Introducing Nationalism

Ask people what nationalism means and most will point to patriotism, national flags, or a willingness to sacrifice for one's country -- the Republic Day parade in Delhi is one striking image often associated with Indian nationalism, radiating a sense of power, strength, and the country's sheer diversity. Yet a precise, widely accepted definition of nationalism is surprisingly hard to pin down. That difficulty is not a reason to look away from the term -- nationalism is far too influential in world affairs to be ignored.

For the last two centuries or more, nationalism has been one of the most compelling political creeds in shaping history. It has inspired both intense loyalty and deep hatred; it has united people and also divided them; it has helped liberate people from oppressive foreign rule and it has also caused conflict, bitterness and war. Nationalist struggles have repeatedly redrawn the boundaries of states and empires, and although a large part of the world today is organised into separate nation-states, that process of re-ordering state boundaries has not ended -- separatist struggles inside existing states remain common even now.

Nationalism has taken different forms in different periods. In nineteenth-century Europe, it drove the unification of many small kingdoms into larger nation-states -- the Germany and Italy we know today were formed through exactly this kind of unification and consolidation. A similar wave created many of the new states of Latin America. As state boundaries consolidated, local dialects and local loyalties were gradually folded into wider state loyalties and shared national languages, and people acquired a new political identity based on membership of the nation-state. India went through a broadly similar process of political consolidation over the last century or so.

But nationalism cut the other way too. It also fed the break-up of large multi-ethnic empires -- the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires collapsed in the early twentieth century, and so, across the middle of the twentieth century, did the British, French, Dutch and Portuguese colonial empires in Asia and Africa. India's own struggle for freedom from colonial rule, like the freedom struggles of other former colonies, was itself a nationalist struggle -- driven by the desire to build independent nation-states free from foreign control.

The redrawing of boundaries has continued since. Since 1960, even nation-states that looked stable have faced nationalist demands from groups or regions within them, sometimes including demands for a wholly separate state. Today separatist movements are active among the Quebecois in Canada, the Basques in northern Spain, the Kurds spread across Turkey and Iraq, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, and among some groups in India as well. Interestingly, the very language of "nationalism" is used on both sides of this tension -- Arab nationalism today hopes to unite Arab countries into a wider pan-Arab union, even as separatist movements like the Basques or the Kurds use nationalist language to argue for dividing existing states.

What almost everyone agrees on is that nationalism remains a powerful force in the world today. What is far harder to agree on is the definition of basic terms like "nation" or "nationalism" themselves. What is a nation? Why do people form nations, and to what do nations aspire? Why are people willing to sacrifice, and sometimes even die, for their nation? Why, and in what way, are claims to nationhood linked to claims to statehood? Do nations have a right to statehood or to national self-determination -- or can nationalist claims be satisfied without conceding a separate state? These are the questions this chapter explores. …