than of German nationalism, waged by Bismarck to ensure Prussian hegemony in central Europe.

Mass nationalism: "blood and soil." By the late 1880s nationalism assumed new forms in Europe. As a movement, it increasingly became a mass phenomenon and was less grounded in the French liberal tradition of consent and contract, or even of a common culture. Race, ethnicity, and language became more important in defining nationality. Of course, this new nationalist discourse was fueled by colonialism and the new imperialism and the literature it spawned regarding the world's races. Much of the national competition among European nation-states was played out in theaters of war on the fringes or beyond the borders of western Europe, particularly in north Africa and the Balkans.

As nationalism and its social constituency changed, so did its political associations. Having been associated with the revolutionary left wing since the French Revolution, by 1900 a new nationalism of blood and soil came to be associated with a bellicose and in some instances racist and anti-Semitic right wing all over Europe. The Dreyfus affair of 1898 in France and the formation of right-wing leagues in Germany contributed to a nationalistic rhetoric that was increasingly strident and xenophobic in nature. Changes in the character of European nationalism were both a reflection of changes in state strategies designed to mobilize their citizenries and a consequence of the democratization of the political process in many European states, with the advent of universal manhood suffrage. In short, a formerly elitist and monarchical right wing saw in nationalism a new source of cohesion and a means to attract a mass constituency.

The early historical work on European nationalism coincided with and reflected its late-nineteenth-century transformation. It resembled the racist, xenophobic, and imperialist rhetoric embodied in fin de siècle nationalism in evoking national traits and stereotypes. This literature was, however, counterbalanced by a serious assessment and critique of the national question by marxists of the Second International. To name a few of them, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxembourg, Otto Bauer, and V. I. Lenin devoted themselves to the problem.

World War I demonstrated the power of national identifications, as expressed, for example, in the initial massive working-class support for the war effort—in apparent contradiction with a self-proclaimed socialist ideology—in much of central and western Europe. The war revealed that the development of a national self-consciousness among different social groups did not necessarily occur at the cost of other forms of social consciousness, even if it could supersede them at particular historical moments. Indeed, popular adhesion to causes such as those of World War I or the Boer War attests to the spread of racial ideas and a new jingoist xenophobic nationalism in a number of European nation-states.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF NATIONALISM AND ITS HISTORY: STAGE 3, 1914–1980

It is no accident that World War I gave rise to the first serious and sustained comparative and historical inquiry into the origins and development of nationalism. This early work is primarily associated with Carlton Hayes and Hans Kohn. Hayes's The Historical Evolution of Modern Nationalism (New York, 1931) and Kohn's The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origin and Background (New York, 1944) were written in the aftermath of the creation of the League of Nations in 1919 and the breakup of the huge multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual empires of central and eastern Europe—the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman—and with the creation of wholly new nation-states in those regions. Indeed, many of the movements dedicated to national liberation in the twenty-five years before World War I were directed against supranational and multinational empires. After World War I, nationalist movements tended to be directed against established national states in Europe. These separatist nationalist movements, which are still very much a part of the European landscape, drew on prewar definitions of nationality based on ethnicity and, in some cases, religion. The League of Nations eventually legitimized the modern nation-state as the only internationally recognized form of political organization in the world. Hayes and Kohn sought to explain how this came to be so, arguing that nationalism was indeed an eighteenth-century invention, despite the claims to a distant historical past among some nations.

Much of this critical interest in nationalism was short-lived, however, as nationalism became suspect as a result of its alliance with fascism, national socialism, and anti-Semitism in the 1930s and 1940s. Moreover, the emergence of a new cold war order following World War II, which led to the disappearance of the autonomy and independence of most of the new states created in eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War I; the rise of supranational organizations, such as the European Economic Community; and the ubiquity of international communism deflected attention away from the study of nationalism as a historical phenomenon. Indeed, it led to the conviction that nationalism represented merely a "stage" in the historical development of Europe, if not the world—a backward and uncivilized one at that—and that the nation-state would ultimately be replaced by other forms of political organization. This was a view taken by both liberals and marxists. Cosmopolitan liberals believed that nationalism was (simply) a stepping-stone to the creation of constitutional sovereign states comprised of citizens sharing common political and civil rights. Marxists regarded the phenomenon as an illusion, an atavism that was manipulated by elites for economic and political purposes. Neither could account for the persistence and pervasive power of nationalism defined in ethnic terms.

The post–World War II era also witnessed the emergence of new nationalist movements in Europe's colonies (or former colonies). During the war itself European and non-European resistance movements emerged in response to German and Japanese attempts to create empires. Nationalism also inspired anticolonial liberation movements in Africa and Asia in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

Modernization theorists, writing in the 1950s in the aftermath of World War II, began to argue that nationalism and the formation of nation-states implied ineluctable processes of assimilation. Karl Deutsch's Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, Mass., 1953) is a case in point. According to Deutsch, modern nation-states were built by political centers through a homogenizing process of cultural and institutional assimilation and acculturation. This process, achieved through the instruments of mass communication, railways, roads, public education, and conscription, allegedly resulted in the abandonment of traditional allegiances and identities and their replacement with those defined by the metropole. Consciously using the the concept of colonization, Eugen Weber in Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, Calif., 1976) has suggested that peasants became Frenchmen as they adopted the ideas, values, and culture of the metropole—Paris—and as these values came to replace those of the region and the village. Why would the far-flung populations wish it to be otherwise, John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) asked as early as the nineteenth century. He wrote that no one could imagine that it would be more beneficial to retain one's regional identity in France, for example, when one could acquire all the benefits of French citizenship.

For much of the 1950s and 1960s, nationalism did not receive sustained or concentrated attention from social historians of Europe. They embraced the study of class formation, social mobility, and social revolution with alacrity, writing the history of peoples who formerly "had no history." Much of this "history from the bottom up" either ignored, somewhat strangely, the development of nationalism or focused on the formation of the nation-state and its relationship to movements of social protest. Thus, the first generation of social history did not have much influence on the historical approaches to European nationalism.

Interest in European nationalisms revived slowly and then grew steadily in the late 1970s. The historical literature that emerged in this period challenged the evolutionary views of marxists and liberals, as well as the assumptions that underpinned interpretations of nationalism that were based on the concept of "modernization," for a variety of reasons. The sudden emergence of a number of "ethnic minority nationalist" movements in the very heart of Western Europe—in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Brittany, Catalonia, the Basque region, and Corsica—made historians question the degree to which one could count on the eventual disappearance of nationalism, and they called into question the process of national integration described by Karl Deutsch and others. How could one account for the appearance of these new nationalisms in some of Europe's oldest nation states? Miroslav Hroch's pathbreaking and early Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (Prague, 1968; Cambridge, U.K., 1985), an analysis of the rise of nationalisms in central and Eastern Europe, suggested new ways of thinking about nationalism. He emphasized the role of regional elites and the uneven economic development "within" states, arguing that local elites whose interests were threatened by larger markets and global forces often encouraged the spread of nationalist sentiment to protect those interests. On the basis of this hypothesis, Hroch argued that nationalist movements generally developed in three separate stages. First, nationalist movements assume an apolitical, folkloric character; second, they are taken up by literate elites wishing to inculcate the "national idea" and organize the masses; and third, nationalist movements then truly gain mass-based support. This stage analysis of nationalist movements has deeply shaped the historical literature on nationalism, building on the modernization theorists' "top down" approach that has reinforced much of the historical literature on nationalism since its inception.

DEVELOPMENTS IN NATIONALISM AND ITS HISTORY SINCE 1980

In the 1980s and 1990s historians began to ask new questions about the development of European nationalism and to abandon many of the assumptions that have informed its study since the early twentieth century. As was the case with previous developments, these challenges and questions have in part been shaped by the history of nationalism in Europe. This history includes the breakup of the former Soviet Union; the emergence of nationalist xenophobia in the former Soviet Union; the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s; the rise of nationalist movements in the Balkans; and the promise of European unity and integration. These developments have refocused scholarly attention on nationalism as a central subject of historical enquiry since the early 1980s, and they have influenced the kinds of questions historians have begun to ask.

Following World War I, President Woodrow Wilson of the United States declared in his famous "Fourteen Points" that the peoples of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire should be given the the freest opportunity for autonomous development. The appearance, disappearance, and reappearance of new nations in eastern Europe have become a fulcrum for the reconsideration of nationalism as a question in Europe as a whole. "Old" nationalisms, which appeared to have withered away, have ostensibly reemerged with a vengeance. The post-Communist organization of political space in these regions has resulted in the proliferation of new "nations" defined largely in ethnic terms. The "identity politics" rampant in the former Yugoslavia, in Kosovo, Uzbekistan, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Azerbaijan unleashed new and horrible tragedies. To what extent are these nationalisms late-twentieth-century creations or old wine in new bottles? Is this the right historical question to ask? What can the answer to these questions tell us about nation formation more generally and how can these nations be integrated into the international community of nations? Campaigns of "ethnic cleansing" have been launched in a national cause, and language tests have been established, for example, to determine who is a real Ukrainian or Slovene. Religion, ethnicity, and language continue to be divisive and defining features of group claims to sovereignty, territory, and self-determination. Such pernicious and deadly developments have forced historians to reexamine the nature of national identifications and their ultimate consequences. Rogers Brubaker has deftly explored the existence of these nationalisms in this regard, and he has suggested that one must think about nationalism in these regions not in terms of resurgence or recession, using the prevailing literature on nationalism that has focused on the state and nation building, but rather on how nationalism was "reframed" in these areas.

The Flemish, Catalans, Lombards, and Scots have continued to reaffirm their local identities and seek a greater degree of autonomy in Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Britain, respectively, as well as a role in a new Europe. Indeed, as these new "ethnic minority" nationalisms have appeared, Western European politics have also been dominated by debates concerning immigration and the permeability of national borders in a new European Union. Large immigrant populations from former European colonies have flowed into Europe since the late 1960s, and many of these immigrants share little in terms of language, culture, or religion with the dominant cultures of Europe. As a result, Europeans have been forced to ask themselves difficult questions about the relationship between nationality and citizenship. On the one hand, "ethnic minority" nationalisms call for a closer relationship between ethnicity and nation; on the other, massive immigration challenges that relationship.

Citizenship, common people, and symbols. All these developments have resulted in a gradual shift away from historical approaches to nationalism that focus primarily on state formation and social-political elites to ones that resonate more with social historians, such as the exploration of "national consciousness," the "culture" of nationalism, the process of identity formation (and its limits), and the role of gender in shaping nationalist movements and nationalist discourse. Historians have begun to focus on a new set of questions: Why were individuals willing to fight and die for a community and for people whom they would never meet in their lifetimes? What is nationalism's emotional appeal? How and why are national passions aroused and in what contexts? Out of what symbolic discourses and repertoires are national identities constructed? How—through what imagery—do societies represent their nations, and what is the significance of these representations? If national identities, viewed in historical perspective, are fluid, how and why do they change through time? How and why does nationalism remain such a potent and powerful force in Europe?

In asking these questions, historians of European nationalism have explored three broad themes. First, they have investigated the nature, evolution, and limits of citizenship and immigration policy in various national contexts. Brubaker, for example, has explored the nature and history of French and German citizenship law to highlight differing conceptions of national identity and belonging. This approach follows older "top down" models by focusing on policy making at the center.

Second, historians have begun to pay far greater attention to the formation of national identities and the creation of a national consciousness among ordinary people. This second approach has further opened the history of nationalism to social historians. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1991), a broad synthetic essay on the emergence and spread of nationalism, has played a pivotal role in this regard. Individual historical studies have provided nuanced historical accounts of the creation of national consciousness through time. Peter Sahlins, for example, has argued that the boundary between France and Spain was as much constructed by Catalans who live on both sides of the border in the Cerdagne between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries as it was by the French government in Paris. He therefore challenges the top-down, center-outward approach to understanding the formation of national identities and suggests ways in which local rivalries and issues inform national debates. Similarly, Celia Applegate argues that the formation of a national consciousness in certain areas of Germany was as much a product of a cherished identification with Heimat (one's local homeland) as it was a product of German unification. I have argued that attempts by the French state to replace time-honored cultural practices and allegiances and to integrate Catholic Brittany into the secular republican culture of metropolitan France toward the end of the nineteenth century were incomplete at best. This did not mean that a national consciousness failed to materialize in the far reaches of the French hexagon, but rather that a national consciousness was forged through a process of negotiation and selective appropriation on the part of individuals and social groups at the periphery. All these historians have sought to understand how ordinary people, rather than elites and governments, have established a relationship with an imagined national community.

Finally, historians using techniques and insights from the "new cultural history" have focused on the importance of representation and symbolism in understanding nationalism and the propagation of national myths. Maurice Agulhon's work on the role of Marianne as a female symbol of France since the French Revolution, and Lynn Hunt's study of the competing symbols of Hercules and Marianne in revolutionary culture suggest that more attention should be given to how nations and their elites define themselves and export their own images abroad.

How does one explain the survival of national antagonisms and the spread of nationalist movements in the face of transnationalism and larger processes of globalization? In many respects the world has become unified by transnational capitalist organizations. In view of its intellectual poverty as ideology, how and why does nationalism now ultimately seem to be a more powerful mobilizing force than socialism or communism? Is the "resurgence" of nationalism an atavism, an aberration? Historians are only beginning to answer these questions. What seems clear is that nationalism as an ideology and as a political movement is and has been ubiquitous since the eighteenth century and continues to be pervasive in Europe. In the prescient words of Isaiah Berlin, written in 1991, nationalism is not "resurgent" because it never really died.

See alsoEmigration and Colonies; Imperialism and Domestic Society; Racism (volume 1); and other articles in this section.

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