I.

Introduction

Nationalism, an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of autonomy, unity, and identity of a human population deemed by some of its members to constitute an actual or potential “nation”.

The concept of nationalism is used in a variety of ways to mean: l) a doctrine or ideology of the nation; 2) a movement with social and political goals on behalf of a nation; 3) a language and symbolism of the nation; 4) a collective sentiment towards the nation; and/or 5) a process of growth of one or more nations.

This last usage is separate from the others; it refers to the much wider process of the development of nations. Similarly with “national sentiment”: widespread attachments to the nation, and a desire for its strength, welfare, and interest, can emerge with or without a nationalist movement or ideology, and to some extent even without the symbolism, if not the language, of the nation. Conversely, we may witness the emergence of nationalist ideologies, movements, and symbols in a tiny minority of the designated national population, without most of the members-to-be having much in the way of an attachment or identification with the emergent nation, as has occurred in several African colonial and ex-colonial states (see Decolonization). Nationalism can appear with or without “its” nation, and vice-versa.

For these reasons, it is best to confine the meaning of the term “nationalism” to ideologies, movements, and symbolisms. Of these, ideology should be accorded primacy; symbols and texts take their meaning from their place in an ideological framework, and while nationalist movements share with other kinds of movements their typical organizational features, they are distinguished by their specific goals, which in turn are set by the ideologies of nationalism.

We sometimes hear that it is impossible to give a unitary meaning to the term “nationalism”, either because it is too vague and inchoate or because there are so many different kinds of nationalism. However, while there are important differences between specific kinds of nationalisms, the central vision animating all of them is bold and clear, and it is one that stamps them as “nationalist” rather than socialist, conservative, Christian, or any other set of ideological movements and belief-systems.

That ideological movement and belief-system has three constituent parts: a core doctrine, a set of ideological goals and concepts, and a network of related motifs, myths and symbols.

II.

The “Core Doctrine”

The `core doctrine' of nationalism can be stated in the following propositions: l) The world is divided into nations, each with its own character, history, and destiny; 2) The source of political power resides solely in the nation; 3) An individual's primary loyalty is to his or her nation; 4) To be free, every individual must identify with a nation; 5) Every nation requires full self-expression and autonomy; 6) World order and justice require a world of free nations.

These are the tenets of an underlying doctrine espoused by every kind of nationalist from the founding fathers—Rousseau, Herder, Burke, Jefferson, Fichte, Mazzini— to post-colonial and contemporary nationalists. They provide the basis and impetus for all kinds of nationalist activity and institutions, and cover moral, social, cultural, as well as political, domains. They also provide the foundations on which particular nationalisms seek to build their nations through the use of “secondary” motifs and theories, derived from and suited to the contexts and situations of given nationalisms; examples of the latter include the Sun Language theory of Turkish origins espoused by Kemal Ataturk, the Emperor-worship central to the nationalism in Meiji Japan, and the idea of a fusion of “races” in Mexican nationalism.

This “core doctrine” has been the object of both moral and intellectual assaults. Elie Kedourie excoriated nationalism for its subversive antinomianism and its irrational millennial yearnings for terrestrial perfectibility, which led nationalists to preach virtue through terror and, in ethnically mixed areas, to bring untold misery and suffering by uprooting or massacring populations in their efforts to make states congruent with nations. He also attacked the doctrine's intellectual incoherence and contradictions, a theme taken up by Michael Freeden for whom nationalism is at best a “thin-centred” ideology with a restricted core of concepts, and at worst not a distinct ideology at all, but a parasitic “fill-in” for developed, mainstream ideologies like liberalism and socialism.

Neither of these negative portraits does justice to the multi-faceted nature of nationalism. While nationalists have often trampled on the rights and interests of other nations and have been responsible for many atrocities, nationalism's first proposition explicitly recognizes the existence and commensurability of other nations, and in such “concerts of nations” as Mazzini's Young Europe or the post-colonial Third World, this recognition was translated into practice. Besides, unlike a pessimistic, deity-dependant millenarianism, nationalism is an earthy, practical, human-centred programme of auto-emancipation, building old-new nations on the ruins of ancien régimes.

III.

Core Ideals

Intellectually, nationalism's credentials are not as straightforward as either its proponents or detractors claim. There is confusion among its adherents over the cultural elements or “signs” of nationhood, such as language, religion, customs, and territory. However there is no lack of themes and concepts, and all of them can be seen to flow from the basic ideals and goals of nationalist movements: national autonomy, unity, and identity.

Though it may translate into political independence and sovereign statehood, national autonomy is a much wider concept. Stemming from the notion of internal rhythms of the self, autonomy denotes the desire for self-determination, which can cover cultural self-expression like a free vernacular press, freedom of worship, retention of collective customs and institutions and the like, as well as a measure of economic freedom, if not autarchy. A number of recent West European ethno-national movements, such as the Catalan, Scots, and Flemish, have preferred these freedoms to outright independence; that is why scholars like Andrew Orridge term them “autonomist” nationalisms.

Closely linked to autonomy is the drive for unification. National unity is both territorial and social. On the one hand, nationalists strive to unite their homeland into a compact, bordered nation, and, from the time of the French Revolution, they have sought to destroy localism and curb regionalism in the interests of the nation “one and indivisible”. In some cases, such as the American Civil War, when the territorial integrity of the nation was at stake, they have been prepared to make huge sacrifices to maintain unity and overcome the nationalism of those prepared to secede. At the same time secessionists who base their claims on a sense of separate history, culture, and territory, aim to create a new compact nation that will serve as a homeland for all co-nationals. According to the same logic, those ethnic kin that are separated from the homeland, and hence “unredeemed” (irredenta), have to be reunited, they and the territories on which they reside, to the motherland (see Irredentism).

On the other hand, nationalists seek social unity—“fraternité” and latterly “sororité”. They aim to integrate the members of the nation, and unite every family in a common purpose and common values. This may produce a homogenizing drive, particularly with organic nationalisms (see below). Generally, however, nationalists require that co-nationals share the same sentiments and goals, and have complementary functions, rather than be similar. In fact, under conditions of modernity, in which the mingling of cultures is widespread, nationalism for the most part seeks the integration of polyethnic nations, notably in new states in Africa and Asia, and in immigrant societies.

There are, of course, limits to the pluralism of modern nations. This is where the third ideal of nationalism, national identity, acts as a vital counterbalance. (Here we should note the distinction between national identity as one of the ideals of every nationalism, discussed here, and “national identity” as a conceptual tool of the analyst.) The idea that every nation must possess a peculiar character or identity, that it must be genuine and unique, and that we must rediscover and cultivate that identity, has been central to nationalism in every continent and period, from the time of Rousseau and Herder to the newly independent national states of the former Soviet Union, and even to the “Eurofederalist” vision of the European Union.

This emphasis on an often elusive national identity helps to account for the many contributions of artists, poets, historians and educators to the articulation of nationalist ideals. It also helps to explain the close involvement of Romantics bent on rediscovering and depicting the “essence” of the nation, and on the use of scholarly disciplines from archaeology and history to anthropology and sociology, to tell us “who we are”, “whence we came” and “whither we are going”.

Underpinning these three central ideals of nationalism is what we may term the “quest for authenticity”. For nationalists, authenticity possesses several meanings: originality, a pristine state, indigeneity, purity, genuineness, uniqueness, or simply “our own” and nobody else's. The sheer variety of meanings poses a problem of ambiguity: is the indigenous necessarily pure, the original ipso facto unique? For nationalists, such complexities are irrelevant: they oppose the authentic and pure to all that is corrupt or cosmopolitan, and thereby determine the “true” inmost being of the nation, and from it they derive the moral imperatives of national education, mobilization, and destiny.

Nationalists support their quest with a number of other ideals. Perhaps the most important is that of national dignity. Authenticity of itself endows a population with moral worth, for the nation is revealed as a true “child of Nature”, in the romantic image of France described by Jules Michelet, and hence inwardly superior to all those mixed states and corrupt empires which nationalisms were bent on overthrowing. Autonomy and liberation may bring a measure of dignity, but true worth comes from within, summed up in the slogan 'Western arts, Eastern morality', used for so many aspirant national states in Asia, whom Western technological prowess had humiliated, but who could always retreat into the strongholds of their inner moral resources. This was especially marked in those cases like China, Japan, and India, which could boast a pedigree and antiquity to match the oldest and noblest of Western states.

Closely linked to the dignity of antiquity is the ideal of continuity. Historians may argue the toss over the degree of continuity or change in a given nation, but for the nationalist the idea of the nation as a slowly evolving community from rudimentary beginnings to its present state represents an ideal that can inspire devotion and action. There are, of course, nationalists who, like the Pharaonic movement in early 20th century Egypt, believe that, beneath the outward ravages of time the nation never really changes; it is always the same. However, for most nationalists, even when they espouse revolution and national liberation, continuity is growth, and hence change is built into national continuity.

This evolutionary view of the nation is reinforced by the nationalist idea of national territory. The very name, the “homeland”, resonates with familiarity, warmth, and stability. Everywhere else, as Michael Billig reminds us, is “abroad”, the place of adventure but also of danger. The homeland, by contrast, is a place of love and devotion—to its hills and valleys, its rivers and fields, its sacred sites and ancestral resting-places. The ancestral homeland has become an ethnoscape where land and people have become fused, where territory has become poetic landscape, where the folk may be extolled, and where we all can explore and celebrate “our roots” in the national soil.

Nevertheless the ideal of the nation is never static, and nationalism is nothing if not a salvation drama. If it seeks a return to roots and to the golden past, it is only to inspire the members to pursue a vision of glory. To this end, the collective future is transmuted into national destiny, and history serves to instruct the members of the nation in the tasks of their unique fate. This ideal of destiny carries with it quasi-religious notions of collective transcendence and immortality, not in another world, but through our posterity on this earth. Just as authenticity has become the new source of the sacred in modern nationalism, so destiny through biological posterity takes the place of the next life, binding the individual closely into the frame of the nation.

IV.

A Symbolic Network

Together, these ideals have formed a rich conceptual field and have helped to produce a striking array of emotive images and symbols. Not only do we have a set of characteristic concepts and languages of nationalisms; there are also recurrent myths, symbols, and memories associated with nations and nationalism.

Take the well-known symbols of the nation, developed for the most part by nationalists. These include emblems and flags for each nation and each national state; the national songs and anthems which emerged in the 18th century and became a sine qua non of any “genuine” nation; the various national holidays (of independence, of the constitution, of decisive battles and revolutions, etc.); the emergence of capital cities of government; the delineation of fixed and policed borders; the growing use of passports and currencies; the establishment of national museums and galleries, academies and libraries, and of national heritage trusts; the proliferation of statues of heroes and heroines, personifications of the nation (Marianne for France , Deutsche Michel for Germany, etc.); national military parades; tombs of the Unknown Warrior; and especially national festivals of remembrance for the war dead. All these, openly displayed or just taken-for-granted, have been reinforced or inculcated by nationalists to underpin and map the nation in the hearts and minds of its members.

The same can be said for the myths and memories of the nation. Nationalism has given coherence and force to the various elements of myth and memory that were the legacy of usually pre-modern cultures and ethnic communities. In the historicist mythology of the nation, its origins are clearly located in time and place. In some cases, there is also a putative ancestor and/or founder, such Piast for the Poles, Oghuz Khan for the Turks, and Abraham for the Jews. There may also be a decisive founding moment or turning point: the Israelite Exodus from Egypt, Gregory's conversion of the Armenians in c.3l2, the creation of the Hungarian kingdom in 896, the Swiss Oath of the Rütli in l29l.

These moments become the stuff of nationalist legend but no less important are the high points, the “golden ages” of the nation. These may be political and military, as with the Han Chinese or the Serbian empires; or they be economic, like the civilization of Teotihuacán in first millennium Mexico; they may be religious, as with the rise of Islam among the Arabs, the Vedic age in India, or the Mosaic or rabbinic ages among the Jews; or they may be artistic and intellectual, like the “golden age” of classical Athens, or the Italian Renaissance. For nationalists, these heroic ages serve a purpose: to excite the imaginations, and stir the emulation, of their co-nationals, and to rouse them so that they may once more scale the heights which their “ancestors” had conquered, and renew the ancient days of national glory.

This rhetoric is reinforced by a myth of national decline. Creativity dried up, wealth was dissipated, the spirit of communion faded, the nation decayed and split into fragments, and sooner or later, it was conquered, its lands expropriated, its members dispersed, and its people sank into ignorance and apathy. This is, of course, the cue for the nationalists to break the spell, awaken the slumbering beauty of the nation, and, through re-education, toil, and struggle, set it once again back on its historic course.

For this purpose, the nationalists appeal to the power of collective memory. Of course, these are not first-hand memories, not even recent, well-attested memories. They are traditions, some of them documented, based on earlier interpretations of often distant events and personages. There is no clear line between such memories and myths, for both deal with popular imagination and widely believed tales of an heroic ethnic past or pasts, and both rely on chains of interpretation after the event. Their selection is guided by present concerns, usually those of this or that political faction, but only within certain cultural limits and the parameters of popular resonance. For all that, the myths, memories, symbols, and traditions of earlier ethnic communities, widely recognized as “ancestral” to the nation in question, have become the staple of nationalist mobilization, and, along with language codes, have provided the cultural framework and underpinning of the nation.

V.

Nationalism as Culture and Religion

We generally compare nationalism, usually unfavourably, with other political ideologies. However this tells us only half the story. Nationalism is also a form of culture and of religion.

For nationalists, the nation is always a form of public culture. There are two aspects to this formulation. The first is the need to rediscover and educate the members in the national culture. Since for nationalists every culture, to be authentic, must be unique, the aim must be to cultivate national identity through history, language, literature, the arts, and the love of nature, so that the individual will feel in his or her heart the beauty and warmth of the nation. In this way, the members will come to share a common devotion to the nation, and become united in their collective goals. The second aspect concerns the means of such national re-education. It is not a private affair, a concern of the individual or family. As Ernest Gellner insisted, national re-education must be public, standardized, mass-based, and compulsory. It must be systemic, and support mass numeracy and literacy through a hierarchy of specialist personnel. As much was clear already to Rousseau, in his advice to the Poles: “It is the national institutions that form the genius, the character, the tastes and the mores of a people... which inspire in it this burning love of the fatherland'. Hence, public education is always directed at the people, and as such is “popular”, if not vernacular. It is also always political. Public culture is a form of “political culture” in which the nation is politicized and its symbols become political symbols, summoning the members (or citizens, in a national state) to love their nation, obey its laws, and defend its homeland.

Beyond a public form of culture, nationalism may also be grasped as a form of political religion, a surrogate religion, to be sure, one that is secular, in the sense of being in and of this world, but that is at the same time transcendent, because it is trans-historical and cross-cultural. In the eyes of nationalists, the nation, as Benedict Anderson points out, is always “good”; like the clouds hiding the blue heavens above, disfigurements only conceal for a time its essential purity. We can go further. For nationalism, the nation is a sacred category, separated and forbidden: in the terminology of Émile Durkheim, a sacred communion of the people; and nationalism becomes the political religion of that people. It is a religion not only in the functional sense, fulfilling the same needs through similar methods as traditional religions. Nationalisms freely borrow from the arsenal of motifs, symbols, and liturgies of the world religions, even when they rework them for cultural, territorial and political ends foreign to the earlier religions. Similarly, nationalisms reinterpret the soteriological meanings of traditional religions, to locate salvation not in some supra-empirical order or unseen world, but in the longue durée of terrestrial national posterity and its vision of heroic destiny, reserved for the new elect of the chosen nation. To this end, nationalism takes up the earlier beliefs in divine election, as well as the reverence for sacred sites, and attaches them to the nation in its ancestral homeland, investing it with the charismatic qualities formerly reserved for saints and heroes.

The same character of a political religion of the people is revealed in its myths of golden ages and destiny through mass sacrifice. In the myth-memories of the golden age nationalists discern once again the true goodness of the nation; hence the many images of a long-lost glory and beauty, with which the national ideal decks itself out. Even more potent are the monuments and rituals of heroic sacrifice. On one level, this is a vicarious atonement: the hero or heroine lives and dies to absolve the nation of its weakness and failure, and remind its denationalised and hence denatured citizens of their national duty. On another level, the sacrifice is made by each and every individual, for in a crisis the nation may demand mass death. To assuage such colossal grief and suffering, mass sacrifice must be linked to national destiny: through the Glorious Dead, the nation must be enabled to pursue its unique historical destiny, so that the fallen heroes shall not have died in vain nor the survivors be numbed by the horror of oblivion. In the solemn rites of mass remembrance, among the flags and massed bands at the Cenotaph or the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the true nature of the sacred communion of the people stands revealed and with it the nation as a community of history and destiny encompassing the dead, the living, and yet unborn.

VI.

Origins and Development

There seems to be considerable agreement about the dating of nationalism's emergence. Yet no ideology, let alone religion, emerges full-blown, like Athena from Zeus' head.

Elie Kedourie proposed 1807, the date of Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation, as nationalism's birth-date; Eric Hobsbawm appeared to favour the later date of 1830, while admitting earlier manifestations; John Breuilly also seems to think in terms of the early 19th century, while conceding an influential role to Herder; whereas Hans Kohn looked back to the Partitions of Poland in the 1770s. If nationalism is regarded as a secular political movement, then its first full-scale expression can be found during the course of the French Revolution, in the aftermath of the Enlightenment. There are also important and influential precedents in 17th century Holland and England, though their vibrant nationalisms were couched in fervent religious language and imagery, as have been many latterday “religious nationalisms”, notably in the Islamic world.

On the other side, medievalists like Adrian Hastings argue that defensive nationalisms can be found as far back as the Anglo-Saxons or even the ancient Israelites. He seems to have in mind more “national sentiment” than nationalist ideologies or movements; a theory of nationalism, he claims, is unimportant compared to the power of the mass sentiments of the nation. This may only serve to confuse the issue. We may concede the antiquity of “national sentiment”, but still argue that nationalism, the ideological movement, is both relatively modern and important in its own right, because the theory provides many ethnic communities and nations with a legitimation, guide, and blueprint for their political aspirations.

Later, with Rousseau and Herder, we begin to enter a new world of a widespread concern for authenticity, a return to roots, a preoccupation with unity and identity, as well as a desire for autonomy, which we find only sporadically in earlier centuries. Notwithstanding, there are a few suggestive pre-modern cases which seem to exhibit an organized ideological movement for autonomy, unity, and identity of a “nation”—among the Maccabees and Zealots of ancient Judea, the ancient Greeks in Persae (“The Persians”) and other dramas by Aeschylus, the Armenians in the pages of Elishe and Xorenatsi, perhaps the Scots of the Declaration of Arbroath and the Swiss after the Oath of the Rutli. If so, the idea did not catch on until much later. The turning point appears to come in the 15th and 16th centuries, when a conjunction of factors—the rise of the modern state, competition between nascent bourgeoisies, the rise of vernacular print, humanism and the revival of Greco-Roman political models, and the return to Old Testament theology of ethnic election and sacred territory, spread both national sentiment and national ideals of unity, autonomy, and identity among a wider literate class in Western Europe. Here too we can locate the origins of the characteristic ideas of “national character”, “authenticity”, and “national genius”, which were taken up over a century and a half later by Rousseau and Herder and their followers.

It is undoubtedly the case that many European nationalisms emerged at the beginning of the 19th century—in Italy, Spain, Germany, Poland, Russia, Hungary, Greece and Serbia—stirred in part by the example and conquests of Napoleon. From this point on, we can trace both emancipatory and unificatory themes, together or in succession. This formulation seems nearer the mark than conventional historical accounts which trace a first period of mass-democratic, “liberal” nationalism to the abortive Revolutions of 1848, followed after 1870 by exclusive small-nation ethno-linguistic nationalisms, which reached their apogee in World War I and World War II—and which for some like Eric Hobsbawm have returned in the wake of the break-up of the Soviet Union. In fact, divisive ethno-linguistic movements could be found as far back as the Serbian, Greek, and Irish uprisings, while several of the post-War anti-colonial nationalisms have been unifying and emancipatory.

A useful distinction can indeed be made between “ethnic” and “territorial” nationalisms, with the latter facing often major problems of integration, as in Nigeria, Kenya, Angola, India, Burma, and Indonesia, and the former veering between the poles of exclusiveness and absorption by larger neighbours. Similarly, we can usefully follow Hans Kohn and distinguish two ideological variants of nationalism in this period: the one more voluntarist, “civic”, and rationalist, the other more organic, “ethnic”, and authoritarian. Of course, in particular cases, it is always a matter of degree, and nationalisms may well move between these poles in different periods and circumstances. Nevertheless there is an important distinction to be made, analytically, between a nationalism that requires an individual to belong to a specific nation, but leaves to him or her the choice of nation, and a nationalism that prescribes the individual's nation from birth.

The later 19th and 20th centuries witnessed a proliferation of nationalisms of all kinds—conservative, religious, social democratic, communist, and fascist. The relationship between fascism, and especially Nazism, and nationalism has been problematic. For some they represent the logical culmination and denouement of nationalism; for others they are radically different, even opposed, the result of new factors like racism and the violence of World War I. In some cases, like the fascism of Mussolini, the link with expansionist integral nationalism is clear. In Romania, too, the affinity between and transition from a populist and romantic nationalism to the fascist movement of Corneliu Codreanu was plainly visible. In the Nazi case, the picture is more complex: the Nazis displaced the conservative Nationalist party of Alfred Hugenberg, while their themes of “agrarian settlement” in the East derived from Volkisch (or populist) nationalism. These themes were accompanied by a brutal imperialism and the idea of a racial hierarchy that was quite contrary to Herder’s original belief in cultural nationalism and to the whole idea of a world of vertical nations.

The relationship between communism and nationalism has been equally complex. Both reveal profound similarities in the structure of their ideologies; both are profoundly historicist, with revolution hastening overall evolution, with a special place reserved for the historical elect (the proletariat, the nation), and with the “movement” as the main instrument of historical progress and emancipation. Yet, “national communism”, from China and Vietnam to Romania and Yugoslavia, proved to be the undoing of the Comintern. The idea that communism had to be adapted to the situation and traditions of each nation (an idea traceable to Marx) revealed the staying power of nationalism and paved the way for the demise of international communism.

VII.

Towards “Post-Nationalism”?

Convinced that the horrors of Nazism and Stalinism, and the unprecedented violence unleashed by World War II, would spell the end of nationalism, many scholars and statesmen were surprised and unprepared for the eruption in the 1960s of “neo-nationalist” movements striving for ethnic autonomy in the secure, wealthy, and stable democracies of North America and Western Europe. Québécois, Scots, Welsh, Flemish, Catalans, Basques, Corsicans, as well as Slovenes and Croats, marched and rioted for greater autonomy within the states in which they had been incorporated on unequal terms. These political movements were supported by cultural revivals, in which the quest for roots and authenticity, also expressed in the student, ecology, and feminist movements of the time, provided a nationalist critique of market exploitation and the regimentation of the bureaucratic state. Two decades later, similar grievances could be heard after the explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl and the experience of glasnost in the Soviet Union. Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Georgians, and Armenians, among others, seized the chance of independence in the name of just those ideals of national identity, unity, autonomy, and authenticity that have resonated across two centuries and in every corner of the globe. Further east, in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, as well as South East Asia, national states and ethnic or ethno-religious communities have often been caught up in intense and protracted conflict, whether between the Kurds and Turkey, Israel and the Palestinians, Sikhs and Hindus, Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, and the Moro and the Filipinos in the Philippines. Analogous conflicts can also be found in Africa, in Sudan, Uganda, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Angola, antagonisms that, in several other states, are only contained by a precarious balance of “ethnic arithmetic”.

Despite this unpromising background of ethnic violence and national conflict, many scholars argue that the processes of globalization, such as growing economic interdependence, supranational political association, mass communications, and consumerism, are increasingly rendering national boundaries porous and national states and nationalism obsolete. Thus William McNeill, the eminent world historian, claims that after a brief period of attempted nationalist homogenization, often more mirage than reality, human society is once again reverting to its habitual polyethnic structure, as national elites find that, with the massive effects of globalization and especially mass migration, a viable economy requires an educated and diversified labour force and hence the creation of an ethnically heterogeneous society. In similar vein, Homi Bhabha and other cultural critics argue for the growing “hybridization” of national identities as a result of massive immigration and the rise of multiculturalism in place of received narratives of national traditions.

In this context, many scholars predict the early demise of nationalism, as “post-modern” structural conditions and the spread of sceptical, deconstructive, “post-emotional” attitudes replace the earlier, passionate romanticism and politicized cultures of the nation-state. For Eric Hobsbawm, surveying the scene in the early 1990s, it is disillusion with the failure of socialism, fear of the vast changes induced by globalization, and the influx of immigrants coupled with anxiety over the drying up of family roots, that has thrown people back into the arms of religious fundamentalism and an ethno-linguistic nationalism. Erecting barricades against the pace and scope of change will be of no avail. Nationalism will remain on the political agenda, as a secondary and complicating factor, but no longer can it serve as a major vector of the movement of history.

Much of this analysis extrapolates from the recent experience of the West. Outside this narrow, if dominant, core area, nationalism, as ideology and movement, appears to be on the increase, both in terms of its extent and its intensity, as post-colonial national states are locked in conflict or struggle to accommodate a variety of ethnic movements. In the West, too, nationalism has by no means run its course. Mingling with Christian fundamentalism, the missionary national ardour of the United States has been reinforced by recent threats and wars, fuelling the strong anti-American nationalism of the French, which in turn tends to pit them and their German ally against other national states within the European Union. Besides, the pressures of migration on employment and welfare in Germany, Italy, Belgium, and other Western states have produced strong counter-movements equating national identity with an indigenous national culture that can slide into racism. As we move east and south, the recent wars in Yugoslavia (see Bosnian-Croatian Serbian War), and the ethnic problems in some of the successor states of the former Soviet Union, remind us of the precarious balance of forces reining in nationalist passions.

At the same time, the persistent drive for European integration suggests that in some national states, at least, supranational identification can act as a counterbalance to centripetal ethnic tensions. Though the European Union, aiming for unity in diversity, does not seek to supplant national loyalties (except for a small ultra-federalist wing), it hopes to create a harmonized economic and communicative space on which a viable political community can be built, one that can gradually transfer some of the existing national attachments to the wider Union. If so, that project remains in its early stages. The “democratic deficit” in the institutions of the European Union, coupled with widespread scepticism towards projects of closer constitutional and political union, suggests that, while desirous of the economic benefits of accession to the Union, most people remain wedded to their national states and cultures.

Similar arguments pertain to the idea that a global culture will supersede nations and nationalism. The problem is twofold. On the one hand, a global culture, unless it be a form of Americanised consumer culture, is likely to be a patchwork of motifs and styles from many different cultures, created in a detached, ironic spirit, and inspiring neither passion nor mass commitment. Affectively neutral, memory-less, tied to no time or place, such a pastiche “electronic culture” is the antithesis of the many vivid and distinctive historical cultures that have been shaped by, and have in turn shaped, human experience, and on which nationalists have drawn for their political projects.

On the other hand, contemporary processes work as much for the retention of national cultures and nationalisms as for their transcendence. One can point to the political and cultural pluralism that underpins the international order, that is, the recognition and drive for cultural and political autonomy, and often sovereignty, in the creation and expansion of the inter-state order. Moreover, despite the much heralded decline of the national state, what we are witnessing is not so much a diminution as a shift in its powers and functions—away from economic and military powers and towards internal law and order, health and social welfare, and educational, media, and cultural functions. Equally important is the uneven distribution of ethno-historical cultural resources, the fact that different peoples can draw on very different cultural and historical repertoires, some of them “thick”—rich, deep, multifaceted—and others relatively “thin”—shadowy, and sparse in relics and documentation—differences which, when politicized, create rivalries and antagonisms in and of themselves. Finally, we should note the functions that nationalisms continue to perform in rooting peoples in particular ethnoscapes, authenticating their distinctive cultures, restoring dignity to the downtrodden, and endowing them with a sense of collective history, continuity, and destiny. These are functions that are unlikely to be fulfilled by a truly supranational, let alone a global, culture and association.