Few ideas have shaped the modern world more than nationalism. It drew the borders of most countries, inspired independence movements, anthems and great works of art, and also fed some of history's worst wars. This course looks at what nationalism is, where it came from, the best arguments for and against it, and how it fits into the wider question of human identity.
Three words that are easy to confuse
- A state is a political institution: a government claiming authority over a territory and its people, with laws, officials, courts and armed forces. The sociologist Max Weber famously described the state, in paraphrase, as the body that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within a territory.
- A nation is a community whose members feel they belong together, usually because of some mix of shared language, history, culture, homeland and memory, and who often want to govern themselves. A nation lives mainly in people's shared sense of belonging; it has no official membership list.
- A nation-state is a state whose people largely see themselves as one nation, so that the political unit and the cultural community roughly coincide.
Nations and states do not always match. Some nations have no state of their own: the Kurds, for example, are a nation without a state, living mainly across Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Other states contain several nations. The United Kingdom includes the English, Scots and Welsh, and Canada's parliament has recognized the Québécois as a nation within Canada. These are called multinational states, meaning states that contain more than one nation. In fact, very few states are nationally uniform.
What is nationalism?
The word has several related meanings:
- a feeling of attachment to and identification with one's nation;
- an ideology holding that the nation is the central unit of political life and that nations should govern themselves;
- movements that pursue those goals, by creating, unifying, defending or expanding a state.
The philosopher and anthropologist Ernest Gellner offered a famous short definition, which in paraphrase says that nationalism is the principle that the political and the national unit should coincide: one nation, one state. On that view, nationalists are troubled when a nation lacks its own state, when it is split among several states, or when its rulers belong to another nation.
Renan's question
In 1882 the French scholar Ernest Renan gave a lecture titled “What Is a Nation?”. He argued that race, language, religion and geography each fail as definitions, since many nations mix several of them. A nation, he said, is a spiritual principle made of two things: a shared inheritance of memories, and a present-day wish to go on living together. In his most quoted phrase, a nation's existence is “a daily plebiscite”, a vote its members renew constantly by choosing to belong.
Renan added a more uncomfortable point: forgetting, and even historical error, help create nations. Nations tell flattering stories about their origins and quietly drop the violence and divisions that went into making them. Historians, by digging up what was forgotten, can unsettle national myths.
Why nationalism is hard to judge
The same idea has inspired very different things. Nationalism moved colonized peoples to demand freedom and gave ordinary people a sense of ownership over their governments. It has also justified conquest, persecution of minorities and war. Much depends on who counts as part of the nation and how the nation treats those it leaves out. This course aims to understand both faces, presenting each position as its best defenders would and then the strongest criticisms.
Worked example: matching nations and states
The terms in this level become clearer when applied to real places. Consider five cases.
- Iceland comes close to the textbook nation-state. Its people share a language, a long recorded history and an island homeland, and almost all see themselves as Icelanders. Even here, immigration in recent decades has made the population more varied.
- The Kurds are often described as one of the largest nations without a state. Kurdish nationalist movements have sought anything from cultural rights and regional self-government to full independence, and the governments of the states where Kurds live have responded in very different ways.
- The United Kingdom is a multinational state. Many of its citizens feel both British and English, Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish, in different proportions, and debates about Scottish independence show that the balance can shift.
- Switzerland has four national languages and both Catholic and Protestant traditions, yet it has a strong shared identity built on federalism, direct democracy and a common history. It is often described as a nation held together by will rather than by language, close to Renan's idea of a daily plebiscite.
- Diasporas, such as communities of Irish, Indian or Armenian descent around the world, show that national feeling can survive far from any homeland state.
Now apply Gellner's definition. A nationalist would see the Kurdish case as a problem to be solved, because a nation lacks a state. Swiss experience suggests that a single state can sustain a shared civic identity among several language communities. The United Kingdom shows that people can hold layered national identities at once. No single formula fits every case, which is why the rest of this course looks at theories, history and arguments rather than one rule.