Eurasia Press & News
The Fall and Rise of Nationalism
In 1852, the Black American writer and abolitionist Martin Delany lamented that “the claims of no people . . . are respected by any nation, until they are presented in a national capacity.” He was urging the emigration of Black people from the United States to Africa in the hope that their individual rights as people—and collective rights as a people—would be better respected across the ocean. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the nation had become the primary political form through which people could claim rights. Belonging to a nation was no guarantee that one’s rights would be respected, of course, but the absence of nationhood nearly guaranteed that one would be vulnerable to others. European imperialists of that era often argued that the societies over which they exercised power were not nations. As the nineteenth-century British liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, “the sacred duties which civilized nations owed to the independence and nationality of each other are not binding towards those to whom nationality and independence are either a certain evil, or at best, a questionable good.” That supposed absence of nationality helped justify the colonization of Africa, India, and the Middle East.
The search for nationhood spread far and wide, becoming a central organizing principle of the world and one of its most potent political ideologies. Ernest Gellner, the twentieth-century theorist of nationalism, once wryly observed: “Marxists basically like to think the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations.”
As Eric Storm shows in his impressive and erudite Nationalism: A World History, nationalism has singularly shaped the modern world. It drove the proliferation of nation-states across the globe, the most significant political transformation of recent centuries. It enabled democracy, breaking down hierarchies and social distinctions, turning subjects into citizens. For many people in the present, nationalism is the lens through which the past acquires meaning. It shapes culture and language. It can serve as a potent competitor to religion, a kind of secular creed, eliciting sacrifice and consecrating death. It turns physical spaces and monuments into hallowed ground. People might occasionally think outside the nation-state, but it is hard for them to live outside one; it orders their everyday existence.
And yet, for a brief period after the end of the Cold War, it seemed to many that the nation was on the way out. Globalization had promised to make the world “flat.” The Internet and social media augured a public sphere that transcended national boundaries. Nation-states and their parochial identities would give way to an interdependent and cosmopolitan future.
But the obituaries of the nation-state were written far too soon. The financial crisis of 2008–9 and the shocks that followed made globalization lose much of its luster in the West. In the past decade, the rise of majoritarian autocratic rulers, the elections of President Donald Trump in the United States, and the leaping gains of the far right in Europe were all reminders of the abiding power of nationalism.
This resurgence points to its fundamental paradox. On the one hand, nationalism builds collective political agency that uniquely empowers citizens to act in the world. On the other hand, it defines citizens more deeply and extensively than any other political ideology and in the process opens constant struggles over who counts as a member of the nation.
These struggles are taking place almost everywhere. They define the political life of many countries. India is witnessing a remarkable resurgence of ethnonationalism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Concerns about immigration and border control shape politics in the United States and Europe. Social media has fueled nationalist passions far more than it has undercut them. Nationalist wars over territory had come to be seen as a thing of the past; Russia’s war on Ukraine demonstrated otherwise. Efforts to address climate change, a planetary challenge that countries committed to tackling in the hopeful years after the Cold War, have foundered as governments raise barriers and evade shared responsibilities. Friedrich List, the nineteenth-century German theorist of economic nationalism, said that “between the individual and humanity stands the nation.” He was being optimistic. Two centuries later, it seems that both the individual and humanity stand under the nation.
THE PIRACY OF NATIONALISM
Storm’s rich and engaging account traces how nationalism became inescapable in almost every part of the world. His history aligns very much with modernist theories that hold that nations are not primordial entities but rather socially constructed forms. In other words, there is nothing “natural” or obvious about being Greek or Turkish, for instance; such identities are fashioned by individuals, social forces, political circumstances, and policy choices that mold people into a nationality. A Dutch historian, Storm specialized in modern Spanish history and in regional histories of France and Germany. He is less interested in how nationalists perceived the world than he is in the general patterns revealed by the formation of nations.
In Storm’s view, the power of nationalism lies not in its ideological appeal but in its omnipresence. There is almost no cultural activity that is not at least to some extent organized on national lines: think of art, literature, music, cuisine, dress, the standardization of languages, the collection of antiquities, the curation of museums. Popular novels and films often stoke nationalism. Sporting competitions, such as the World Cup and the Olympics, remind people of the thrill of vicarious identification with their community. Nationalism is so readily a part of everyday life that nationalist leaders, such as Modi and Trump, can easily tap into it. Storm uses a dazzling range of references from across the world to show how nationalism becomes a matter of fact more than an ideology—including in his delicious recounting of the rise of gastrodiplomacy, the drive to brand cuisine in national terms. That ubiquity is also why nationalism is so inescapable, and so powerful as a force for mobilization.
Storm places the birth and initial spread of nationalism in the crucible of the Atlantic revolutions of the eighteenth century. The ideals of the French Revolution and its emphasis on popular sovereignty disseminated quickly. Jacobin clubs popped up in places as far from Paris as Constantinople and Aleppo. The Napoleonic wars spurred the growth of nationalism, partly by inspiring state building and constitution writing. American ideas of sovereignty and popular participation were inspirational, as well, but the United States as a model proved harder to emulate. Acts of resistance also galvanized nationalism. In Europe, for instance, the notion of Polish national identity grew out of the experience of foreign domination; so, too, were many of the nationalisms of the colonized world forged in rebellion against empires. It was not just the Western model of the nation-state that spread; Storm also points to the influence of reformist authoritarian regimes in Asia, such as Japan, in positing an alternative model worthy of emulation.
From 1815 onward, a Romantic form of nationalism that imagined the nation as a cultural homeland took deep roots in German-speaking parts of Europe. In the nineteenth century, cultural nationalism had great allure in central Europe, where political institutions were less developed and unable to become the focal point of national identity; such cultural nationalism at once signaled pride in the past and fear of the future. This was true in central Europe at that time, and it remains true of many German-inspired cultural nationalisms, such as contemporary Hindu nationalism in India. Storm also contests the old adage that nationalism required a commercialized middle class to take root—the idea that without a bourgeoisie, national consciousness could not spread. In fact, in Germany and Japan, for instance, nationalism was often a project undertaken by aristocratic or authoritarian elites. These nationalisms did not always share the civic and participatory character of revolutionary nationalisms.
Storm does follow the conventional narrative that holds that the geopolitical crisis of World War I followed by the decolonization after World War II consolidated the nation-state system around the world. The so-called neoliberal turn in the late 1970s, with its emphasis on trade, global financial flows, and greater migration, might seem to have attenuated nationalism. But Storm argues that even in this period, countries were using the technologies of globalization to project their national cultures, not to do away with them.
Global histories, by dint of their ambition, can be risky. For one, they can overemphasize similarity and suppress difference. In Storm’s account, the nation-state appears as a kind of technology, available for “pirating,” in the words of the anthropologist and theorist of nationalism Benedict Anderson, whom Storm quotes. Certainly, there was a lot of emulation. All nation-states have flags, national museums, national languages, famous historical icons, and so forth. But countries do not all pirate the same content. It is not especially helpful to think of nationalism as a force that spread through the power of imitation when considering countries as disparate as Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Pakistan, Russia, Turkey, and the United States. These countries, after all, differ in so many ways. The Russian nationalism espoused by President Vladimir Putin, for instance, is the product of ressentiment, the experience of a perpetual gap between the country’s self-image and its actual power. By contrast, American nationalism immediately after the end of the Cold War engaged the world with openness and confidence, projecting hope rather than fear. Some contemporary nationalisms, such as those in India, Russia, and Turkey, are animated by memories of territorial loss, while others have an uncompromising sense of the permanence and security of their borders. These distinctions matter for understanding how countries imagine the past, what cultural projects they might undertake, and how they might behave in geopolitics.
COLLECTIVE NARCISSISM
For as much as nationalism can define a country’s orientation to the rest of the world, it is principally inward-facing. Delany, the nineteenth-century abolitionist, keenly understood a paradox that is central to nationalism: one group’s nationalist project can represent bondage for another. Black, Native American, and other nonwhite people found themselves marginalized by the way the American nationalist project had been defined. Yet the only recourse he could imagine was for Black Americans to find a space where they, too, could be dominant and advance a nationalist project of their own.
Nationalism has been a liberating force, but it has also been exploited to justify the abridgment of rights. In the twentieth century, conflicts over membership—who can belong to a nation—had the divisive force that religious conflicts had in the seventeenth century. Liberalism, in both the West and in non-Western countries, is struggling in part because although liberals have a theory of the state and even a theory of secular and religious power, they have never had a cogent theory of membership. They have muddled through on questions of immigration and national identity and have often ceded ground on these questions to the nationalist right. Civic notions of national belonging, which liberals prize, have come under huge strain in recent years in many countries. The costs of freer trade, immigration, and capital mobility have been unevenly distributed. Even the cultural anxieties produced by the need to confront a country’s past wrongs can be felt differently across different groups within a nation. Publics increasingly do not trust liberals to govern in a way that genuinely addresses these fears. Instead, they turn to the simple solace of nationalism and the veneration of the nation.
The formation of nation-states almost everywhere was a story of conflict between cultural groups. Storm struggles to recognize this fact. “The invention of the nation-state during the age of revolutions,” he writes, “was the consequence of a conflict about political legitimacy in which ethnic, cultural, and language differences did not play a substantial role.” As a description of the self-representation of the French and American Revolutions, this might be true. The French Revolution may have inaugurated inclusive citizenship by turning subjects into citizens. But the availability of the category of “the people” also made possible the crimes that could be done in the name of the people. The process of forming the people, creating the conditions for national homogeneity, was and still is accompanied by ethnic cleansing—or sometimes genocide. Even so-called civic nationalisms often rely on a cultural core more than they acknowledge. Think of the persistence of a Christian understanding of American identity. Even ostensibly civic nations must deal with ethnic contestation, as witnessed in Canada, India, the United States, and elsewhere.
One group’s nationalist project can represent bondage for another.
Every nation-state that has ever been formed has for most of its history excluded some group or the other. The blood and drama of nationalism is not the demand for a state, the upswell of a people claiming their sovereignty; it is found more often in one group’s achievement of dominance over territory and over other peoples. If ethnic or cultural issues did not seem to play much of a role in the French and American Revolutions and the birth of those nation-states, it is not because they were absent; some groups had already managed to establish enough dominance over others prior to the uprisings. In France, the Catholics were supreme; in the British colonies that became the United States, white people had sidelined nonwhite people. The difference between France and the United States and the likes of India, Ireland, Turkey, and African countries is not that ethnic, cultural, or language issues did not play a substantial role in the eighteenth century. It is rather that those countries were born when specific religious, cultural, or linguistic groups had already cemented their dominance by subjugating or expelling minorities. The Protestant ascendancy in England, for example, was an established fact as English nationalism consolidated in the eighteenth century. In newer nations, the same process of one group’s trying to establish its dominance has sparked numerous conflicts: the twentieth century offers many examples of such strife in postcolonial countries. But the formation of most nations has taken place under the shadow of majoritarian dominance at some point. That is what Delany was trying to remind Americans. While at one level, the story of nationalism is a story of deepening citizenship, it is also inescapably a story of exclusion.
Nationalism may have acquired an all-encompassing and sociological reality, as Storm argues. Its enduring power, however, is not just in its institutional forms but also in its psychological attractions. It offers a theodicy of sorts, an explanation for evil and woe. Societies can conclude that their collective struggles arise from the fact that they are not nationalist enough—or that some people in their ranks have let down the nation. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, a philosopher and eventual president of India, once warned about the dangers of nationalism. “Nations have become mysterious symbols to whose protection we rally as savages to fetishes,” he said in 1936 in a lecture at Oxford. The paradox of the modern age is that the rational emancipated individual is also the most vulnerable to a new form of collective narcissism.
One of the remarkable features of nationalism is that sustaining it requires constant political mobilization toward the achievement of a goal or the defeat of a threat. Nationalism relies on internal and external enemies to retain its evocative power. Whether in China, India, Russia, Turkey, or the United States, nationalism can be sustained only by reverting to this old playbook. All the major powers feel that other powers are out to undermine them: Russia is threatened by the West, China fears subversion by the United States, and the United States frets about “the China challenge.” No nationalism can survive if it does not privilege its own interests over the interests of others. In principle, a nation could be energized by the higher goal of embodying universalist principles in the service of humanity. So hoped some intellectuals during the Enlightenment who saw the nation as a carrier of a universalist spirit. So, too, did anticolonial nationalists in the twentieth century conceive of their battles against Western empires in this way. But they soon discovered that the realities of global politics meant that one could be nationalist or universalist, but not both. Storm suggests hopefully that a planetary crisis, such as climate change, might attenuate nationalism. But it is a feature of nationalism that it cannot contemplate any goal higher than itself, no matter the cost.
