Nationalism: Overview, Forms, History and Contemporary Issues

Nationalism is not a single ideology, but different nationalisms have certain similarities.

In 1971, British sociologist Anthony D. Smith identified four beliefs that unite all nationalists:

1. Mankind is by nature divided into peoples, each with its own national character. Only through their development could a fruitful and harmonious community of nations come into being.
2. In order to achieve this national self-realization, people had to identify with their people, their nation. The loyalty that arises from this is above all loyalties.
3. Nations could only develop fully in their own states with their own governments; they therefore had an inalienable right to national self-determination (the right of peoples to self-determination).
4. The source of all legitimate political power was therefore the nation. The state power had to act solely according to its will, otherwise it would lose its legitimacy.

Nationalisms create a special form of collective identity. "When emotional attachment to and loyalty to the nation is at the top of the scale of attachments and loyalties," successful nationalism exists. Nations represent the primary political frame of reference, not estates as in feudalism, religion, dynasties, states, social classes, or humanity in the cosmopolitan sense. The nation mediates Lebensraum, a part of "the meaning of life in the present and the future." Alter refers to Friedrich Meinecke, who demonstrated the process of intellectual reorientation from Enlightenment humanism to the nation.

The definition of the sociologist Eugen Lemberg describes nationalism as a binding force "which integrates national or quasi-national large groups" and exercises a demarcation towards the outside. According to Lemberg, cohesion factors are particularly uniform or equal aspects: Language, descent, equality of character and culture, and subordination to a common state authority.

Karl W. Deutsch understands nationalism as a state of mind that can be a principle of order oriented to the national interest: On the one hand, the nation has a privileged place in social communication; on the other hand, the politics of this society legitimizes and orients itself according to it. Accordingly, a nationalist would pay particular attention to "national news". It should be stressed, however, that nationalism can appear in many forms and that there are therefore different definitions with different emphases.

Analytical concepts

Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson, Robert Miles and others emphasize that a nation is an "imagined community". For Gellner, nationalism is "not at all the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: one invents nations where they did not exist before". Anderson understands a nation as an "imagined political community" (imagined communities), but defines imagined in the sense of created, not false (false, artificial). According to Robert Miles, nationalism assumes the existence of "natural subdivisions of the world's population" and embodies a political project of seizing a territory "in which the 'people' can govern themselves".

In contrast to modernist theorists, a number of other nationalism scholars (e.g., Anthony D. Smith or Clifford Geertz) concede that ethnic nations defined by language, religion, kinship networks, cultural traits, or quasi-racial commonalities have a life of their own without nationalism. For these theorists, nationalism is at least in part a manifestation of a primordial (primal) sense of belonging. Karl Raimund Popper argues similarly as early as 1945 in the second volume of his work The Open Society and Its Enemies. He sees nationalism as a relic of a primal instinctive sense of tribal belonging, dominated by passion and prejudice. Moreover, for Popper, nationalism represents a nostalgic desire for the replacement of individual by collective responsibility. For Popper, the nation-state is in itself merely a myth, unjustifiable by anything but an irrational and romantic utopia; it is "a dream of naturalism and collectivist tribalism."

Based on nationalism research in the Anglo-Saxon language area, nationalism is understood as all movements that regard the nation as a value that determines action. In the political vernacular, however, nationalism is understood as an ideology of national intolerance and aggressiveness. In this sense, nationalism stands in contrast to patriotism, which is to be valued positively. In social psychology and historiography, however, this distinction is disputed on empirical grounds.

The counter-movement and ideology to nationalism is internationalism or cosmopolitanism. Supranationalism is associated with a softening of national orientations and corresponding reactions, which can be observed, for example, in the area of the European Union.

Typologies

Nationalisms can be typologized in several ways.

Civic vs. ethnic nationalism

Two main forms of nationalism are distinguished (e.g. Hans Kohn, John Plamenatz): Civic nationalism is often attributed to the West (e.g. France, USA): it defines nations primarily politically and only the borders of the territory represent an exclusion criterion. While in civic nationalism the members of a nation enter into a volitional union, in ethnic nationalism the ethnic nation represents a community of destiny. Ethnic nationalism, whose concept of nation is based on descent, belonging by birth, blood, or, indeed, ethnicity, has been prevalent in Central and Eastern Europe (e.g., Germany, Hungary) up to the present. Civic nationalism is usually associated with liberalism and ethnic nationalism with anti-liberalism tending towards authoritarianism. The sociologist Sammy Smooha coined the term "ethnic democracy" in this context.

Inclusive vs. exclusive nationalism

Inclusive nationalisms aim to integrate all subgroups of a society, regardless of their political orientation and cultural identity. They espouse the values and symbols of their own nation and concede this to other nations as well. Inclusive nationalisms refer positively to different characteristics of the nation: to the republican tradition, the democratic constitution (constitutional patriotism), welfare state, economic success or international reputation.

Exclusive nationalism or chauvinism is the term used to describe an exaggerated sense of value that aims at the sometimes aggressive demarcation from other nations. The exaltation of one's own nation with the aim of achieving the greatest possible unity of people and space is often accompanied by exclusion and discrimination, in extreme cases up to expulsion or extermination of ethnic and other minorities who are seen as alien or harmful to the imagined body of the people. Examples of exclusive nationalisms include Italian fascism, German Nazism, and the ethnic cleansing that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Exclusive nationalism claims a "monopoly of loyalty and interpretation": the individual is no longer supposed to regard his religion, his home region, or the dynasty that rules there as the identity-forming focus of thought and action, but the nation alone. In an integral nationalism, this claim can lead to the relativization or even devaluation of the individual: "You are nothing, your nation is everything". Therefore, this nationalism is classified under political religions. Since the 1970s, the term has been used almost exclusively in the sense of chauvinism.

Recent socio-psychological studies have shown that exclusive and inclusive nationalism cannot always be clearly distinguished empirically - on living people, so to speak - and therefore rarely occur in their purest form. A particularly visible example is "football nationalism". In order to avoid the pejorative connotation that the term nationalism always has today, according to Peter Alter, it is sometimes referred to as "love of one's fatherland".