Nationalism's defenders admit that it has a dark side. Its critics argue that the dark side is not an accident but a built-in risk. This level looks at the main dangers and at how each side interprets them.
Exclusion
If the state belongs to a nation, the question becomes: who belongs to the nation? If the state belongs to one nation, others may be treated as outsiders in their own country. Minorities can face pressure to assimilate, bans on their language in schools, discrimination in jobs and land, or even the loss of citizenship. Because few states are nationally uniform, the goal of matching nation and state almost always leaves someone on the wrong side of the line.
Partitions and population transfers
Attempts to make borders and peoples match have caused enormous suffering. In 1923, Greece and Turkey agreed to a compulsory exchange of populations: over a million Orthodox Christians were moved from Turkey to Greece, and several hundred thousand Muslims from Greece to Turkey, most of them leaving homes their families had held for generations. The 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan displaced roughly 10 to 20 million people, and estimates of the deaths in the accompanying violence range from a few hundred thousand to two million.
Chauvinism and contempt
Chauvinism is the belief that one's own nation is superior to others, often with contempt for foreigners. The word comes from Nicolas Chauvin, a probably legendary French soldier devoted to Napoleon. A related English word, jingoism, comes from a British music hall song of 1878 urging war. Chauvinism turns pride in one's own people into a ranking of peoples, and that ranking can be used to justify conquest and domination.
Nationalism and war
Nationalism helped make the twentieth century the bloodiest in history. Historians see it as one of several causes of the First World War, alongside alliances, militarism and imperial rivalry; crowds in many capitals cheered the declarations of war in 1914. Fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany fused extreme nationalism with dictatorship, and Nazism with racism, treating the nation or race as the supreme value and other peoples as obstacles or inferiors. In the 1990s, as communist Yugoslavia broke apart, leaders mobilized ethnic nationalism, and neighbors who had lived together for decades were recast as enemies. Many of the worst atrocities of the last century were carried out in the name of national purity or national survival.
Orwell's distinction
In his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism”, George Orwell drew a contrast that is still widely used. In paraphrase: patriotism is defensive devotion; nationalism seeks power for one's group. A patriot loves a particular place and way of life and has no wish to force it on others. A nationalist identifies with a group, treats its interests as above moral judgment, and measures everything by whether it advances that group's power. Orwell noted how nationalists of every kind could ignore or excuse atrocities committed by their own side while condemning the same acts by others.
How the two sides interpret the record
Defenders of liberal nationalism reply that the worst cases came from ethnic exclusivity and dictatorship, not from national loyalty as such. Democratic, rights-respecting nationalism, they argue, has a very different record, and ordinary love of country helped defeat fascism. Critics answer that the line between healthy and dangerous nationalism is hard to hold, because nationalism appeals to emotions of pride and fear that leaders can inflame, and because the question of who belongs is always open to being narrowed. Both sides agree on one practical point: how a nation treats its minorities and its neighbors is the clearest test of which kind of nationalism is at work.
Worked example: how neighbors became strangers
Yugoslavia, formed after the First World War and rebuilt as a communist federation after the Second, contained Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Slovenes, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Albanians, Hungarians and others. In many places, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina, people of different backgrounds lived in the same towns, worked together and married one another. Some described themselves simply as Yugoslavs.
In the late 1980s, as the communist system weakened and the economy struggled, politicians in several republics found that ethnic nationalism was a powerful way to win support. Watch how the dangers in this level appeared one after another:
- Who belongs? Republics began to define themselves as the states of particular nations, leaving others as minorities.
- Fear. State-controlled media revived memories of atrocities from the Second World War and warned that the other group was preparing to strike again.
- Chauvinism. Each side's own suffering was emphasized and the other side's denied or excused, exactly the selective vision Orwell described.
- Partition by force. When war came, armed groups sought to make territories ethnically uniform, producing ethnic cleansing and, at Srebrenica, genocide.
Two points stand out. First, the hatred was not simply ancient and inevitable: for decades people had lived together, and leaders and media worked hard to divide them. Second, many people resisted, sheltering neighbors or refusing to join in, often at great risk. The case shows how quickly national identity can be turned into a weapon, and how much depends on the choices of leaders and citizens.