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External WebsitesProfessor of History, City College, City University of New York, 1949–62. Author of Political Ideologies of the Twentieth Century.
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Top Questions What is nationalism?Nationalism is an ideology that emphasizes loyalty, devotion, or allegiance to a nation or nation-state and holds that such obligations outweigh other individual or group interests.
What is the difference between a nation and a state?A nation is a group of people with a common language, history, culture, and (usually) geographic territory. A state is an association of people characterized by formal institutions of government, including laws; permanent territorial boundaries; and sovereignty (political independence). A state may comprise one or more nations (as did the Roman Empire and Austria-Hungary), and a nation may be represented in (or ruled by) one or more (usually contiguous) states, as in the early modern principalities of Germany. A state comprising or dominated by a single nation is often called a nation-state.
stateRead more about what a state is. What is a nationalist movement?A nationalist movement may be political or cultural or both. A political nationalist movement is a political, sometimes also military, struggle by a national group for statehood or for some measure of independence from or autonomy within a larger political association, such as another state or an empire. It may also be a struggle by a national group within its own nation-state for wider rights for its members, or it may be a (reactionary) struggle by such a national group against wider rights for minority groups. A cultural nationalist movement, which historically often precedes a political movement, is an effort to rediscover, preserve, study, or reinvigorate the language or cultural traditions of a nation.
Read more below: Cultural nationalism When did nationalist movements first arise?Although the 17th-century Puritan Revolution in England was animated by nationalist sentiment, significant nationalist movements generally did not arise until the late 18th century. The American and French revolutions (1775–83 and 1787–99, respectively) were both expressions of political nationalism. Later, nationalist movements inspired the Revolutions of 1848 on the European continent, the establishment of a unified Italian state in 1861, and the formation of new nation-states in central and eastern Europe after World War I.
What are some contemporary nationalist movements?Nationalist movements have included those by or on behalf of Tibetans in China, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, Chechens in the Soviet Union and Russia, and Bosniaks, Serbs, and Croats in the ethnic republics that arose from Yugoslavia.
nationalism, ideology based on the premise that the individual’s loyalty and devotion to the nation-state surpass other individual or group interests.
This article discusses the origins and history of nationalism to the 1980s. For later developments in the history of nationalism, see 20th-century international relations; European Union; and Euroskepticism.
Nationalism is a modern movement. Throughout history people have been attached to their native soil, to the traditions of their parents, and to established territorial authorities, but it was not until the end of the 18th century that nationalism began to be a generally recognized sentiment molding public and private life and one of the great, if not the greatest, single determining factors of modern history. Because of its dynamic vitality and its all-pervading character, nationalism is often thought to be very old; sometimes it is mistakenly regarded as a permanent factor in political behaviour. Actually, the American and French revolutions may be regarded as its first powerful manifestations. After penetrating the new countries of Latin America, it spread in the early 19th century to central Europe and from there, toward the middle of the century, to eastern and southeastern Europe. At the beginning of the 20th century, nationalism flowered in Asia and Africa. Thus, the 19th century has been called the age of nationalism in Europe, while the 20th century witnessed the rise and struggle of powerful national movements throughout Asia and Africa.
Nationalism, translated into world politics, implies the identification of the state or nation with the people—or at least the desirability of determining the extent of the state according to ethnographic principles. In the age of nationalism, but only in the age of nationalism, the principle was generally recognized that each nationality should form a state—its state—and that the state should include all members of that nationality. Formerly states, or territories under one administration, were not delineated by nationality. People did not give their loyalty to the nation-state but to other, different forms of political organization: the city-state, the feudal fief and its lord, the dynastic state, the religious group, or the sect. The nation-state was nonexistent during the greater part of history, and for a very long time it was not even regarded as an ideal. In the first 15 centuries of the Common Era, the ideal was the universal world-state, not loyalty to any separate political entity. The Roman Empire had set the great example, which survived not only in the Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages but also in the concept of the res publica christiana (“Christian republic” or community) and in its later secularized form of a united world civilization.
As political allegiance, before the age of nationalism, was not determined by nationality, so civilization was not thought of as nationally determined. During the Middle Ages, civilization was looked upon as determined religiously; for all the different nationalities of Christendom as well as for those of Islam, there was but one civilization—Christian or Muslim—and but one language of culture—Latin (or Greek) or Arabic (or Persian). Later, in the periods of the Renaissance and of Classicism, it was the ancient Greek and Roman civilizations that became a universal norm, valid for all peoples and all times. Still later, French civilization was accepted throughout Europe as the valid civilization for educated people of all nationalities. It was only at the end of the 18th century that, for the first time, civilization was considered to be determined by nationality. It was then that the principle was put forward that people could be educated only in their own mother tongue, not in languages of other civilizations and other times, whether they were classical languages or the literary creations of other peoples who had reached a high degree of civilization.
From the end of the 18th century on, the nationalization of education and public life went hand in hand with the nationalization of states and political loyalties. Poets and scholars began to emphasize cultural nationalism first. They reformed the mother tongue, elevated it to the rank of a literary language, and delved deep into the national past. Thus, they prepared the foundations for the political claims for national statehood soon to be raised by the people in whom they had kindled the spirit.
