essay on nationalism in nation building

• Bibliography
• Publish with Us
• Nation-Building
• The State of Nationalism
• Annotated Bibliography

Harris Mylonas 2021

A new approach to the study of nation-building: onset, process, outcome Nation-building refers to the policies that core group governing elites pursue toward non-core groups in their effort to manage social order within state boundaries in ways that promotes a particular national narrative over any other. Such policies may vary widely ranging from assimilationist to exclusionary ones ( Mylonas 2012 ; Bulutgil 2016 ). Moreover, the content of the national narrative or constitutive story ( Smith 2003 ) varies dramatically from case to case. The systematic study of the process of nation-building intensified following the Second World War primarily in relation to decolonization movements and the associated establishment of postcolonial independent states around the globe ( Emerson 1960 ). However, the field was initially dominated by assumptions and logics developed based on European experiences with nation-building.

We would not be that interested in nation-building were it not for its far-reaching impact on state formation and social order, self-determination movements, war onset, and public goods provision. The desired outcome of nation-building is to achieve social order and national integration ( Wimmer 2018 ). Nation-building, when successful, results in societies where individuals are primarily loyal to the nation. This process of national integration facilitates military recruitment, tax collection, law enforcement, public goods provision and cooperation ( Bendix 1977 ). There are also negative aspects of this process as well including violent policies, at times chauvinistic nationalism, even cultural genocide. When nation-building is either not pursued or is unsuccessful it leads to either state collapse (through civil war and/or secessionists movements) or to weak states ( Darden & Mylonas 2016 ). In fact, many civil wars or national schisms can be understood as national integration crises ( Mavrogordatos 1983 ).

Nation-building has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. For the purposes of this review essay, I focus on an overlooked distinction in the study of nation-building: works that focus on the onset , those studying the process , and finally the ones that try to account for the outcome : success or failure. While there is overlap between these fields, each approach is focusing on a different question. Studies of onset are preoccupied with when , where , and why does nation-building take place to begin with. Works that focus on process are exploring the alternative paths to nation-building that could or have been taken. Finally, studies concentrating on the outcome analyze the societal consequences of the various paths to nation-building. Distinguishing between onset , process and outcome allows us to avoid several methodological pitfalls when testing arguments. For instance, oftentimes a theory focusing on onset is mistakenly tested on outcomes. We should not expect arguments aiming at explaining variation in nation-building policies, i.e., focusing on process , to also explain success or failure, i.e., outcomes . Similarly, once we internalize the importance of this distinction, we can be more careful in articulating our scope conditions. For example, if a place did not ever experience nation-building efforts then it probably should not make it into the universe of cases of studies that are trying to account for outcomes of nation-building policies. This theoretical move will help scholars unearth the linkages between aspects of nation-building and important effects such as military recruitment, civil war onset, or public goods provision.

Onset For scholars like Anthony Smith, nation-building can be traced to the ethnic origins of a particular core group ( 1986a , 259). Nation-states without pre-existing ethnic content face a problematic situation because without it, ‘there is no place from which to start the process of nation-building,’ as Smith put it ( 1986 , 17). In the early 1990s, Barry Posen proposed an alternative argument for the onset of nation-building in his “Nationalism, the Mass Army and Military Power” ( 1993 ). Posen identifies imitation of advantageous military practices as the mechanism that accounts for the spread of nationalism and the adoption of nation-building policies. Given the anarchic condition of the international system, states either adopted this new model to match external threats or perished. This critical juncture accounts for the spread of nationalism through nation-building policies, initially in the army. Eric Hobsbawm ( 1990 ) locates the source of states’ interest in spreading nationalism mainly in the need of new or increasingly centralized states to find new sources of internal legitimacy. Similarly, Michael Hechter ( 2000 ) locates the origins of nation-building in the transition from indirect to direct rule identifying different types of nationalism: State-Building Nationalism, Peripheral Nationalism, Irredentist Nationalism, Unification Nationalism, and Patriotism. In a more recent article, Darden and Mylonas ( 2016 ) suggest that state elites pursue nation-building policies only in parts of the world that face heightened territorial competition, particularly in the form of externally backed fifth columns.

Process Before we dive in the theoretical debates in this category, I should note that the theoretical underpinnings of the theories discussed here have been influenced by some seminal case studies ( Bendix 1977 ; Lipset 1967 ; Weber 1976 ; Harp 1998 ; Magocsi 1978 ; Mavrogordatos 1983 ; Banac 1988 ; Jelavich 1990 ; Livezeanu 1995 ). Three main causal pathways lead to national integration according to scholars who focus on the process of nation-building. The central debate is between those that understand nation-building as an outgrowth of structural processes taking place in modern times—industrialization, urbanization, social mobilization, and so forth—and those that highlight the agency of governing elites that pursue intentional policies aiming at the national integration of a state along the lines of a specific constitutive story. The third causal path emphasizes how bottom-up processes can reshape, reconceptualize, and repurpose nation-building trajectories.

Structural accounts understand nation-building as a by-product of broad socioeconomic or geopolitical changes. Karl Deutsch’s ( 1953 ; 1961 ) classic argument that modernization opens up people for new forms of socialization constitutes the core of this approach. For Deutsch the process of social mobilization led to acculturation in a new urban environment, facilitated social communication, and ultimately caused assimilation and political integration into a new community. Works by Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner could be categorized as being part of this modernization paradigm. Posner’s empirical work ( 2003 ) tracing linguistic homogenization in Zambia serves as an illustration of such structural arguments. But there are several other types of arguments that highlight the importance of other structural aspects of modernity. Adria Lawrence ( 2013 ) suggests that disillusionment with the French empire—in places where the French administration failed to extend equal rights to its colonial subjects—led to the abandonment of mobilization solely for equal rights. Disruptions/triggering factors (in the form invasion, occupation, or France’s decision to decolonize) then offered opportunities for mobilization that account for the variation in the patterns of nationalist mobilization across the empire and within particular colonies. Dominika Koter ( 2020 ) suggests that in the Sub-Saharan African context citizens developed national identities through impersonal comparisons with neighbors during the post-colonial period despite the information-poor setting.

Other scholars see nation-building as a top-down process . Clearly, these accounts that emphasize the top-down aspects of nation-building are developed and tested in cases where nationalism has already been introduced and dominated the political imagination of at least the ruling elites. Moreover, some of the processes discussed by modernization theorists are prerequisites for most of the top-down nation-building arguments to unfold. One of the first scholars to criticize modernist accounts for leaving elites’ agency out of their accounts was Anthony Smith ( 1986 ). According to Rogers Smith ( 2003 ), we should try to explain the social mechanisms of nation-building and identify political goals that motivate elites initiating and directing these mechanisms. Soviet policies of ethnofederalism and affirmative action were particularly consequential instances of state-planned nation-building policies in the 20th century ( Connor 1984 ; Suny 1993 ).

Andreas Wimmer builds on the work of Fredrick Barth, and describes the means of ethnic boundary making such as discourse and symbols, discrimination, political mobilization, coercion and violence ( 2013 , 74–75). McGarry and O’Leary ( 1994 ) have offered an accessible overview of different strategies available to state elites in this pursuit, yet scholars have also sought to explain why policy choices vary across states ( Brubaker 1996 ), across non-core groups within the same state ( Mylonas 2012 ), across different parts of the same country ( McNamee & Zhang 2019 ), and across historical periods ( Marx 2005 ). Some authors have argued that state strategies are strongly shaped by historical legacies ( Brubaker 1992 ; Aktürk 2012 ). Nation-building strategies have also taken violent forms ( Bulutgil 2016 ). In fact, a few authors have noted that in ethnically diverse states, the introduction of democratic mass politics can actually lead to violent national homogenization ( Mann 2005 ; Snyder 2000 ).

Han and Mylonas ( 2014 ) try to account for variation in state-ethnic group relations in multiethnic states, focusing on China. They argue that interstate relations and ethnic group perceptions about the relative strength of competing states are important—yet neglected—factors in accounting for the variation in state-ethnic group relations. In particular, whether an ethnic group is perceived as having an external patron matters a great deal for the host state’s treatment of the group. If the external patron of the ethnic group is an enemy of the host state, then repression is likely. If it is an ally, then accommodation ensues. Given the existence of an external patron, an ethnic group’s response to a host state’s policies depends on the perceptions about the relative strength of the external patron vis-à-vis the host state and whether the support is originating from an enemy or an ally of the host state. They test their theoretical framework on the eighteen largest ethnic groups in China from 1949 to 1965, tracing the Chinese government’s nation-building policies toward these groups and examining how each group responded to these various policies. All in all, these top-down accounts are better calibrated to account for the form that nation-building practices take compared to the modernization scholars that see nation-building as a by-product of other processes.

Another approach to nation-building refocuses our attention on situations in which nationhood emerges as an active force in political life through various forms of bottom-up actions by ordinary people . These bottom-up processes of identification are treated as independent causes, but they are also structured, and are themselves restructuring a particular historical and institutional context ( Suny 1993 ) that gives meaning to social action. Lisa Wedeen ( 2008 ) is interested in how seemingly quotidian social practices create and reproduce a sense of national belonging even in the absence of a strong state, applying her argument to Yemen. Michael Billig’s ( 1995 ) work on banal nationalism—referring to the everyday representations of the nation aiming at reproducing a shared sense of national belonging—is also pertinent here, since pride in victory in sports or prominence in cultural affairs could be the source of a bottom-up nation-building process. In the African context Crawford Young suggested that the arbitrary territorial borders have been internalized over time, thus becoming a primary component of national identity ( 2012 , 309). Authors of this strand implore us to think about the nation not as a thing with fixed relevance and meanings but as one of the possible outcomes of partially contingent social processes of identification ( Brubaker 2004 ). Dominika Koter ( 2019 ) argues that electoral outcomes have consequences for national identification. She finds that the election of one’s co-ethnic increases the sense of belonging to the nation.

Isaacs and Polese have put together a special issue published in Nationalities Papers on nation-building in Central Asia focusing both on the efforts of ‘the political elites to create, develop, and spread/popularize the idea of the nation and the national community’ and ‘the agency of nonstate actors such as the people, civil society, companies, and even civil servants when not acting on behalf of state institutions.’ ( 2015 , 372). Thus, they suggest a more dynamic understanding of the nation-building process, with elites proposing and implementing policies which are, in turn, accepted, renegotiated, or rejected by those targeted by them.

Finally, Darden and Mylonas ( 2012 ), offer a conceptually and theoretically reflective discussion of the challenges and limitations of externally promoted nation-building. They argue that effective third-party state-building requires nation-building through education with national content. Nation-building, however, is an uncertain and long process with a long list of prerequisites, making third-party state-building a risky proposition.

A conceptual clarification is in order here. Journalists, policy commentators, as well as several scholars have recently used the term ‘nation-building’ in place of what the U.S. Department of Defense calls ‘stability operations.’ In other words, they often use the term ‘nation-building’ to signify ‘third party state-building,’ efforts to build roads and railways, enforce the rule of law, and improve the infrastructure of a state. This literature grew following the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 and the US attempts at state-building in Afghanistan and Iraq ( Dobbins et al. 2007 ; Dodge 2006 ; Rubin 2006 ). But, state-building and nation-building although related they are analytically distinct concepts. Nation-building refers to the development of a cultural identity through constitutive stories, symbols, shared histories, and meanings. To be sure, state-building can and often does influence the national integration process over the long term, just as the existing patterns of national loyalties may facilitate or hinder state-building projects.

Outcome Important works also exist that try to account for the success or failure of nation-building projects. For instance, Keith Darden’s stand-alone work ( forthcoming ), points to mass schooling as a mechanism that explains both the initial fluidity and the consequent fixity of national identities. Darden’s argument is that in countries where mass schooling with national content is introduced to a largely illiterate population for the first time and it is implemented on more than 50% of the population, then the national identity propagated in this round of schooling will become dominant. He proposes a few mechanisms for this effect, including western style formal schooling, status reversal within the family, and consequent gatekeeping to keep their children aligned with their initial national identity. Darden and Grzymala-Busse ( 2006 ) have shown that mass schooling with national content is a particularly effective strategy of inculcating the population with national loyalties that can endure long periods of foreign-sponsored authoritarian rule. Balcells ( 2013 ) finds supports for Darden’s argument in the Catalan case. Despite similar initial conditions, Catalan national identity is not salient in French Catalonia today because the first round of mass schooling with national content took place under French rule. In contrast, mass schooling in Spain was introduced in Spanish Catalonia during a period of Catalan nationalist upheaval.

Sambanis et al. ( 2015 ) argue that favorable outcomes in interstate wars significantly increase a state’s international status and induce individuals to identify nationally, thereby reducing internal conflict. Thus, leaders have incentives to invest in state capacity in order to solve their internal nation-building problems. The key assumption here is that strength depends to a great extent on nationalist sentiment. An important implication of their model is that the ‘higher anticipated payoffs to national unification makes leaders fight international wars that they would otherwise choose not to fight.’ The authors illustrate their argument and test its plausibility through a thorough case study of German unification after the Franco Prussian war.

Vasiliki Fouka ( 2019 ) has recently argued that discrimination against German immigrants in the US led these immigrants to pursue assimilation efforts, i.e. change their names and seek naturalization. However, in another article ( Fouka 2020 ) she finds that forced assimilation policies, such as language restrictions in elementary schools, had counterproductive effects. In particular, those individuals that were not allowed to study German in several U.S. states following WWI, were less likely to volunteer in World War II, more likely to practice endogamy, and to give German names to their children. These articles are part of a broader project ( forthcoming ) where Fouka tries to identify the types of initiatives that contribute to or hinder immigrant incorporation. She tests her intuitions studying the integration programs during the Americanization movement. Overall, she finds that nation-building policies that increase the benefits of integration are successful in promoting citizenship acquisition, linguistic homogeneity, and mixed marriages with the native-born. Conversely, prescription-based policies—where a reward is tied to a specific level of effort—are either ineffective or counterproductive. However, this is an approach that may not travel in contexts where assimilation cannot be assumed as the government’s intended outcome for all non-core groups in a country ( Mylonas 2012 ; Wimmer 2013 ).

Andreas Wimmer’s latest book asks: Why does nation-building succeed in some cases but not in others? For Wimmer successful nation-building manifests itself in having forged ‘political ties between citizens and the state that reach across ethnic divides and integrate ethnic majorities and minorities into an inclusive power arrangement.’ ( 2018 , 1). He operationalizes successful nation-building through the degree of ethnopolitical inclusion in a country’s power structures and citizens’ identification with their nation-state. The crux of the argument is that state centralization in the 19th century—in turn a product of warfighting, in Europe, topography facilitating state control ‘where peasants could not escape’ (16), elsewhere, combined with population density high enough to sustain a nonproductive political elite at the end of the Middle Ages—facilitated the conditions for the linguistic homogenization of populations and the construction of central governments able to provide public goods. These two factors, along with the presence of civic society that spans ancestral/ethnic divisions, lead both to successful nation-building. The most exogenous part of Wimmer’s argument is that variation in topography and population density explain the success of initial state building efforts. But could there be an alternative argument that accounts for variation in initial state- or nation-building efforts? Darden and Mylonas ( 2016 ) argue that a threatening international environment leads to state capacity and public goods provision in the form of nation-building policies (in particular public mass schooling) that in turn, when successful, account for variation in linguistic homogeneity and national cohesion. Comparing cases with similar levels of initial linguistic heterogeneity, state capacity, and development, but in different international environments, they find that states that did not face external threats to their territorial integrity were more likely to outsource education and other tools for constructing identity to missionaries or other groups, or to not invest in assimilation at all, leading to higher ethnic heterogeneity. Conversely, states developing in higher threat environments were more likely to invest in nation-building strategies to homogenize their populations.

Amanda Robinson ( 2014 ) focuses on Africa and attempts to evaluate the impact of modernization and colonial legacies on group identification utilizing survey data from sixteen African countries. She is focusing in particular on national vs. ethnic group identification. Robinson’s findings are consistent with the classic modernization theory. Living in urban areas, having more education, and being formally employed in the modern sector are all positively correlated with identifying with the nation above one’s ethnic group. Further, greater economic development at the state level is also associated with greater national identification, once Tanzania is excluded as an outlier.

Depetris-Chauvin, Durante, and Campante ( 2020 ) focus on sub-Saharan Africa and find that national football teams’ victories in sub-Saharan Africa make national identification more likely, they boost trust for other ethnicities in the country, and also reduce violence. Blouin and Mukand ( 2019 ) examine the impact of propaganda broadcast over radio on interethnic attitudes in postgenocide Rwanda. They exploit the variation in government’s radio propaganda reception due to Rwanda’s mountainous terrain. They find that individuals exposed to government propaganda decreases the salience of ethnicity, increases interethnic trust, and willingness to interact face-to-face with non-co-ethnics.

Dominika Koter ( 2020 ) puzzles over the existence of national identification in the absence of traditional nation-building projects and asks: what is driving national attachment in Africa? For Koter ‘the process that results in individuals identifying with their nation is nation-building.’ Which places her squarely in the ‘outcome’ group of scholars. However, Koter points out that Robinson’s ( 2014 ) finding that wealthier countries report higher levels of national identification worked on the third round of the Afrobarometer survey data but the correlation vanishes in subsequent four rounds of the surveys (rounds 4 through 7). In fact, the relationship appears to be skewing in the opposite direction as more countries were surveyed. Koter zooms in on Ghana and proposes an alternative pathway to understanding national identification, suggesting that national integration is an accidental byproduct of shared experiences and distinct country-level trajectories which allow contrast with other national communities. In particular, Ghanaian national identity is most consistent with the role of socio-political developments in the country, rather than cultural factors or state-led nation-building.

Conclusion The field of nation-building has developed tremendously in the past two decades, but more empirical interdisciplinary work, involving economists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists, remains to be done. In particular, work that involves cross-regional comparisons and perspectives will push our theories in a direction that can account for global patterns rather than rehashing the European experience and assumptions. Moreover, a more conscious effort thinking of onset, process, and outcomes as distinct stages when theorizing nation-building will move the field forward by improving our causal identification strategies.

[Sections of this essay build on Mylonas 2017 ]

Harris Mylonas is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University and editor-in-chief of  Nationalities Papers . His work contributes to our understanding of states’ management of diversity that may originate from national minorities, immigrants, diasporas, or refugees. His first book  The Politics of Nation-Building: Making Co-Nationals, Refugees, and Minorities    (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013) won the 2014 European Studies Book Award by the Council for European Studies and the Peter Katzenstein Book Prize in 2013. Mylonas’ work on the processes of nation- and state-building, diaspora policies, and political development has also been published in the  American Review of Political Science ,  Perspectives on Politics ,  Comparative Political Studies ,  Security Studies ,  European Journal of Political Research ,  Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies ,  Territory, Politics, Governance ,  Nations and Nationalism ,  Social Science Quarterly ,  Nationalities Papers ,  Ethnopolitics , as well as various edited volumes.

Recently Published

Nationalism and religion: making sense of a complex relationship jiyoung ko 2024, nationalism and international conflict jiyoung ko, kathleen e. powers 2024, nationalism and capitalism karlo basta 2024, revisiting the nationalism and social policy nexus silvana gomes, daniel béland, ally hays-alberstat, andré lecours 2023, nationalism and climate change daniele conversi 2023.

All material published with SoN is written by experts, peer-reviewed, and open-source. To submit an article, please contact Mr Stefan Poland at [email protected] .

• Subject List
• Take a Tour
• For Authors
• Subscriber Services
• Publications
• African American Studies
• African Studies
• American Literature
• Anthropology
• Architecture Planning and Preservation
• Art History
• Atlantic History
• Biblical Studies
• British and Irish Literature
• Childhood Studies
• Chinese Studies
• Cinema and Media Studies
• Communication
• Criminology
• Environmental Science
• Evolutionary Biology
• International Law

International Relations

• Islamic Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Latino Studies
• Linguistics
• Literary and Critical Theory
• Medieval Studies
• Military History
• Political Science
• Public Health
• Renaissance and Reformation
• Social Work
• Urban Studies
• Victorian Literature
• Browse All Subjects

How to Subscribe

• Free Trials

In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Nation-Building

Introduction, reference works: concepts and definitions.

• Structural Explanations
• State-Planned Policies
• Third-Party Nation-Building
• Contingency, Events, and Demonstration Effects
• Seminal Case Studies
• State Formation and Social Order
• Self-Determination Movements
• Public Goods Provision

Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about

About related articles close popup.

Lorem Ipsum Sit Dolor Amet

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Aliquam ligula odio, euismod ut aliquam et, vestibulum nec risus. Nulla viverra, arcu et iaculis consequat, justo diam ornare tellus, semper ultrices tellus nunc eu tellus.

• Nations and Nationalism
• State Theory in International Relations

Other Subject Areas

Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

• Crisis Bargaining
• History of Brazilian Foreign Policy (1808 to 1945)
• Indian Foreign Policy
• Find more forthcoming articles...
• Export Citations
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Nation-Building by Harris Mylonas LAST REVIEWED: 24 September 2020 LAST MODIFIED: 24 September 2020 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199743292-0217

Nation-building may be defined as the process through which the boundaries of the modern state and those of the national community become congruent. The desired outcome is to achieve national integration ( Reference Works: Concepts and Definitions ). The major divide in the literature centers on the causal path that leads to national integration. Thus, nation-building has been theorized as a structural process intertwined with industrialization, urbanization, social mobilization, etc. ( Structural Explanations ); as the result of deliberate state policies that aim at the homogenization of a state along the lines of a specific constitutive story—that can and often does change over time and under certain conditions ( State-Planned Policies ); as the product of top-bottom processes that could originate from forces outside of the boundaries of the relevant state; and as the product of bottom-up processes that do not require any state intervention to come about ( Contingency, Events, and Demonstration Effects ). Since the emergence of nationalism as the dominant ideology to legitimate authority and the template of the nation-state as an organizational principle of the international system, state elites have pursued different policies toward the various unassimilated groups within their territorial boundaries ( Seminal Case Studies ) with variable consequences ( Nation-Building and Its Consequences ). Thus, scholars have suggested that the nation-building experience of each state—or lack thereof—has had an impact on patterns of State Formation and Social Order , Self-Determination Movements , War Onset , and Public Goods Provision .

The concept of nation-building cannot be understood without the help of certain key concepts such as the nation, national identity, nation-state, and nationalism. The term “nation” has been defined by multiple philosophers, scholars, and practitioners. These definitions range from essentialist ones that reify certain characteristics as purely national ones ( Herder 2004 , Fichte 2008 ) to more constructivist ones highlighting collective ascription as a key element for the existence of a nation ( Renan 1995 , Anderson 1983 ). Tension exists between scholars who see the emergence of modern nations as a natural outgrowth from centuries of development and those who understand national identity as a modern social construct. Naturally, most nationalists themselves adopt a primordialist understanding of nationhood but prominent scholars also highlight the ethnic origins of modern nations ( Smith 1986 ). Modernization scholars ( Gellner 2006 , Anderson 1983 ) and, later on, various strands of constructivists ( Laitin 2007 , Brubaker 1996 ) have pointed out the limitations of the primordialist view. The view of nations being the natural outgrowth of premodern ethnies often assumes phenotypical commonalities that do not correspond to realities on the ground. Moreover, constructivists echo Renan’s critique that shared ethnic attributes do not necessarily mean a shared national identity or imply anything about loyalty to a nation. Finally, a primordialist perspective that essentializes attributes cannot help us explain identity change ( Laitin 2007 ) or the timing of “national awakenings.” Regardless of the definition of the nation and debates about the origins of nationalism, most scholars agree that nationalism—the “political principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent” ( Gellner 2006 , see p. 1)—is one of the most potent ideologies in modern times. In fact, what differentiates an ethnic group from a stateless national group is the fact that the former is not motivated by a nationalist ideology, namely the belief that the world is divided into national units (“nation-states”), that the primary loyalty should be to the nation and not to the family, the kinship group, or some other local or supranational unit, accompanied by a claim to sovereignty over a territorially bounded homeland. Nationalism takes different forms depending on the position that the group making the claim to sovereignty currently occupies in relation to other groups ( Hechter 2000 ).

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism . London: Verso, 1983.

Anderson introduces an influential definition of nationalism that focuses on the constructed nature of nations, calling them “imagined communities.” He defines the nation as an imagined impersonal community, defined by its common history and perceived distinctiveness, that is believed to exercise the collective right to sovereign control over a given territory.

Brubaker, Rogers. Nationalism Refrained: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511558764

Brubaker’s theme is the nationalization of the political sphere. He highlights the dynamic interaction in the triadic nexus involving national minorities, nationalizing states, and external national homelands. The three entities are far from fixed according to Brubaker, who invites us to stop treating the “nation” as an entity and approach it as “an institutionalized form.”

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. Addresses to the German Nation . Edited and translated by Gregory Moore. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Fichte (1808) defined the nation by objective criteria such as shared attributes. For Fichte, language is a natural phenomenon. Indeed, the possession of a shared language defines the natural boundaries of a Volk or a Nation. Fichte’s writings developed in reaction to the occupation of German territories by Napoleon’s forces.

Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism . 2d ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.

This pathbreaking book was originally published in 1983. Gellner famously defined nationalism as “primarily a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent” (p. 1). He emphasized the role of industrialization in the emergence and spread of nationalism through the introduction of mass schooling and assimilation into a high culture.

Hechter, Michael. Containing Nationalism . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Hechter defines nations as “territorially concentrated ethnic groups” (p. 14). He focuses on the transition from indirect to direct rule and identifies different types of nationalism: State-Building Nationalism, Peripheral Nationalism, Irredentist Nationalism, Unification Nationalism, and Patriotism. Hechter, echoing Gellner, defines nationalism as “a collective action designed to render the boundaries of the nation congruent with those of its governance unit” (p. 15).

Herder, Johann Gottfried. Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings . Edited and translated by Ioannis Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2004.

This is a reliable English translation of Herder’s writings from the second half of the 18th century. Herder argued that “Nature raises families; the most natural state is therefore also one people, with one national character. Through the millennia, this national character is maintained within a people and can be developed most naturally if its native prince so desires, for a people is as much a plant of nature as a family, only with more branches” (p. 128). He is considered as one of the fathers of romantic nationalism.

Laitin, David. Nations, States, and Violence . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Laitin defines the nation as a population with a coordinated set of beliefs about their cultural identities whose representatives claim ownership of a state for them by dint of that coordination either through separation, amalgamation, or return. Benefits of coordination explain the stickiness of these national identities.

Renan, Ernest. “What Is a Nation?” In The Nationalism Reader . Edited by Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay, 143–155. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995.

This is an English translation of a lecture that Renan gave in 1882 at Sorbonne University. It presents one of the first coherent and thorough critiques of the romantic nationalist view. Renan reviews the most common markers used to define nations in Europe, such as race, dynasty, language, religion, and geography, and discusses their limitations. For Renan, “the existence of a nation is a daily plebiscite” (p. 154).

Smith, Anthony D. The Ethnic Origins of Nations . Oxford: Blackwell, 1986.

Smith has famously engaged Gellner’s claim that “any old shred and patch would do” for the purposes of constructing a nation. Smith, instead, highlights the importance of ethnic roots in the formation of nations. He takes issue with the emphasis on the exclusively modern quality of nations and argues that most nations have premodern origins in the form of long-standing cultural symbols that are building blocks for modern nation-building.

back to top

Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login .

Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here .

• About International Relations »
• Meet the Editorial Board »
• Academic Theories of International Relations Since 1945
• Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb
• Arab-Israeli Wars
• Arab-Israeli Wars, 1967-1973, The
• Armed Conflicts/Violence against Civilians Data Sets
• Arms Control
• Asylum Policies
• Audience Costs and the Credibility of Commitments
• Authoritarian Regimes
• Balance of Power Theory
• Bargaining Theory of War
• Brazilian Foreign Policy, The Politics of
• Canadian Foreign Policy
• Case Study Methods in International Relations
• Casualties and Politics
• Causation in International Relations
• Central Europe
• Challenge of Communism, The
• China and Japan
• China's Defense Policy
• China’s Foreign Policy
• Chinese Approaches to Strategy
• Cities and International Relations
• Civil Resistance
• Civil Society in the European Union
• Cold War, The
• Colonialism
• Comparative Foreign Policy Security Interests
• Comparative Regionalism
• Complex Systems Approaches to Global Politics
• Conflict Behavior and the Prevention of War
• Conflict Management
• Conflict Management in the Middle East
• Constructivism
• Contemporary Shia–Sunni Sectarian Violence
• Counterinsurgency
• Countermeasures in International Law
• Coups and Mutinies
• Criminal Law, International
• Critical Theory of International Relations
• Cuban Missile Crisis, The
• Cultural Diplomacy
• Cyber Security
• Cyber Warfare
• Decision-Making, Poliheuristic Theory of
• Demobilization, Post World War I
• Democracies and World Order
• Democracy and Conflict
• Democracy in World Politics
• Deterrence Theory
• Development
• Digital Diplomacy
• Diplomacy, Gender and
• Diplomacy, History of
• Diplomacy in the ASEAN
• Diplomacy, Public
• Disaster Diplomacy
• Diversionary Theory of War
• Drone Warfare
• Eastern Front (World War I)
• Economic Coercion and Sanctions
• Economics, International
• Embedded Liberalism
• Emerging Powers and BRICS
• Empirical Testing of Formal Models
• Energy and International Security
• Environmental Peacebuilding
• Epidemic Diseases and their Effects on History
• Ethics and Morality in International Relations
• Ethnicity in International Relations
• European Migration Policy
• European Security and Defense Policy, The
• European Union as an International Actor
• European Union, International Relations of the
• Experiments
• Face-to-Face Diplomacy
• Fascism, The Challenge of
• Feminist Methodologies in International Relations
• Feminist Security Studies
• Food Security
• Forecasting in International Relations
• Foreign Aid and Assistance
• Foreign Direct Investment
• Foreign Policy Decision-Making
• Foreign Policy of Non-democratic Regimes
• Foreign Policy of Saudi Arabia
• Foreign Policy, Theories of
• French Empire, 20th-Century
• From Club to Network Diplomacy
• Future of NATO
• Game Theory and Interstate Conflict
• Gender and Terrorism
• Genocide, Politicide, and Mass Atrocities Against Civilian...
• Genocides, 20th Century
• Geopolitics and Geostrategy
• Germany in World War II
• Global Citizenship
• Global Civil Society
• Global Constitutionalism
• Global Environmental Politics
• Global Ethic of Care
• Global Governance
• Global Justice, Western Perspectives
• Globalization
• Governance of the Arctic
• Grand Strategy
• Greater Middle East, The
• Greek Crisis
• Hague Conferences (1899, 1907)
• Hierarchies in International Relations
• History and International Relations
• Human Nature in International Relations
• Human Rights
• Human Rights and Humanitarian Diplomacy
• Human Rights, Feminism and
• Human Rights Law
• Human Security
• Hybrid Warfare
• Ideal Diplomat, The
• Identity and Foreign Policy
• Ideology, Values, and Foreign Policy
• Illicit Trade and Smuggling
• Imperialism
• Indian Perspectives on International Relations, War, and C...
• Indigenous Rights
• Industrialization
• Intelligence
• Intelligence Oversight
• Internal Displacement
• International Conflict Settlements, The Durability of
• International Criminal Court, The
• International Economic Organizations (IMF and World Bank)
• International Health Governance
• International Justice, Theories of
• International Law, Feminist Perspectives on
• International Monetary Relations, History of
• International Negotiation and Conflict Resolution
• International Nongovernmental Organizations
• International Norms for Cultural Preservation and Cooperat...
• International Organizations
• International Relations, Aesthetic Turn in
• International Relations as a Social Science
• International Relations, Practice Turn in
• International Relations, Research Ethics in
• International Relations Theory
• International Security
• International Society
• International Society, Theorizing
• International Support For Nonstate Armed Groups
• Internet Law
• Interstate Cooperation Theory and International Institutio...
• Intervention and Use of Force
• Interviews and Focus Groups
• Iran, Politics and Foreign Policy
• Iraq: Past and Present
• Japanese Foreign Policy
• Just War Theory
• Kurdistan and Kurdish Politics
• Law of the Sea
• Laws of War
• Leadership in International Affairs
• Leadership Personality Characteristics and Foreign Policy
• League of Nations
• Lean Forward and Pull Back Options for US Grand Strategy
• Mediation and Civil Wars
• Mediation in International Conflicts
• Mediation via International Organizations
• Memory and World Politics
• Mercantilism
• Middle East, The Contemporary
• Middle Powers and Regional Powers
• Military Science
• Minorities in the Middle East
• Minority Rights
• Morality in Foreign Policy
• Multilateralism (1992–), Return to
• National Liberation, International Law and Wars of
• National Security Act of 1947, The
• Nation-Building
• NATO, Europe, and Russia: Security Issues and the Border R...
• Natural Resources, Energy Politics, and Environmental Cons...
• New Multilateralism in the Early 21st Century
• Nonproliferation and Counterproliferation
• Nonviolent Resistance Datasets
• Normative Aspects of International Peacekeeping
• Normative Power Beyond the Eurocentric Frame
• Nuclear Proliferation
• Peace Education in Post-Conflict Zones
• Peace of Utrecht
• Peacebuilding, Post-Conflict
• Peacekeeping
• Political Demography
• Political Economy of National Security
• Political Extremism in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Political Learning and Socialization
• Political Psychology
• Politics and Islam in Turkey
• Politics and Nationalism in Cyprus
• Politics of Extraction: Theories and New Concepts for Crit...
• Politics of Resilience
• Popuism and Global Politics
• Popular Culture and International Relations
• Post-Civil War State
• Post-Conflict and Transitional Justice
• Post-Conflict Reconciliation in the Middle East and North ...
• Power Transition Theory
• Preventive War and Preemption
• Prisoners, Treatment of
• Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs)
• Process Tracing Methods
• Pro-Government Militias
• Proliferation
• Prospect Theory in International Relations
• Psychoanalysis in Global Politics and International Relati...
• Psychology and Foreign Policy
• Public Opinion and Foreign Policy
• Public Opinion and the European Union
• Quantum Social Science
• Race and International Relations
• Rebel Governance
• Reconciliation
• Reflexivity and International Relations
• Religion and International Relations
• Religiously Motivated Violence
• Reputation in International Relations
• Responsibility to Protect
• Rising Powers in World Politics
• Role Theory in International Relations
• Russian Foreign Policy
• Russian Revolutions and Civil War, 1917–1921
• Sanctions in International Law
• Science Diplomacy
• Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), The
• Secrecy and Diplomacy
• Securitization
• Self-Determination
• Shining Path
• Sinophone and Japanese International Relations Theory
• Small State Diplomacy
• Social Scientific Theories of Imperialism
• Sovereignty
• Soviet Union in World War II
• Space Strategy, Policy, and Power
• Spatial Dependencies and International Mediation
• Status in International Relations
• Strategic Air Power
• Strategic and Net Assessments
• Sub-Saharan Africa, Conflict Formations in
• Sustainable Development
• Systems Theory
• Teaching International Relations
• Territorial Disputes
• Terrorism and Poverty
• Terrorism, Geography of
• Terrorist Financing
• Terrorist Group Strategies
• The Changing Nature of Diplomacy
• The Politics and Diplomacy of Neutrality
• The Politics and Diplomacy of the First World War
• The Queer in/of International Relations
• the Twenty-First Century, Alliance Commitments in
• The Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic and Consular Relation...
• Theories of International Relations, Feminist
• Theory, Chinese International Relations
• Time Series Approaches to International Affairs
• Transnational Actors
• Transnational Law
• Transnational Social Movements
• Tribunals, War Crimes and
• Trust and International Relations
• UN Security Council
• United Nations, The
• United States and Asia, The
• Uppsala Conflict Data Program
• US and Africa
• US–UK Special Relationship
• Voluntary International Migration
• War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714)
• Weapons of Mass Destruction
• Western Balkans
• Western Front (World War I)
• Westphalia, Peace of (1648)
• Women and Peacemaking Peacekeeping
• World Economy 1919-1939
• World Polity School
• World War II Diplomacy and Political Relations
• World-System Theory
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility

Powered by:

• [66.249.64.20|81.177.182.154]
• 81.177.182.154

• Table of Contents
• Random Entry
• Chronological
• Editorial Information
• About the SEP
• Editorial Board
• How to Cite the SEP
• Special Characters
• Advanced Tools
• Support the SEP
• PDFs for SEP Friends
• Make a Donation
• SEPIA for Libraries
• Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

• Friends PDF Preview
• Author and Citation Info
• Back to Top

Nationalism

The term “nationalism” is generally used to describe two phenomena:

• the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity, and
• the actions that the members of a nation take when seeking to achieve (or sustain) self-determination.

(1) raises questions about the concept of a nation (or national identity), which is often defined in terms of common origin, ethnicity, or cultural ties, and specifically about whether an individual’s membership in a nation should be regarded as non-voluntary or voluntary. (2) raises questions about whether self-determination must be understood as involving having full statehood with complete authority over domestic and international affairs, or whether something less is required.

Nationalism came into the focus of philosophical debate three decades ago, in the nineties, partly in consequence of rather spectacular and troubling nationalist clashes. Surges of nationalism tend to present a morally ambiguous, and for this reason often fascinating, picture. “National awakening” and struggles for political independence are often both heroic and cruel; the formation of a recognizably national state often responds to deep popular sentiment but sometimes yields inhuman consequences, from violent expulsion and “cleansing” of non-nationals to organized mass murder. The moral debate on nationalism reflects a deep moral tension between solidarity with oppressed national groups on the one hand and repulsion in the face of crimes perpetrated in the name of nationalism on the other. Moreover, the issue of nationalism points to a wider domain of problems related to the treatment of ethnic and cultural differences within democratic polity, arguably among the most pressing problems of contemporary political theory.

In the last two decades, migration crisis and the populist reactions to migration and domestic economic issues have been the defining traits of a new political constellation. The traditional issue of the contrast between nationalism and cosmopolitanism has changed its profile: the current drastic contrast is between populist aversion to the foreigners-migrants and a more generous, or simply just, attitude of acceptance and Samaritan help. The populist aversion inherits some features traditionally associated with patriotism and nationalism, and the opposite attitude the main features of traditional cosmopolitanism. One could expect that the work on nationalism will be moving further on this new and challenging playground, addressing the new contrast and trying to locate nationalism in relation to it.

In this entry, we shall first present conceptual issues of definition and classification (Sections 1 and 2) and then the arguments put forward in the debate (Section 3), dedicating more space to the arguments in favor of nationalism than to those against it in order to give the philosophical nationalist a proper hearing. In the last part we shall turn to the new constellation and sketch the new issues raised by nationalist and trans-nationalist populisms and the migration crisis.

1.1 The Basic Concept of Nationalism

1.2 the concept of a nation, 2.1 concepts of nationalism: classical and liberal, 2.2 moral claims, classical vs. liberal: the centrality of nation, 3.1 classical and liberal nationalisms, 3.2 arguments in favor of nationalism, classical vs. liberal: the deep need for community, 3.3 arguments in favor of nationalism: issues of justice, 3.4 populism and a new face of nationalism, 3.5 nation-state in global context, 4. conclusion, introduction, other internet resources, related entries, 1. what is a nation.

Although the term “nationalism” has a variety of meanings, it centrally encompasses two phenomena: (1) the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their identity as members of that nation and (2) the actions that the members of a nation take in seeking to achieve (or sustain) some form of political sovereignty (see for example, Nielsen 1998–9: 9). Each of these aspects requires elaboration.

• raises questions about the concept of a nation or national identity, about what it is to belong to a nation, and about how much one ought to care about one’s nation. Nations and national identity may be defined in terms of common origin, ethnicity, or cultural ties, and while an individual’s membership in the nation is often regarded as involuntary, it is sometimes regarded as voluntary. The degree of care for one’s nation that nationalists require is often, but not always, taken to be very high: according to such views, the claims of one’s nation take precedence over rival contenders for authority and loyalty. [ 1 ]
• raises questions about whether sovereignty requires the acquisition of full statehood with complete authority over domestic and international affairs, or whether something less than statehood suffices. Although sovereignty is often taken to mean full statehood (Gellner 1983: ch. 1), [ 2 ] possible exceptions have been recognized (Miller 1992: 87; Miller 2000). Some authors even defend an anarchist version of patriotism-moderate nationalism foreshadowed by Bakunin (see Sparrow 2007).

There is a terminological and conceptual question of distinguishing nationalism from patriotism. A popular proposal is the contrast between attachment to one’s country as defining patriotism and attachment to one’s people and its traditions as defining nationalism (Kleinig 2014: 228, and Primoratz 2017: Section 1.2). One problem with this proposal is that love for a country is not really just love of a piece of land but normally involves attachment to the community of its inhabitants, and this introduces “nation” into the conception of patriotism. Another contrast is the one between strong, and somewhat aggressive attachment (nationalism) and a mild one (patriotism), dating back at least to George Orwell (see his 1945 essay). [ 3 ]

Despite these definitional worries, there is a fair amount of agreement about the classical, historically paradigmatic form of nationalism. It typically features the supremacy of the nation’s claims over other claims to individual allegiance and full sovereignty as the persistent aim of its political program. Territorial sovereignty has traditionally been seen as a defining element of state power and essential for nationhood. It was extolled in classic modern works by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau and is returning to center stage in the debate, though philosophers are now more skeptical (see below). Issues surrounding the control of the movement of money and people (in particular immigration) and the resource rights implied in territorial sovereignty make the topic politically central in the age of globalization and philosophically interesting for nationalists and anti-nationalists alike.

In recent times, the philosophical focus has moved more in the direction of “liberal nationalism”, the view that mitigates the classical claims and tries to bring together the pro-national attitude and the respect for traditional liberal values. For instance, the territorial state as political unit is seen by classical nationalists as centrally “belonging” to one ethnic-cultural group and as actively charged with protecting and promulgating its traditions. The liberal variety allows for “sharing” of the territorial state with non-dominant ethnic groups. Consequences are varied and quite interested (for more see below, especially section 2.1 ).

In its general form, the issue of nationalism concerns the mapping between the ethno-cultural domain (featuring ethno-cultural groups or “nations”) and the domain of political organization. In breaking down the issue, we have mentioned the importance of the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity. This point raises two sorts of questions. First, the descriptive ones:

Second, the normative ones:

This section discusses the descriptive questions, starting with (1a) and (1b) ;the normative questions are addressed in Section 3 on the moral debate. If one wants to enjoin people to struggle for their national interests, one must have some idea about what a nation is and what it is to belong to a nation. So, in order to formulate and ground their evaluations, claims, and directives for action, pro-nationalist thinkers have expounded theories of ethnicity, culture, nation, and state. Their opponents have in turn challenged these elaborations. Now, some presuppositions about ethnic groups and nations are essential for the nationalist, while others are theoretical elaborations designed to support the essential ones. The definition and status of the social group that benefits from the nationalist program, variously called the “nation”, “ethno-nation”, or “ethnic group”, is essential. Since nationalism is particularly prominent with groups that do not yet have a state, a definition of nation and nationalism purely in terms of belonging to a state is a non-starter.

Indeed, purely “civic” loyalties are often categorized separately under the title “patriotism”, which we already mentioned, or “constitutional patriotism”. [ 4 ] This leaves two extreme options and a number of intermediates. The first extreme option has been put forward by a small but distinguished band of theorists. [ 5 ] According to their purely voluntaristic definition, a nation is any group of people aspiring to a common political state-like organization. If such a group of people succeeds in forming a state, the loyalties of the group members become “civic” (as opposed to “ethnic”) in nature. At the other extreme, and more typically, nationalist claims are focused upon the non-voluntary community of common origin, language, tradition, and culture: the classic ethno-nation is a community of origin and culture, including prominently a language and customs. The distinction is related (although not identical) to that drawn by older schools of social and political science between “civic” and “ethnic” nationalism, the former being allegedly Western European and the latter more Central and Eastern European, originating in Germany. [ 6 ] Philosophical discussions centered on nationalism tend to concern the ethnic-cultural variants only, and this habit will be followed here. A group aspiring to nationhood on this basis will be called an “ethno-nation” to underscore its ethno-cultural rather than purely civic underpinnings. For the ethno-(cultural) nationalist it is one’s ethnic-cultural background that determines one’s membership in the community. One cannot choose to be a member; instead, membership depends on the accident of origin and early socialization. However, commonality of origin has become mythical for most contemporary candidate groups: ethnic groups have been mixing for millennia.

Sophisticated, liberal pro-nationalists therefore tend to stress cultural membership only and speak of “nationality”, omitting the “ethno-” part (Miller 1992, 2000; Tamir 1993,2013; Gans 2003). Michel Seymour’s proposal of a “socio-cultural definition” adds a political dimension to the purely cultural one: a nation is a cultural group, possibly but not necessarily united by a common descent, endowed with civic ties (Seymour 2000). This is the kind of definition that would be accepted by most parties in the debate today. So defined, the nation is a somewhat mixed category, both ethno-cultural and civic, but still closer to the purely ethno-cultural than to the purely civic extreme.

Let us now turn to the issue of the origin and “authenticity” of ethno-cultural groups or ethno-nations. In social and political science one usually distinguishes two kinds of views, but there is a third group, combining element from both. The first are modernist views that see nationalism as born in modern times, together with nation-states. [ 7 ] In our times the view was pioneered by Ernst Gellner (see his 1983). [ 8 ] Other modernist choose similar starting points with century or two of variation. [ 9 ] The opposite view can be called, following Edward Shils (1957) “primordialist”. According to it, actual ethno-cultural nations have either existed “since time immemorial”.

The third, quite plausible kind of view, distinct from both primordialism-ethno-symbolism and modernism, has been initiated by W. Connor (1994). [ 10 ] A nation is a politicized and mobilized ethnic group rather than a state. So, the origins of nationalism predate the modern state, and its emotional content remains up to our times (Conversi 2002: 270), but the actual statist organization is, indeed, modern. However, nation-state is a nationalist dream and fiction, never really implemented, due to the inescapable plurality of social groups. So much for the three dominant perspectives on the origin of nationalism.

Indeed, the older authors—from great thinkers like Herder and Otto Bauer to the propagandists who followed their footsteps—took great pains to ground normative claims upon firm ontological realism about nations: nations are real, bona fide entities. However, the contemporary moral debate has tried to diminish the importance of the imagined/real divide. Prominent contemporary philosophers have claimed that normative-evaluative nationalist claims are compatible with the “imagined” nature of a nation. [ 11 ] They point out that common imaginings can tie people together, and that actual interaction resulting from togetherness can engender important moral obligations.

Let us now turn to question (1c) about the nature of pro-national attitudes. The explanatory issue that has interested political and social scientists concerns ethno-nationalist sentiment, the paradigm case of a pro-national attitude. Is it as irrational, romantic, and indifferent to self-interest as it might seem on the surface? The issue has divided authors who see nationalism as basically irrational and those who try to explain it as being in some sense rational. Authors who see it as irrational propose various explanations of why people assent to irrational views. Some say, critically, that nationalism is based on “false consciousness”. But where does such false consciousness come from? The most simplistic view is that it is a result of direct manipulation of “masses” by “elites”. On the opposite side, the famous critic of nationalism Elie Kedourie (1960) thinks this irrationality is spontaneous. A decade and a half ago Liah Greenfeld went as far as linking nationalism to mental illness in her provocative 2005 article (see also her 2006 book). On the opposite side, Michael Walzer has offered a sympathetic account of nationalist passion in his 2002. Authors relying upon the Marxist tradition offer various deeper explanations. To mention one, the French structuralist Étienne Balibar sees it as a result of the “production” of ideology effectuated by mechanisms which have nothing to do with spontaneous credulity of individuals, but with impersonal, structural social factors (Balibar & Wallerstein 1988 [1991]). [ 12 ]

Some authors claim that it is often rational for individuals to become nationalists (Hardin 1985). Can one rationally explain the extremes of ethno-national conflict? Authors like Russell Hardin propose to do so in terms of a general view of when hostile behavior is rational: most typically, if an individual has no reason to trust someone, it is reasonable for that individual to take precautions against the other. If both sides take precautions, however, each will tend to see the other as increasingly inimical. It then becomes rational to start treating the other as an enemy. Mere suspicion can thus lead by small, individually rational steps to a situation of conflict. (Such negative development is often presented as a variant of the Prisoner’s Dilemma; see the entry on prisoner’s dilemma ). It is relatively easy to spot the circumstances in which this general pattern applies to national solidarities and conflicts (see also Wimmer 2013).

Finally, as for question (1d) , the nation is typically seen as an essentially non-voluntary community to which one belongs by birth and early nurture and such that the belonging is enhanced and made more complete by one’s additional conscious endorsement. Not everyone agrees: liberal nationalists accept the idea of choice of one’s national belonging and of possibility for immigrants to become nationals by choice and intentional acculturation.

2. Varieties of Nationalism

We pointed out at the very beginning of the entry that nationalism focuses upon (1) the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity, and (2) the actions that the members of a nation take when seeking to achieve (or sustain) some form of political sovereignty. The politically central point is (2): the actions enjoined by the nationalist. To these we now turn, beginning with sovereignty and territory, the usual foci of a national struggle for independence. They raise an important issue:

The classical answer is that a state is required. A more liberal answer is that some form of political autonomy suffices. Once this has been discussed, we can turn to the related normative issues:

Consider first the classical nationalist answer to (2a) . Political sovereignty requires a state “rightfully owned” by the ethno-nation (Oldenquist 1997). Developments of this line of thought often state or imply specific answers to (2b) , and (2c) , i.e., that in a national independence struggle the use of force against the threatening central power is almost always a legitimate means for bringing about sovereignty. However, classical nationalism is not only concerned with the creation of a state but also with its maintenance and strengthening.

Classical nationalism is the political program that sees the creation and maintenance of a fully sovereign state owned by a given ethno-national group (“people” or “nation”) as a primary duty of each member of the group. Starting from the assumption that the appropriate (or “natural”) unit of culture is an ethno-nation, it claims that a primary duty of each member is to abide by one’s recognizably ethno-national culture in all cultural matters.

Classical nationalists are usually vigilant about the kind of culture they protect and promote and about the kind of attitude people have to their nation-state. This watchful attitude carries some potential dangers: many elements of a given culture that are universal or simply not recognizably national may fall prey to such nationalist enthusiasms. Classical nationalism in everyday life puts various additional demands on individuals, from buying more expensive home-produced goods in preference to cheaper imported ones to procreating as many future members of the nation as one can manage (see Yuval-Davies 1997, and Yack 2012).

Besides classical nationalism (and its more radical extremist cousins), various moderate views are also now classified as nationalist. Indeed, the philosophical discussion has shifted to these moderate or even ultra-moderate forms, and most philosophers who describe themselves as nationalists propose very moderate nationalist programs.

Nationalism in this wider sense is any complex of attitudes, claims, and directives for action ascribing a fundamental political, moral, and cultural value to nation and nationality and deriving obligations (for individual members of the nation, and for any involved third parties, individual or collective) from this ascribed value. The main representative of this group of views is liberal nationalism , proposed by authors like Miller, Tamir, and Gans (see below).

Nationalisms in this wider sense can vary somewhat in their conceptions of the nation (which are often left implicit in their discourse), in the grounds for and degree of its value, and in the scope of their prescribed obligations. Moderate nationalism is less demanding than classical nationalism and sometimes goes under the name of “patriotism.” (A different usage, again, reserves “patriotism” for valuing civic community and loyalty to state, in contrast to nationalism, centered on ethnic-cultural communities).

Let us now turn to liberal nationalism, the most discussed kind of moderate nationalism.

Liberal nationalists see liberal-democratic principles and pro-national attitudes as belonging together. One of the main proponents of the view, Yael Tamir, started the debate in her 1993 book and in her recent book talks about the nation-state as “an ideal meeting point between the two” (2019: 6). Of course, some things have to be sacrificed: we must acknowledge that either the meaningfulness of a community or its openness must be sacrificed to some extent as we cannot have them both. (2019: 57). How much of each is to give way is left open, and of course, various liberal nationalists take different views of what precisely the right answer is.

Tamir’s version of liberal nationalism is a kind of social liberalism, in this respect similar to the views of David Miller who talks about “solidaristic communities” in his 1999 book Principles of Social Justice and also takes stance in his 1995 and 2008 books. They both see the feeling of national identity as a feeling that promotes solidarity, and solidarity as means for increased social justice (Tamir 2019, in particular ch.20; compare Walzer 1983, Kymlicka 1995a, 2001, and Gans 2003, 2008).

Liberal nationalists diverge about the value of multiculturalism. Kymlicka takes it as basic for his picture of liberalism while Tamir dismisses it without much ado: multicultural, multiethnic democracies have a very poor track record, she claims (2019: 62). Tamir’s diagnosis of the present day political crisis, with politicians like Trump and Le Pen coming to the forefront, is that “liberal democrats were paralyzed by their assumed victory” whereas “nationalists felt defeated and obsolete” (2019: 7).

Tamir lists two kinds of reasons that guarantee special political status to nations. First kind, that no other political entity “is more able than the state to promote ideas in the public sphere” (2019: 52), and the second kind that nation needs continuous creative effort to make it functional and attractive.

The historical development of liberalism turned it into a universalistic, anti-communitarian principle; this has been a fatal mistake that can be and should be corrected by the liberal nationalist synthesis. Can we revive the unifying narratives of our nationality without sacrificing the liberal inheritance of freedom and rights? Liberal nationalism answers in the affirmative. From its standpoint, national particularism has primacy: “The love of humanity is a noble ideal, but real love is always particular…” (2019: 68).

Interestingly, Tamir combines this high regard of nation with an extreme constructivist view of its nature: nations are mental structures that exist in the minds of their members (2019: 58).

Is liberal nationalism implemented anywhere in the present world, or is it more of an ideal, probably end-state theory, that proposes a picture of a desirable society? Judging by the writings of liberal nationalists, it is the latter, although presented as a relatively easily reachable ideal, combining two traditions that are already well implemented in political reality.

The variations of nationalism most relevant for philosophy are those that influence the moral standing of claims and of recommended nationalist practices. The elaborate philosophical views put forward in favor of nationalism will be referred to as “theoretical nationalism”, the adjective serving to distinguish such views from less sophisticated and more practical nationalist discourse. The central theoretical nationalist evaluative claims can be charted on the map of possible positions within political theory in the following useful but somewhat simplified and schematic way.

Nationalist claims featuring the nation as central to political action must answer two crucial general questions. First, is there one kind of large social group that is of special moral importance? The nationalist answer is that there certainly is one, namely, the nation. Moreover, when an ultimate choice is to be made, say between ties of family, or friendship, and the nation, the latter has priority. Liberal nationalists prefer a more moderate stance, which ascribes value to national belonging, but don’t make it central in this way. Second, what are the grounds for an individual’s obligations to the morally central group? Are they based on voluntary or involuntary membership in the group? The typical contemporary nationalist thinker opts for the latter, while admitting that voluntary endorsement of one’s national identity is a morally important achievement. On the philosophical map, pro-nationalist normative tastes fit nicely with the communitarian stance in general: most pro-nationalist philosophers are communitarians who choose the nation as the preferred community (in contrast to those of their fellow communitarians who prefer more far-ranging communities, such as those defined by global religious traditions). [ 13 ]

Before proceeding to moral claims, let us briefly sketch the issues and viewpoints connected to territory and territorial rights that are essential for nationalist political programs. [ 14 ] Why is territory important for ethno-national groups, and what are the extent and grounds of territorial rights? Its primary importance resides in sovereignty and all the associated possibilities for internal control and external exclusion. Add to this the Rousseauian view that political attachments are essentially bounded and that love —or, to put it more mildly, republican civil friendship—for one’s group requires exclusion of some “other”, and the importance becomes quite obvious. What about the grounds for the demand for territorial rights? Nationalist and pro-nationalist views mostly rely on the attachment that members of a nation have to national territory and to the formative value of territory for a nation to justify territorial claims (see Miller 2000 and Meisels 2009). This is similar in some respects to the rationale given by proponents of indigenous peoples’ rights (Tully 2004, but see also Hendrix 2008) and in other respects to Kolers’ 2009 ethno-geographical non-nationalist theory, but differs in preferring ethno-national groups as the sole carriers of the right. These attachment views stand in stark contrast to more pragmatic views about territorial rights as means for conflict resolution (e.g., Levy 2000). Another quite popular alternative is the family of individualistic views grounding territorial rights in rights and interests of individuals. [ 15 ] On the extreme end of anti-nationalist views stands the idea of Pogge) that there are no specific territorial problems for political philosophy—the “dissolution approach”, as Kolers calls it.

We now pass to the normative dimension of nationalism. We shall first describe the very heart of the nationalist program, i.e., sketch and classify the typical normative and evaluative nationalist claims. These claims can be seen as answers to the normative subset of our initial questions about (1) pro-national attitudes and (2) actions.

We will see that these claims recommend various courses of action: centrally, those meant to secure and sustain a political organization for the given ethno-cultural national community (thereby making more specific the answers to our normative questions (1e) , (1f) , (2b) , and (2c) ). Further, they enjoin the community’s members to promulgate recognizable ethno-cultural contents as central features of the cultural life within such a state. Finally, we shall discuss various lines of pro-nationalist thought that have been put forward in defense of these claims. To begin, let us return to the claims concerning the furthering of the national state and culture. These are proposed by the nationalist as norms of conduct. The philosophically most important variations concern three aspects of such normative claims:

• The normative nature and strength of the claim: does it promote merely a right (say, to have and maintain a form of political self-government, preferably and typically a state, or have cultural life centered upon a recognizably ethno-national culture), or a moral obligation (to get and maintain one), or a moral, legal, and political obligation? The strongest claim is typical of classical nationalism; its typical norms are both moral and, once the nation-state is in place, legally enforceable obligations for all parties concerned, including for the individual members of the ethno-nation. A weaker but still quite demanding version speaks only of moral obligation (“sacred duty”).
• The strength of the nationalist claim in relation to various external interests and rights: to give a real example, is the use of the domestic language so important that even international conferences should be held in it, at the cost of losing the most interesting participants from abroad? The force of the nationalist claim is here being weighed against the force of other claims, including those of individual or group interests or rights. Variations in comparative strength of nationalist claims take place on a continuum between two extremes. At one rather unpalatable extreme, nation-focused claims take precedence over any other claims, including over human rights. Further towards the center is the classical nationalism that gives nation-centered claims precedence over individual interests and many needs, but not necessarily over general human rights (see, for example, MacIntyre 1994, Oldenquist 1997). On the opposite end, which is mild, humane, and liberal, the central classical nationalist claims are accorded prima facie status only (see Tamir 1993, Gans 2003, and Miller 2013; and for applications to Central Europe Stefan Auer 2004).

Universalizing nationalism is the political program that claims that every ethno-nation should have a state that it should rightfully own and the interests of which it should promote.

Alternatively, a claim may be particularistic, such as the claim “Group X ought to have a state”, where this implies nothing about any other group:

Particularistic nationalism is the political program claiming that some ethno-nation should have its state, without extending the claim to all ethno-nations. It claims thus either by omission (unreflective particularistic nationalism), or by explicitly specifying who is excluded: “Group X ought to have a state, but group Y should not” (invidious nationalism).

The most difficult and indeed chauvinistic sub-case of particularism, i.e., (B), has been called “invidious” since it explicitly denies the privilege of having a state to some peoples. Serious theoretical nationalists usually defend only the universalist variety, whereas the nationalist-in-the-street most often defends the egoistic indeterminate one.

The nationalist picture of morality traditionally has been quite close to the dominant view in the theory of international relations called “realism”. Put starkly, the view is that morality ends at the boundaries of the nation-state; beyond there is nothing but anarchy. [ 16 ] It nicely complements the main classical nationalist claim about the nation-state, i.e., that each ethno-nation or people should have a state of its own, and suggests what happens next: nation-states enter into competition in the name of their constitutive peoples.

3. The Moral Debate

Recall the initial normative question centered around (1) attitudes and (2) actions. Is national partiality justified, and to what extent? What actions are appropriate to bring about sovereignty? In particular, are ethno-national states and institutionally protected (ethno-) national cultures goods independent from the individual will of their members, and how far may one go in protecting them? The philosophical debate for and against nationalism is a debate about the moral validity of its central claims. In particular, the ultimate moral issue is the following: is any form of nationalism morally permissible or justified, and, if not, how bad are particular forms of it? [ 17 ] Why do nationalist claims require a defense? In some situations they seem plausible: for instance, the plight of some stateless national groups—the history of Jews and Armenians, the historical and contemporary misfortunes of Kurds—lends credence to the idea that having their own state would have solved the worst problems. Still, there are good reasons to examine nationalist claims more carefully. The most general reason is that it should first be shown that the political form of the nation-state has some value as such, that a national community has a particular, or even central, moral and political value, and that claims in its favor have normative validity. Once this is established, a further defense is needed. Some classical nationalist claims appear to clash—at least under normal circumstances of contemporary life—with various values that people tend to accept. Some of these values are considered essential to liberal-democratic societies, while others are important specifically for the flourishing of creativity and culture. The main values in the first set are individual autonomy and benevolent impartiality (most prominently towards members of groups culturally different from one’s own). The alleged special duties towards one’s ethno-national culture can and often do interfere with individuals’ right to autonomy.

Liberal nationalists are aware of the difficulties of the classical approach, and soften the classical claims, giving them only a prima facie status. They usually speak of “various accretions that have given nationalism a bad name”, and they are eager to “separate the idea of nationality itself from these excesses” (Miller 1992, 2000). Such thoughtful pro-nationalist writers have participated in an ongoing philosophical dialogue between proponents and opponents of the claim. [ 18 ] In order to help the reader find their through this involved debate, we shall briefly summarize the considerations which are open to the ethno-nationalist to defend their case (compare the useful overview in Lichtenberg 1997). Further lines of thought built upon these considerations can be used to defend very different varieties of nationalism, from radical to very moderate ones.

For brevity, each line of thought will be reduced to a brief argument; the actual debate is more involved than one can represent in a sketch. Some prominent lines of criticism that have been put forward in the debate will be indicated in brackets (see Miscevic 2001). The main arguments in favor of nationalism will be divided into two sets. The first set of arguments defends the claim that national communities have a high value, sometime seen as coming from the interests of their individual member (e.g., by Kymlicka, Miller, and Raz) and sometimes as non-instrumental and independent of the wishes and choices of their individual members, and argues that they should therefore be protected by means of state and official statist policies. The second set is less deeply “comprehensive”, and encompasses arguments from the requirements of justice, independent from substantial assumptions about culture and cultural values.

The first set will be presented in more detail since it has formed the core of the debate. It depicts the community as the source of value or as the transmission device connecting its members to some important values. For the classical nationalist, the arguments from this set are communitarian in a particularly “deep” sense since they are grounded in basic features of the human condition.

The general form of deep communitarian arguments is as follows. First, the communitarian premise: there is some uncontroversial good (e.g., a person’s identity), and some kind of community is essential for acquisition and preservation of it. Then comes the claim that the ethno-cultural nation is the kind of community ideally suited for this task. Then follows the statist conclusion: in order for such a community to preserve its own identity and support the identity of its members, it has to assume (always or at least normally) the political form of a state. The conclusion of this type of argument is that the ethno-national community has the right to an ethno-national state and the citizens of the state have the right and obligation to favor their own ethnic culture in relation to any other.

Although the deeper philosophical assumptions in the arguments stem from the communitarian tradition, weakened forms have also been proposed by more liberal philosophers. The original communitarian lines of thought in favor of nationalism suggest that there is some value in preserving ethno-national cultural traditions, in feelings of belonging to a common nation, and in solidarity between a nation’s members. A liberal nationalist might claim that these are not the central values of political life but are values nevertheless. Moreover, the diametrically opposing views, pure individualism and cosmopolitanism, do seem arid, abstract, and unmotivated by comparison. By cosmopolitanism we refer to moral and political doctrines claiming that

• one’s primary moral obligations are directed to all human beings (regardless of geographical or cultural distance), and
• political arrangements should faithfully reflect this universal moral obligation (in the form of supra-statist arrangements that take precedence over nation-states).

Confronted with opposing forces of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, many philosophers opt for a mixture of liberalism-cosmopolitanism and patriotism-nationalism. In his writings, B. Barber glorifies “a remarkable mixture of cosmopolitanism and parochialism” that in his view characterizes American national identity (Barber 1996: 31). Charles Taylor claims that “we have no choice but to be cosmopolitan and patriots” (Taylor 1996: 121). Hilary Putnam proposes loyalty to what is best in the multiple traditions in which each of us participates, apparently a middle way between a narrow-minded patriotism and an overly abstract cosmopolitanism (Putnam 1996: 114). The compromise has been foreshadowed by Berlin (1979) and Taylor (1989, 1993), [ 19 ] and in the last two decades it has occupied center stage in the debate and even provoked re-readings of historical nationalism in its light. [ 20 ] Most liberal nationalist authors accept various weakened versions of the arguments we list below, taking them to support moderate or ultra-moderate nationalist claims.

Here are then the main weakenings of classical ethno-nationalism that liberal, limited-liberal, and cosmopolitan nationalists propose. First, ethno-national claims have only prima facie strength and cannot trump individual rights. Second, legitimate ethno-national claims do not in themselves automatically amount to the right to a state, but rather to the right to a certain level of cultural autonomy. The main models of autonomy are either territorial or non-territorial: the first involves territorial devolution; the second, cultural autonomy granted to individuals regardless of their domicile within the state. [ 21 ] Third, ethno-nationalism is subordinate to civic patriotism, which has little or nothing to do with ethnic criteria. Fourth, ethno-national mythologies and similar “important falsehoods” are to be tolerated only if benign and inoffensive, in which case they are morally permissible despite their falsity. Finally, any legitimacy that ethno-national claims may have is to be derived from choices the concerned individuals are free to make.

Consider now the particular pro-nationalist arguments from the first set. The first argument depends on assumptions that also appear in the subsequent ones, but it further ascribes to the community an intrinsic value. The later arguments point more towards an instrumental value of nation, derived from the value of individual flourishing, moral understanding, firm identity and the like.

• The Argument From Intrinsic Value . Each ethno-national community is valuable in and of itself since it is only within the natural encompassing framework of various cultural traditions that important meanings and values are produced and transmitted. The members of such communities share a special cultural proximity to each other. By speaking the same language and sharing customs and traditions, the members of these communities are typically closer to one another in various ways than they are to the outsiders.
• The Argument from Flourishing . The ethno-national community is essential for each of its members to flourish. In particular, it is only within such a community that an individual can acquire concepts and values crucial for understanding the community’s cultural life in general and the individual’s own life in particular. There has been much debate on the pro-nationalist side about whether divergence of values is essential for separateness of national groups.

The Canadian liberal nationalists Seymour (1999), Taylor, and Kymlicka pointed out that “divergences of value between different regions of Canada” that aspire to separate nationhood are “minimal”. Taylor (1993: 155) concluded that it is not separateness of value that matters.

• The Argument from Identity . Communitarian philosophers emphasize nurture over nature as the principal force determining our identity as people—we come to be who we are because of the social settings and contexts in which we mature. This claim certainly has some plausibility. The very identity of each person depends upon his/her participation in communal life (see MacIntyre 1994, Nielsen, 1998, and Lagerspetz 2000). Given that an individual’s morality depends upon their having a mature and stable personal identity, the communal conditions that foster the development of personal identity must be preserved and encouraged. Therefore, communal life should be organized around particular national cultures.
• The Argument from Moral Understanding . A particularly important variety of value is moral value. Some values are universal, e.g., freedom and equality, but these are too abstract and “thin”. The rich, “thick” moral values are discernible only within particular traditions; as Charles Taylor puts it, “the language we have come to accept articulates the issues of the good for us” (1989: 35). The nation offers a natural framework for moral traditions, and thereby for moral understanding; it is the primary school of morals.

The ‘physiognomies’ of cultures are unique: each presents a wonderful exfoliation of human potentialities in its own time and place and environment. We are forbidden to make judgments of comparative value, for that is measuring the incommensurable. (1976: 206)

Assuming that the (ethno-)nation is the natural unit of culture, the preservation of cultural diversity amounts to institutionally protecting the purity of (ethno-)national culture. The plurality of cultural styles can be preserved and enhanced by tying them to ethno-national “forms of life”.

David Miller has developed an interesting and sophisticated liberal pro-national stance over the course of decades from his work in 1990 to the most recent work in 2013. He accepts multicultural diversity within a society but stresses an overarching national identity, taking as his prime example British national identity, which encompasses the English, Scottish, and other ethnic identities. He demands an “inclusive identity, accessible to members of all cultural groups” (2013: 91). miller claims such identity is necessary for basic social solidarity, and it goes far beyond simple constitutional patriotism. A skeptic could note the following. The problem with multicultural society is that national identity has historically been a matter of ethno-national ties and has required sameness in the weighted majority of cultural traits (common language, common “history-as-remembered”, customs, religion and so on). However, multi-cultural states typically bring together groups with very different histories, languages, religions, and even quite contrasting appearances. Now, how is the overarching “national identity” to be achieved starting from the very thin identity of common belonging to a state? One seems to have a dilemma. Grounding social solidarity in national identity requires the latter to be rather thin and seems likely to end up as full-on, unitary cultural identity. Thick constitutional patriotism may be one interesting possible attitude that can ground such solidarity while preserving the original cultural diversity.

The arguments in the second set concern political justice and do not rely on metaphysical claims about identity, flourishing, and cultural values. They appeal to (actual or alleged) circumstances that would make nationalist policies reasonable (or permissible or even mandatory), such as (a) the fact that a large part of the world is organized into nation-states (so that each new group aspiring to create a nation-state just follows an established pattern), or (b) the circumstances of group self-defense or of redressing past injustice that might justify nationalist policies (to take a special case). Some of the arguments also present nationhood as conducive to important political goods, such as equality.

• The Argument from the Right to Collective Self-determination . A group of people of a sufficient size has a prima facie right to govern itself and decide its future membership, if the members of the group so wish. It is fundamentally the democratic will of the members themselves that grounds the right to an ethno-national state and to ethno-centric cultural institutions and practices. This argument presents the justification of (ethno-)national claims as deriving from the will of the members of the nation. It is therefore highly suitable for liberal nationalism but not appealing to a deep communitarian who sees the demands of the nation as independent from, and prior to, the choices of particular individuals. [ 22 ]
• The Argument from the Right to Self-defense and to Redress Past Injustices . Oppression and injustice give the victimized group a just cause and the right to secede. If a minority group is oppressed by the majority to the extent that almost every minority member is worse off than most members of the majority simply in virtue of belonging to the minority, then nationalist claims on behalf of the minority are morally plausible and potentially compelling. The argument establishes a typical remedial right, acceptable from a liberal standpoint (see the discussion in Kukathas and Poole 2000, also Buchanan 1991; for past injustices see Waldron 1992).
• The Argument from Equality . Members of a minority group are often disadvantaged in relation to the dominant culture because they have to rely on those with the same language and culture to conduct the affairs of daily life. Therefore, liberal neutrality itself requires that the majority provide certain basic cultural goods, i.e., granting differential rights (see Kymlicka 1995b, 2001, and 2003b). Institutional protections and the right to the minority group’s own institutional structure are remedies that restore equality and turn the resulting nation-state into a more moderate multicultural one.
• The Argument from Success . The nationstate has in the past succeeded in promoting equality and democracy. Ethno-national solidarity is a powerful motive for a more egalitarian distribution of goods (Miller 1995; Canovan 1996, 2000). The nation-state also seems to be essential to safeguard the moral life of communities in the future, since it is the only form of political institution capable of protecting communities from the threats of globalization and assimilationism (for a detailed critical discussion of this argument see Mason 1999).

Andreas Wimmer (2018) presents an interesting discussion of the historical success of nation-state (discussed in Knott, Tolz, Green, & Wimmer 2019).

These political arguments can be combined with deep communitarian ones. However, taken in isolation, their perspectives offer a “liberal culturalism” that is more suitable for ethno-culturally plural societies. More remote from classical nationalism than the liberal one of Tamir and Nielsen, it eschews any communitarian philosophical underpinning. [ 23 ] The idea of moderate nation-building points to an open multi-culturalism in which every group receives its share of remedial rights but, instead of walling itself off from others, participates in a common, overlapping civic culture in open communication with other sub-communities. Given the variety of pluralistic societies and intensity of trans-national interactions, such openness seems to many to be the only guarantee of stable social and political life (see the debate in Shapiro and Kymlicka 1997).

In general, the liberal nationalist stance is mild and civil, and there is much to be said in favor of it. It tries to reconcile our intuitions in favor of some sort of political protection of cultural communities with a liberal political morality. Of course, this raises issues of compatibility between liberal universal principles and the particular attachments to one’s ethno-cultural nation. Very liberal nationalists such as Tamir divorce ethno-cultural nationhood from statehood. Also, the kind of love for country they suggest is tempered by all kinds of universalist considerations, which in the last instance trump national interest (Tamir 1993: 115; 2019: passim, see also Moore 2001 and Gans 2003). There is an ongoing debate among philosophical nationalists about how much weakening and compromising is still compatible with a stance’s being nationalist at all. [ 24 ] There is also a streak of cosmopolitan interest present in the work of some liberal nationalists (Nielsen 1998–99). [ 25 ]

In the last two decades, the issues of nationalism have been increasingly integrated into the debate about the international order (see the entries on globalization and cosmopolitanism ). The main conceptual link is the claim that nation-states are natural, stable, and suitable units of the international order. A related debate concerns the role of minorities in the processes of globalization (see Kaldor 2004). Moreover, the two approaches might ultimately converge: a multiculturalist liberal nationalism and a moderate, difference-respecting cosmopolitanism have a lot in common. [ 26 ]

“Populism” is an umbrella term, covering both right-wing and left-wing varieties. This section will pay attention to right-wing populist movements, very close to their traditional nationalist predecessors. This corresponds to the situation in the biggest part of Europe, and in the US, where nationalist topics are being put forward by the right-wing populist. [ 27 ]

However, it has become quite clear that nationalism is only one of the political “isms” attracting the right-wing populists. The migration crisis has brought to the forefront populist self-identification with linguistic-cultural communities (“we, French speaking people” for the former, “we Christians” for the later) that goes beyond nationalism.

Jan-Werner Müller (2016) and Cas Mudde (2007) note that the form common to all sorts of populism is quite simple and describe it as “thin”. Mudde explains: “Populism is understood as a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the People” (2007: 23). Populism, so defined, has two opposites: elitism and pluralism. First, there is the elite vs. people (“underdog”) contrast. Second, it is possible to distinguish two ways of characterizing “the people”: either in terms of social status (class, income-level, etc.) or in terms of ethnic and/or cultural belonging (see also de Cleen 2017).

The second, horizontal dimension distinguishes the predominantly left-wing from the predominantly right-wing populisms and leaves a place for a centrist populist option. Take classical strong ethnic nationalism. The relation between right-wing populism and such a nationalism is very tight. This has led some theoreticians (Taguieff 2015) to present “nationalist populism” as the only kind of populism. The term captures exactly the synthesis of populism and the strong ethnic nationalism or nativism. From populism, it takes the general schema of anti-elitism: the leader is addressing directly the people and is allegedly following the people’s interest. From nationalism, it takes the characterization of the people: it is the ethnic community, in most cases the state-owing ethnic community, or the ethno-nation. In his work, Mudde documents the claim that purely right-wing populists claim to represent the true people who form the true nation and whose purity is being muddied by new entrants. In the United States, one can talk about populist and reactionary movements, like the Tea Party, that have emerged through the recent experience of immigration, terrorist attacks, and growing economic polarization. We have to set aside here, for reasons of space, the main populist alternative (or quasi-alternative) to national populism. In some countries, like Germany, some populist groups-parties (e.g., German AfD party (Alternative for Germany)), appeal to properties much wider in their reach than ethno-national belonging, typically to religious affiliations. Others combine this appeal with the ethno-national one. This yields what Riva Kastoryano (2006) calls “transnational nationalism”.

Interestingly, liberal nationalism is not very attractive to the populists. On the theoretical side one can note that Tamir (2019) sees her liberal nationalism as a good recipe against the threat of demagogues like Trump and Boris Johnson (she avoids the use of the label “populist”, e.g., 2019: 31).

The rise of populism is changing the political playfield one must work with. The tolerant (liberal nationalist or anti-nationalist) views are confronting new problems in the populist age marked by migration crisis, etc. The dangers traditionally associated with military presence are gone; the national populists have to invent and construct a presumed danger that comes into the country together with foreign families, including those with children. In short, if these conjectures hold, the politicians and theoreticians are faced with a change. The traditional issue of the contrast between patriotism/nationalism and cosmopolitanism has changed its profile: the current drastic contrast is between the populist aversion to the foreigners-migrants and a more generous attitude of acceptance and Samaritan help. Finally, the populist understanding of “our people” (“we-community”) encompasses not only nationalist options but also goes way beyond it. The important element is the promiscuous character of the populist choices. It is probable that the future scholarship on nationalism will mainly focus on this new and challenging playfield, with an aim to address the new contrast and locate kinds of nationalism in relation to it. [ 28 ]

The migration crisis has made the nation-state in global context the central political topic concerning nationality. Before moving on to current events, the state of art before the crisis should be summarized. First, consider the debates on territory and nation and issues of global justice.

Liberal nationalists try to preserve the traditional nationalist link between ethnic “ownership” of the state and sovereignty and territorial control, but in a much more flexible and sophisticated setting. Tamar Meisels thus argues in favor of “taking existing national settlements into account as a central factor in demarcating territorial boundaries” since this line “has both liberal foundations” (i.e., in the work of John Locke) and liberal-national appeal (2009: 159) grounded in its affinity with the liberal doctrine of national self-determination. She combines it with Chaim Gans’ (2003: Ch. 4) interpretation of “historical right” claims as “the right to formative territories”. She thus combines “historical arguments, understood as claims to formative territories”, with her argument from settlement and insists on their interplay and mutual reinforcement, presenting them as being “most closely related to, and based on, liberal nationalist assumptions and underlying ideas” (Meisels 2009: 160). She nevertheless stresses that more than one ethnic group can have formative ties to a given territory, and that there might be competing claims based on settlement. [ 29 ] But, given the ethno-national conflicts of the twentieth century, one can safely assume that culturally plural states divided into isolated and closed sub-communities glued together merely by arrangements of modus vivendi are inherently unstable. Stability might therefore require that the pluralist society envisioned by liberal culturalists promote quite intense intra-state interaction between cultural groups in order to forestall mistrust, reduce prejudice, and create a solid basis for cohabitation.

But where should one stop? The question arises since there are many geographically open, interacting territories of various sizes. Consider first the geographical openness of big continental planes, then add the modern ease of interaction (“No island is an island any more”, one could say), and, finally and dramatically, the substantial ecological interconnectedness of land and climate. Here, the tough nationalistic line is no longer proposed seriously in ethical debates, so the furthest pro-national extreme is in fact a relatively moderate stance, exemplified by Miller in the works listed. Here is a typical proposal of his concerning global justice based on nation-states: it might become a matter of national pride to have set aside a certain percentage of GDP for developmental goals—perhaps for projects in one particular country or group of countries (2013: 182).

This brings us to the topic of migrations, and the heated debate on the present scene. [ 30 ] In Europe immigration is probably the main topic of the present day populist uproar, and in the United States it is one of the main topics. So, immigration plus the nationalist-populist reactions to it are in the current decade the main testing ground for nationalist and cosmopolitan views.

Let’s look at the pro-national side in the debate. Liberal nationalists, in particular Miller, have put forward some thoughtful pro-nationalist proposal concerning immigration. Miller’s proposal allows refugees to seek asylum temporarily until the situation in their country of origin improves; it also limits economic migration. Miller argues against the defensibility of a global standard for equality, opportunity, welfare, etc., because measures of just equality are context-bound. People do have the right to a minimum standard of living, but the right to migrate only activates as a last resort after all other measures within a candidate-migrant’s country of origin have been tried. However, he also (particularly in his book on “Strangers in our midst”, 2016), claims that national responsibility to accept immigrant refugees is balanced by considerations of the interest of would-be immigrants and the interests that national communities have in maintaining control over their own composition and character.

If we agree with the liberal nationalists on the positive side, we can ask about the dynamics of the help required for the immigrants. Distinguish at least three stages, first, the immediate emergency (starvation, freezing, urgent medical problems) and catering to it, second, settlement and learning (on the host and the immigrant newcomer side), and third, the stage of (some kind of) citizenship, of relatively stable life in the host country.

In the first phase, the immediate help comes first, both normatively and causally: just accept the would-be refugees (indeed, the would-be refugees should be helped in leaving their countries and travelling to the host country). In longer term, staying should involve opportunity for work and training.

But there is more. The Samaritan obligation can and should function as a preparation for wider global activity. [ 31 ] So, we have two theoretical steps, first, accepting Samaritanism and second, agreeing with deeper trans-national measure of blocking distant causes, like poverty and wars in the Third world. Let us call this “Samaritan-to-deeper-measures model”. The model is geared to the dramatically changed playground in which the nationalism issues are played out in the context of populism and refugee crisis, raising issues that were not around two decades ago.

In presenting the claims that the pro-nationalists defend, we have proceeded from the more radical towards more liberal nationalist alternatives. In examining the arguments for these claims, we have presented metaphysically demanding communitarian arguments resting upon deep communitarian assumptions about culture, such as the premise that the ethno-cultural nation is the most important community for all individuals. This is an interesting and respectable claim, but its plausibility has not been established. The moral debate about nationalism has resulted in various weakenings of culture-based arguments, typically proposed by liberal nationalists, which render the arguments less ambitious but much more plausible. Having abandoned the old nationalist ideal of a state owned by a single dominant ethno-cultural group, liberal nationalists have become receptive to the idea that identification with a plurality of cultures and communities is important for a person’s social identity. They have equally become sensitive to trans-national issues and more willing to embrace a partly cosmopolitan perspective. Liberal nationalism has also brought to the fore more modest, less philosophically or metaphysically charged arguments grounded in concerns about justice. These stress the practical importance of ethno-cultural membership, ethno-cultural groups’ rights to have injustices redressed, democratic rights of political association, and the role that ethno-cultural ties and associations can play in promoting just social arrangements.

The events in the current decade, the refugee crisis and the rise of right-wing populism, have dramatically changed the relevant practical and theoretical playground. The traditional nationalism is still relevant, but populist nationalism attracts much more attention: new theories are being produced and debated, coming to occupy the center stage. On the other hand, migration crisis has replaced the typical cosmopolitan issue of solidarity-with-distant-strangers with burning issues of helping refugees present at our doors. Of course, the causes of the crisis are still the same ones that cosmopolitans have been worrying about much earlier: wars and dramatically unequal global distribution of goods, and of threats, like illnesses and climate disasters. The task of the theory is now to connect these deeper issues with the new problems occupying the center-stage of the new playground; it is a challenge now formulated in somewhat different vocabulary and within different political conceptual frameworks than before.

This is a short list of books on nationalism that are readable and useful introductions to the literature. First, two contemporary classics of social science with opposing views are:

• Gellner, Ernest, 1983, Nations and Nationalism , Oxford: Blackwell.
• Smith, Anthony D., 1991, National Identity , Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Three presentations of liberal nationalism, two of them by the same author, Yael Tamir, offer the best introduction to the approach:

• Miller, David, 1995, On Nationality , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198293569.001.0001
• Tamir, Yael, 1993, Liberal Nationalism , Press, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2019, Why Nationalism , Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Two short and readable introductions are:

• Özkirimli, Umut, 2010, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction , second edition, London: Palgrave Macmillan. First edition is 2000; third edition is 2017.
• Spencer, Philip and Howard Wollman, 2002, Nationalism, A Critical Introduction , London: Sage.

The two best anthologies of high-quality philosophical papers on the morality of nationalism are:

• McKim, Robert and Jeff McMahan (eds), 1997, The Morality of Nationalism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Couture, Jocelyne, Kai Nielsen, and Michel Seymour (eds.), 1998, Rethinking Nationalism , Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Supplement Volume 22, Calgary, AB: University of Calgary Press.

The debate continues in:

• Miscevic, Nenad (ed), 2000, Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict: Philosophical Perspectives , La Salle and Chicago: Open Court.
• Dieckoff, Alain (ed.), 2004, The Politics of Belonging: Nationalism, Liberalism, and Pluralism , Lanham: Lexington.
• Primoratz, Igor and Aleksandar Pavković (eds), 2007, Patriotism, Philosophical and Political Perspectives , London: Ashgate.
• Breen, Keith and Shane O’Neill (eds.), 2010, After the Nation? Critical Reflections on Nationalism and Postnationalism , London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9780230293175

A good brief sociological introduction to nationalism in general is:

• Grosby, Steven, 2005, Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

and to the gender-inspired criticism of nationalism is:

• Yuval-Davis, Nira, 1997, Gender & Nation , London: Sage Publications.
• Heuer, Jennifer, 2008, “Gender and Nationalism”, in Herb and Kaplan 2008: vol. 1, 43–58.
• Hogan, Jackie, 2009, Gender, Race and National Identity: Nations of Flesh and Blood , London: Routledge.

The best general introduction to the communitarian-individualist debate is still:

• Avineri, Shlomo and Avner de-Shalit (eds.), 1992, Communitarianism and Individualism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

For a non-nationalist defense of culturalist claims see:

• Kymlicka, Will (ed.), 1995a, The Rights of Minority Cultures , Oxford: Oxford University Press.

A very readable philosophical defense of very moderate liberal nationalism is:

• Gans, Chaim, 2003, The Limits of Nationalism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490231

And for application to Central Europe see:

• Auer, Stefan, 2004, Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe , London: Routledge.

A polemical, witty and thoughtful critique is offered in:

• Barry, Brian, 2001, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism , Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.

And a more recent one in

• Kelly, Paul, 2015, “Liberalism and Nationalism”, in The Cambridge Companion to Liberalism , Steven Wall (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 329–352. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139942478.018

Interesting critical analyses of group solidarity in general and nationalism in particular, written in the traditions of rational choice theory and motivation analysis, are:

• Hardin, Russell, 1985, One for All, The Logic of Group Conflict , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Yack, Bernard, 2012, Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

There is a wide offering of interesting sociological and political science work on nationalism, which is beginning to be summarized in:

• Motyl, Alexander (ed.), 2001, Encyclopedia of Nationalism , Volumes I and II, New York: Academic Press.

A fine encyclopedic overview is:

• Herb, Guntram H. and David H. Kaplan, 2008, Nations and Nationalism: a Global Historical Overview , four volumes, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio.

A detailed sociological study of life under nationalist rule is:

• Billig, Michael, 1995, Banal Nationalism , London: Sage Publications.

The most readable short anthology of brief papers for and against cosmopolitanism (and nationalism) by leading authors in the field is:

• Cohen, Joshua (ed.), 1996, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism , Martha Nussbaum and respondents, Boston, MA: Beacon Press
• Anderson, Benedict, 1983 [2006], Imagined Communities , London: Verso; revised edition, 2006.
• Aron, Raymond, 1962, Paix et guerre entre les nations , Paris: Calmann-Levy. Translated as Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations , Richard Howard and Annette Baker Fox (trans), Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965.
• Balibar, Etienne and Immanuel Wallerstein, 1988 [1991], Race, nation, classe: les identités ambiguës , Paris: Editiones La Découverte; translated as Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities , Chris Turner (trans.), London-New York: Verso.
• Barber, Benjamin R., 1996, “Constitutional Faith”, in J. Cohen (ed.) 1996: 30–37.
• –––, 1996, Jihad Vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World , New York: Ballantine Books.
• Barry, Brian, 1999, “Statism and Nationalism: a Cosmopolitan Critique”, in Shapiro and Brilmayer 1999: 12–66.
• –––, 2001, Culture and Equality: An Egalitarian Critique of Multiculturalism , Cambridge, MA: Polity Press.
• Bauböck, Reiner, 2004, “Territorial or Cultural Autonomy for National Minorities?”, in Dieckoff 2004: 221–258.
• Bechhofer, Frank and David McCrone (eds.), 2009, National Identity, Nationalism and Constitutional Change , London: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/9780230234147
• Bell, Duncan (ed.), 2008, Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Berlin, Isaiah, 1976, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas , London: The Hogarth Press.
• –––, 1979, “Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power”, in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas , London: Hogarth Press, 333–355.
• Betts, Alexander and Paul Collier, 2017, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System , London: Penguin.
• –––, 2017, “Banal Nationalism and the Imagining of Politics”, in Everyday Nationhood: Theorising Culture, Identity and Belonging after Banal Nationalism , Michael Skey and Marco Antonsich (eds.), London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 307–321. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57098-7_15
• Blake, Michael, 2013, Justice and Foreign Policy , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199552009.001.0001
• Breuilly, John, 2001, “The State”, in Motyl (ed.) 2001: Volume 1.
• –––, 2011, “On the Principle of Nationality”, in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought , Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 77–109. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521430562.005
• Breuilly, John, John Hutchinson, and Eric Kaufmann (eds), 2019, special issue on populism and nationalism in Nations and Nationalism , 25(1): 1–400.
• Brubaker, Rogers, 2004, “In the Name of the Nation: Reflections on Nationalism and Patriotism1”, Citizenship Studies , 8(2): 115–127. doi:10.1080/1362102042000214705
• –––, 2013, “Language, Religion and the Politics of Difference”, Nations and Nationalism , 19(1): 1–20. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8129.2012.00562.x
• –––, 2015, Grounds for Difference , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Buchanan, Allen, 1991, Secession: The Morality of Political Divorce from Fort Sumter to Lithuania and Quebec , Boulder: Westview Press.
• –––, 2004, Justice, Legitimacy, and Self-Determination: Moral Foundations for International Law , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198295359.001.0001
• Buchanan, Allen and Margaret Moore (eds.), 2003, States, Nations and Borders: The Ethics of Making Boundaries , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511613937
• Butt, Daniel, Sarah Jane Fine, & Zofia Stemplowska (eds), 2018, Political Philosophy, Here and Now: Essays in Honour of David Miller , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Calhoun, Craig, 2007, Nations Matter. Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream , London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203960899
• Canovan, Margaret, 1996, Nationhood and Political Theory , Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.
• –––, 2000, “Patriotism Is Not Enough”, British Journal of Political Science , 30(3): 413–432. doi:10.1017/S000712340000017X
• –––, 2001, “Sleeping Dogs, Prowling Cats and Soaring Doves: Three Paradoxes in the Political Theory of Nationhood”, Political Studies , 49(2): 203–215. doi:10.1111/1467-9248.00309
• Carens, Joseph H., 2013, The Ethics of Immigration , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Casertano, Stefano, 2013, Our Land, Our Oil! Natural Resources, Local Nationalism, and Violent Secession , Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. doi:10.1007/978-3-531-19443-1
• Chatterjee, Deen K. and B. Smith (eds.), 2003, Moral Distance , special issue of The Monist , 86(3): 327–515.
• Christiano, Thomas, 2008, “Immigration, Community and Cosmopolitanism”, in San Diego Law Review , 933(Nov–Dec): 938–962.
• –––, 2012, “The Legitimacy of International Institutions”, in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Law , Andrei Marmor (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 380–394.
• Christiano, Thomas and John Christman (eds.), 2009, Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy , Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781444310399
• Cohen, Joshua (ed.), 1996, For Love of Country? (Martha C. Nussbaum with respondents), Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
• Colm Hogan, Patrick, 2009, Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science and Identity , Ohio: Ohio State University Press.
• Connor, Walker, 1994, Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Conversi, Daniele, 2002, Ethnonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism , London: Routledge.
• –––, 2018, “Introduction: Why a State Is Not a Nation – and Whether Economics Really Matters. Walker Connor 50 Years On”, Nations and Nationalism , 24(3): 497–505. doi:10.1111/nana.12441
• Crowley, Brian Lee, 1987, The Self, the Individual and the Community , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Dagger, Richard, 2009, “Individualism and the Claims of Community”, in Christiano and Christman 2009: 303–332. doi:10.1002/9781444310399.ch17
• de Cleen, Benjamin, 2017, “Populism and Nationalism”, in Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Populism , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• de Lange, Deborah E., 2010, Power and Influence: The Embeddedness of Nations , New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. doi:10.1057/9780230115545
• De Schutter, Helder and Ronald Tinnevelt (eds.), 2011, Nationalism and Global Justice: David Miller and His Critics , London: Routledge.
• Delanty, Gerard, John Hutchinson, Eric Kaufmann, Umut Özkirimli, and Andreas Wimmer, 2008, “Debate on John Hutchinson’s Nations as Zones of Conflict ”, Nations and Nationalism , 14(1): 1–28. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8129.2008.00306.x
• Delanty, Gerard and Krishan Kumar (eds.), 2006, The SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism , Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
• Derks, Tom and Nico Roymans (eds.), 2009, Ethnic Constructs in Antiquity: The Role of Power and Tradition , Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press.
• –––, 2017, Nationalism and the Multination State , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Edensor, T., 2002, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life , Oxford: Berg.
• Eisenberg, Avigail and Jeff Spinner-Halev (eds.), 2005, Minorities within Minorities: Equality, Rights and Diversity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490224
• Farris, Sara R., 2017, In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism , Durham: Duke University Press.
• Feltham, Brian and John Cottingham (eds), 2010, Partiality and Impartiality: Morality, Special Relationships, and the Wider World , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579952.001.0001
• Fine, Sarah and Lea Ypi (eds.), 2016, Migration in Political Theory: The Ethics of Movement and Membership , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199676606.001.0001
• Fox, Jon E., 2017, “The Edges of the Nation: A Research Agenda for Uncovering the Taken-for-Granted Foundations of Everyday Nationhood”, Nations and Nationalism , 23(1): 26–47. doi:10.1111/nana.12269
• Frost, Catharine, 2006, Morality and Nationalism , London: Routledge.
• –––, ,2017, “Citizenship and Nationhood”, in Rainer Baubock et al. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gat, Azar and Alexander Yakobson, 2013, Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139047654
• Giddens, Anthony, 1985, The Nation-state and Violence (Volume 2), Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Glenn, John, 1997, “Nations and Nationalism: Marxist Approaches to the Subject”, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics , 3(2): 79–100. doi:10.1080/13537119708428503
• Goetze, David, 2001, “Evolutionary Theory”, in Motyl (ed.) 2001: Volume 1.
• Goodin, Robert E., 2006, “Liberal Multiculturalism: Protective and Polyglot”, Political Theory , 34(3): 289–303. doi:10.1177/0090591705284131
• Greenfeld, Liah, 2001, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2005, “Nationalism and the Mind”, Nations and Nationalism , 11(3): 325–341. doi:10.1111/j.1354-5078.2005.00207.x
• –––, 2006, Nationalism and the Mind: Essays Modern Culture . London: Oneworld.
• Habermas, Jürgen, 1992 [1996], Faktizität und Geltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des demokratischen Rechtsstaats , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated as Between Facts and Norms: Contribution to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy , Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996.
• –––, 1996 [1998], Die Einbeziehung des Anderen: Studien zur politischen Theorie , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated as The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory , Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (eds), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998.
• Haidt, Jonathan, 2016, “When and Why Nationalism Beats Globalism”, The American Interest , 12(1): 10 July 2016. URL = < available online >.
• Hale, Henry E., 2008, The Foundations of Ethnic Politics: Separatism of States and Nations in Eurasia and the World , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511790669
• Harris, Erika, 2016, “Why Has Nationalism Not Run Its Course?”, Nations and Nationalism , 22(2): 243–247. doi:10.1111/nana.12185
• Hastings, Adrian, 1997, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511612107
• Hazony, Yoram, 2018, The Virtue of Nationalism , New York: Basic Books.
• Hearn, Jonathan, 2018, “Power, Culture, Identity, and the Work of Anthony Smith”, Nations and Nationalism , 24(2): 286–291. doi:10.1111/nana.12407
• Hearn, Jonathan, Chandran Kukathas, David Miller, and Bernard Yack, 2014, “Debate on Bernard Yack’s Book Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community ”, Nations and Nationalism , 20(3): 395–414. doi:10.1111/nana.12074
• Hechter, Michael, 2001, Containing Nationalism , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019924751X.001.0001
• Helbling, Marc, Tim Reeskens, and Matthew Wright, 2016, “The Mobilisation of Identities: A Study on the Relationship between Elite Rhetoric and Public Opinion on National Identity in Developed Democracies”, Nations and Nationalism , 22(4): 744–767. doi:10.1111/nana.12235
• Held, David, 2003, “Cosmopolitanism: Globalisation Tamed?”, Review of International Studies , 29(4): 465–480. doi:10.1017/S0260210503004650
• Hendrix, Burke A., 2008, Ownership, Authority, and Self-Determination: Moral Principles and Indigenous Rights Claims , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Hobsbawm, E. J., 1990, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Second edition 2012. doi:10.1017/CBO9781107295582
• Hutchinson, John, 2005, Nations as Zones of Conflict , London: Sage; see also the debate on this book in Delanty et al. 2008.
• –––, 2017, Nationalism and War , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198798453.001.0001
• –––, 2018, “Bringing the Study of Warfare into Theories of Nationalism”, Nations and Nationalism , 24(1): 6–21. doi:10.1111/nana.12364
• Ichijo, Atsuko and Ronald Ranta, 2016, Food, National Identity and Nationalism: From Everyday to Global Politics , London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. doi:10.1057/9781137483133
• Ichijo, Atsuko, Jon E. Fox, Arthur Aughey, David McCrone, and Frank Bechhofer, 2017, “Debate on Understanding National Identity by David McCrone and Frank Bechhofer”, Nations and Nationalism , 23(3): 441–462. doi:10.1111/nana.12314
• Ingram, James D., 2017, “Populism and Cosmopolitanism”, in Oxford Handbook of Populism , Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo,and Pierre Ostiguy (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 644–660.
• Iyall Smith, Keri E. and Patricia Leavy (eds.), 2008, Hybrid Identities: Theoretical and Empirical Examinations , Leiden: Brill.
• Jaramillo Torres, Angel and Marc Benjamin Sable (eds.), 2018, Trump and Political Philosophy: Leadership, Statesmanship, and Tyranny , Cham: Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-74445-2
• Joppke, Christian and Steven Lukes (eds.), 1999, Multicultural Questions , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019829610X.001.0001
• Kaldor, Mary, 2004, “Nationalism and Globalisation”, Nations and Nationalism , 10(1–2): 161–177. doi:10.1111/j.1354-5078.2004.00161.x
• Kastoryano, Riva, 2006, “Vers un Nationalisme Transnational. Redéfinir la Nation, le Nationalisme et le Territoire”, Revue Française de Science Politique , 56: 533–553.
• Kaufmann, Eric, 2019, “Ethno‐traditional Nationalism and the Challenge of Immigration”, Nations and Nationalism , 25(2): 435–448. doi:10.1111/nana.12516
• Kedourie, Elie, 1960, Nationalism , London: Hutchison.
• Kim, Sung Ho, 2002, “Max Weber’s Liberal Nationalism”, History of Political Thought , 23(3): 432–457.
• Kleinig, John, 2014, On Loyalty and Loyalties: The Contours of a Problematic Virtue , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Knott, Eleanor, Vera Tolz, Elliott Green, and Andreas Wimmer, 2019, “Debate on Andreas Wimmer’s Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Other Fall Apart” Nation and Nationalism , 25(1): 82–103.
• Kohen, Marcelo G. (ed.), 2006, Secession: International Law Perspectives , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511494215
• Kohn, Hans, 1965, Nationalism: Its Meaning and History , revised edition, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company.
• Kolers, Avery, 2009, Land, Conflict, and Justice: A Political Theory of Territory , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511575709
• Kostagiannis, Konstantinos, 2018, Realist Thought and the Nation-State: Power Politics in the Age of Nationalism , (The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought), Cham: Springer International Publishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-59629-7
• Kukathas, Chandran, 2003, The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019925754X.001.0001
• Kukathas, Chandran and R. Poole, Ross, (eds.), 2000, Australasian Journal of Philosophy (Special Issue on Indigenous Rights), Volume 78, Issue 3.
• Kuran Burcoglu, Nedret (ed.), 1997, Multiculturalism: Identity and Otherness , Istanbul: Bogazici University Press.
• –––, 1995b, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198290918.001.0001
• –––, 2001, Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199240981.001.0001
• –––, 2003a, “Conclusion: The Futures of Nationalism”, in Nationalism and Its Futures , Umut Özkırımlı (ed.), London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 145–151. doi:10.1057/9780230524187_8
• –––, 2003b, “Liberal Theories of Multiculturalism”, in Rights, Culture and the Law: Themes from the Legal and Political Philosophy of Joseph Raz , Lukas H. Meyer, Stanley L. Paulson, and Thomas W. Pogge (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 229–252.
• –––, 2004, “Justice and Security in the Accommodation of Minority Nationalism”, in Dieckoff 2004: 127–154.
• –––, 2007a, “Community and Multiculturalism”, in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (Volume 2), second edition, Robert E. Goodin, Philip Pettit, and Thomas Pogge (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, 463–477.
• –––, 2007b, Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2016 “Defending Diversity in an Era of Populism: Multiculturalism and Interculturalism Compared” in Multiculturalism and Interculturalism: Debating the Dividing Lines , Nasar Meer, Tariq Modood and Ricard Zapata-Barrero (eds.), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 158–177.
• Kymlicka, Will and Alan Patten (eds.), 2004, Language Rights and Political Theory , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Lægaard, Sune, 2007, “Liberal Nationalism and the Nationalisation of Liberal Values”, Nations and Nationalism , 13(1): 37–55. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8129.2007.00269.x
• Lagerspetz, Olli, 2000, “On National Belonging” in Miscevic 2000: 57–74.
• Laitin, David, 2001, “Political Science and Nationalism”, in Motyl (ed.) 2001: Volume 1.
• –––, 2007, Nations, States, and Violence , Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Laitin, David D. and Rob Reich, 2004, “A Liberal Democratic Approach to Language Justice”, in Kymlicka and Patten 2004: 80–104.
• Laitin, David D., James T. Watkins IV, and Elise V. Watkins, 1998, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Lecours, André and Luis Moreno (eds.), 2010, Nationalism and Democracy: Dichotomies, Complementarities, Oppositions , London: Routledge.
• Leoussi, Athena S. and Steven Grossby (eds.), 2007, Nationalism and Ethnosymbolism: History, Culture and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Levy, Jacob T., 2000, Multiculturalism of Fear , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198297122.001.0001
• –––, 2004, “National Minorities without Nationalism”, in Dieckoff 2004: 155– 174.
• Lichtenberg, Judith, 1997, “Nationalism, For and (Mainly) Against”, in McKim & McMahan 1997: 158–175.
• MacCormick, Neil, 1982, Legal Right and Social Democracy: Essays in Legal and Political Philosophy , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1984“Is Patriotism a Virtue?”, The Lindley Lecture, Lawrence: The University of Kansas, available online .
• Malešević, Siniša, 2011, “The Chimera of National Identity”, Nations and Nationalism , 17(2): 272–290. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8129.2010.00479.x
• –––, 2013, Nation-States and Nationalisms: Organization, Ideology and Solidarity , Cambridge: Polity.
• –––, 2018, “The Rise and Rise of Grounded Nationalisms”, Ethnopolitics , 17(5): 553–557. doi:10.1080/17449057.2018.1532636
• Malešević, Siniša and Mark Haugaard (eds.), 2007, Ernest Gellner and Contemporary Social Thought , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511488795
• Malešević, Siniša, 2017, The Rise of Organized Brutality , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Margalit, Avishai, 1997, “The Moral Psychology of Nationalism”, in McKim and McMahan 1997: 74–88.
• Margalit, Avishai and Joseph Raz, 1990, “National Self-Determination”, Journal of Philosophy , 87(9): 439–461. doi:10.2307/2026968
• Markell, Patchen, 2000, “Making Affect Safe for Democracy?: On ‘Constitutional Patriotism’”, Political Theory , 28(1): 38–63. doi:10.1177/0090591700028001003
• Mason, Andrew, 1999, “Political Community, Liberal‐Nationalism, and the Ethics of Assimilation”, Ethics , 109(2): 261–286. doi:10.1086/233896
• McCabe, David, 1997, “Patriotic Gore, Again”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy , 35(2): 203–223. doi:10.1111/j.2041-6962.1997.tb00834.x
• Meadwell, Hudson, 2012, “Nationalism Chez Gellner”, Nations and Nationalism , 18(4): 563–582. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8129.2012.00544.x
• –––, 2014, “Gellner Redux?”, Nations and Nationalism , 20(1): 18–36. doi:10.1111/nana.12029
• Meinecke, Friedrich, 1924 [1965], Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte , Munich and Berlin: R. Oldenbourg. Translated as Machiavellism , Douglas Scott (trans.), New York: Praeger, 1965.
• Meisels, Tamar, 2009, Territorial Rights , second edition, (Law and Philosophy Library 72), Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands. doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-9262-6
• Miller, David, 1990, “The Resurgence of Political Theory”, Political Studies , 38(3): 421–437.
• –––, 1992, “Community and Citizenship”, in Avineri and de Shalit 1992: 85–100.
• –––, 1995, On Nationality , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198293569.001.0001
• –––, 1999, Principles of Social Justice , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 2000, Citizenship and National Identity , Oxford: Blackwell.
• –––, 2005a, “Crooked Timber or Bent Twig? Isaiah Berlin’s Nationalism”, Political Studies , 53(1): 100–123. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9248.2005.00519.x
• –––, 2005b, “Immigration: The Case for Limits”, in Contemporary Debates in Applied Ethics , Andrew I. Cohen and Christopher Heath Wellman (eds.), Oxford; Blackwell, 193–206.
• –––, 2007, National Responsibility and Global Justice , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199235056.001.0001
• –––, 2008, “Immigrants, Nations, and Citizenship”, Philosophy, Politics & Society (Special Issue), 4 (December): 371–390.
• –––, 2013, Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139236898
• –––, 2016, Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Miller, David Lee and Sohail H. Hashmi (eds.), 2001, Boundaries and Justice: Diverse Ethical Perspectives , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Miscevic, Nenad (ed.), 2000, Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict. Philosophical Perspectives , La Salle and Chicago: Open Court.
• –––, 2001, Nationalism and Beyond , Budapest, New York: Central European University Press.
• –––, 2019, “Populism and nationalism”, in New Politics of Decisionism , Violeta Besirevic (ed.), The Hague: Eleven International Publishing.
• Moore, Margaret (ed.), 1998, National Self-Determination and Secession , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198293844.001.0001
• –––, 2001, “Normative Justifications for Liberal Nationalism: Justice, Democracy and National Identity”, Nations and Nationalism , 7(1): 1–20. doi:10.1111/1469-8219.00001
• –––, 2009, “Liberalism, Communitarianism and the Politics of Identity”, in Christiano and Christman 2009: 322–342. doi:10.1002/9781444310399.ch18
• Morgenthau, Hans, 1946, Scientific Man versus Power Politics , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Motyl, Alexander (ed.), 2001, Encyclopedia of Nationalism: Volume 1: Fundamental Themes , New York: Academic Press.
• Mudde, Cas, 2007, Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511492037
• Müller, Jan-Werner, 2016, What is Populism , Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
• Nation and Nationalism , 2019, thematic issue on migration, 25(2): 401–751.
• Nielsen, Kai, 1998, “Liberal Nationalism, Liberal Democracies and Secession”, University of Toronto Law Journal , 48(2): 253–295. doi:10.2307/825982
• –––, 1998–99, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism and Particularism in the age of Nationalism and Multiculturalism”, Philosophical Exchange , 29(1): art. 2 (3–34). [ Nielsen 1998–99 available online ]
• O’Neill, Onora, 2000, Bounds of Justice , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511605734
• Okin, Susan Moller, 1999, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” and “Response”, in Boston Review , 1997; reprinted with some revisions in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and M. Nussbaum (eds.), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 2002, “‘Mistresses of Their Own Destiny’: Group Rights, Gender, and Realistic Rights of Exit”, Ethics , 112(2): 205–230. doi:10.1086/324645
• –––, 2005, “Multiculturalism and Feminism: No Simple Question, No Simple Answers”, in Eisenberg and Spinner-Halev 2005: 67–89. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490224.004.
• Oldenquist, Andrew, 2002, “Ethnicity and Sovereignty”, Studies in East European Thought , 54(4): 271–284.
• Orgad, Liav, 2015, The Cultural Defense of Nations: A Liberal Theory of Majority Rights , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199668687.001.0001
• Orwell, George, 1945 [2000], “Notes on Nationalism”, first published: Polemic. May 1945, London; reprinted in his Essays , Bernard Crick (ed.), London: Penguin, 2000.
• Özkirimli, Umut, 2003, “The Nation as an Artichoke? A Critique of Ethnosymbolist Interpretations of Nationalism”, Nations and Nationalism , 9(3): 339–355. doi:10.1111/1469-8219.00100
• –––, 2010, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction , second revised edition, London: Palgrave Macmillan. First edition is 2000; third edition is 2017.
• Patten, Alan, 2003, “Liberal Neutrality and Language Policy”, Philosophy & Public Affairs , 31(4): 356–386. doi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.2003.00356.x
• Pavković, Aleksandar and Peter Radan (eds.), 2007, Creating New States: Theory and Practice of Secession , London: Ashgate.
• Pogge, Thomas W., 1997, “Group Rights and Ethnicity”, in Shapiro and Kymlicka 1997: 187–221.
• –––, 2001, “Rawls on International Justice”, The Philosophical Quarterly , 51(203): 246–253. doi:10.1111/j.0031-8094.2001.00228.x
• –––, 2002, World Poverty and Human Rights , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Primoratz, Igor, 2017, “Patriotism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/patriotism/ >.
• Putnam, Hilary, 1996, “Must We Choose Between Patriotism and Universal Reason?”, in Cohen 1996: 91–97.
• Rawls, John, 1999, The Law of Peoples , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Renan, Ernest, 1882, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?”, lecture delivered at the Sorbonne, 11 March 1882. Translated by Martin Thom as “What is a nation?”, in Nation and Narration , Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), London: Routledge, 1990, 8–22; reprinted in part in Nationalism , John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, 17–18.
• Risse, Mathias, 2012a, “Global Justice” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Philosophy , David Estlund (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 457–489
• –––, 2012b, On Global Justice , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Roshwald, Aviel, 2006. The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Sardoč, Mitja (ed.), 2017–, Handbook of Patriotism , Springer International Publishing AG (some chapters available on the web from 2017 on). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-30534-9
• Satz, Debra and Rob Reich (eds.), 2009, Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/Acprof:Oso/9780195337396.001.0001
• Scruton, Roger, 2004, England and the Need for Nations , London: Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society.
• Searle-White, Joshua, 2001, The Psychology of Nationalism , New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. doi:10.1057/9780312299057
• Seymour, Michel, 1999, La nation en question , Montreal: L’Hexagone.
• –––, 2000, “On Redefining the Nation”, in Miscevic 2000: 25–56.
• Shapiro, Ian and Lea Brilmayer (eds.), 1999, Global Justice , (Nomos, Volume XLI), New York: New York University Press.
• Shapiro, Ian and Will Kymlicka (eds.), 1997, Ethnicity and Group Rights , (Nomos, Volume XXXIX), New York: New York University Press.
• Simmons, A. John, 2001, “On The Territorial Rights of States”, Philosophical Issues , 11: 300 –326. doi:10.1111/0029-4624.35.s1.12
• –––, 2016, Boundaries of Authority , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190603489.001.0001
• Shils, Edward, 1957, “On The Territorial Rights of StatesPrimordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties: Some Particular Observations on the Relationships of Sociological Research and Theory”, The British Journal of Sociology , 8(2): 130– 145.
• Smith, Anthony D., 1991, National Identity , Penguin, Harmondsworth.
• –––, 2001, Nationalism , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• –––, 2003, “The Poverty of Anti-Nationalist Modernism”, Nations and Nationalism , 9(3): 357–370. doi:10.1111/1469-8219.00101
• –––, 2008a. The Cultural Foundations of Nations: Hierarchy, Covenant and Republic , Oxford: Blackwell Publishing
• –––, 2008, “Opening Remarkts to the Debate on Aviel Roshwald’s The Endurance of Nationalism”, Nations and Nationalism , 14(4): 637–663. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8129.2008.00355.x
• –––, 2009, Ethno-Symbolism and Nationalism: a Cultural Approach , London: Routledge.
• –––, 2011, “National Identity and Vernacular Mobilisation in Europe”, Nations and Nationalism , 17(2): 223–256. doi:10.1111/j.1469-8129.2011.00491.x
• Sober, Elliott, and David Sloan Wilson, 1998, Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Sparrow, Robert, 2007, “For the Union Makes Us Strong: Anarchism and Patriotism”, in Primoratz and Pavkovic 2007: 201–218.
• Spinner-Halev, Jeff, 2008, “Democracy, Solidarity and Post-Nationalism”, Political Studies , 56(3): 604–628. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00708.x
• Steiner, Hillel, 1999, “Just Taxation and International Redistribution”, in Shapiro and Brilmayer 1999: 171–191.
• Stiltz, Anna, 2016, “The Value of Self-Determination”, Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy 2 , David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne, and Steven Wall (eds), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 98–127. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198759621.003.0005
• Stone, John and Ioanna Christodoulaki, 2018, “Nebulous Nationalism: Walker Connor in an Era of Rising Populism”, Nations and Nationalism , 24(3): 513–518. doi:10.1111/nana.12443
• Storm, Eric, 2018, “A New Dawn in Nationalism Studies? Some Fresh Incentives to Overcome Historiographical Nationalism”, European History Quarterly , 48(1): 113–129. doi:10.1177/0265691417741830
• Tan, Kok-Chor, 2004, Justice without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511490385
• –––, 2011, “Nationalism and Global Justice: A Survey of Some Challenges”, in Sovereign Justice: Global Justice in a World of Nations , Diogo P. Aurélio, Gabriele De Angelis, and Regina Queiroz (eds.), Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 9–24. doi:10.1515/9783110245745.1.9
• –––, 2012, Justice, Institutions, and Luck: The Site, Ground, and Scope of Equality , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199588855.001.0001
• Taguieff, Pierre-André, 2015, La revanche du nationalisme: Néopopulistes et xénophobes ? l’assaut de l’Europe , Paris: Presses Universitaires De France.
• Tajfel, Henri, 1981, Human Groups and Social Categories , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2019, Why Nationalism, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Taylor, Charles, 1989, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 1993, Reconciling the Solitudes , Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
• –––, 1996, “Why Democracy Needs Patriotism”, in Cohen 1996: 119–121.
• Tilly, Charles (ed.), 1975, The Formation of National States in Western Europe , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Tonkiss, Katherine, 2013, Migration and Identity in a Post-National World , London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. doi:10.1057/9781137309082
• Tully, James, 1994, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511607882
• –––, 2004, “Recognition and dialogue: the emergence of a new field”, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy , 7(3): 84–106.
• Twining, William (ed.), 1991, Issues of Self-determination , Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
• Vick, Brian, 2007, “Of Basques, Greeks, and Germans: Liberalism, Nationalism, and the Ancient Republican Tradition in the Thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt”, Central European History , 40(4): 653–681. doi:10.1017/S0008938907001070
• Vincent, Andrew, 2001, “Political Theory”, in Motyl (ed.) 2001: Volume 1, 589–599.
• Waldron, Jeremy, 1992, “Superseding Historic Injustice”, Ethics , 103(1): 4–28. doi:10.1086/293468
• Walker, R.B.J., 2001, “Postmodernism”, in Motyl (ed.) 2001: Volume 1, 611–630.
• Walzer, Michael, 1983, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality , New York: Basic Boooks.
• –––, 2002, “Passion and Politics”, Philosophy & Social Criticism , 28(6): 617–633. doi:10.1177/019145370202800602
• –––, 2004, Arguing about War , New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
• Weber, Max, 1924, “Diskussionsrede zum Vortrag von P. Barth ‘Die Nationalitit in ihrer soziologischer (1912) Bedeutung’ auf dem zweiten Deutschen Soziologentag in Berlin 1912”, in Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsatze zur Soziologie und Sozialpolitik , Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), S. pp. 484–486.
• Wellman, Christopher Heath, 2005, A Theory of Secession: The Case for Self- Determination , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511499265
• Williams, Michael C., 2007, “Morgenthau Now: Neoconservatism, National Greatness, and Realism”, in Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in International Relations , Michael C. Williams (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 216–240.
• Wimmer, Andreas, 2013, Waves of War: Nationalism, State Formation, and Ethnic Exclusion in the Modern World , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139198318
• –––, 2018, Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Others Fall Apart, Princeton: Princeton University Press
• Wright, Sue, 2016, Language Policy and Language Planning: From Nationalism to Globalisation , second revised edition, London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. doi:10.1007/978-1-137-57647-7
• –––, 2018, “Nationalism’s Grip on Democracy: Good News and Bad”, in Reimagining Nation and Nationalism in Multicultural East Asia , Sungmoon Kim and Hsin-Wen Lee (eds.), London: Routledge, chapter 1.
• Ypi, Lea, 2011, Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency , Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199593873.001.0001
• Yuval-Davis, Nira, 1997, Gender and Nation , New York: Sage Publications.
• Žižek, Slavoj, 2015, “In the Wake of Paris Attacks the Left Must Embrace Its Radical Western Roots”, In These Times , 16 November 2015, available online .
• –––, 2017, The Incontinence of the Void , Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• Nussbaum, Martha C. 2002, “ Beyond the Social Contract: Toward Global Justice ”, Tanner Lecture, Australian National University.
• Waldron, Jeremy, 2005, “ Proximity as the Basis of Political Community .”
• Nationalism – A Bibliography , compiled by Peter Rasmussen. A good collection of links and bibliographies, but no longer maintained.
• The Warwick Debates , debate between Ernest Gellner and Anthony D. Smith at the London School of Economics, 1995.
• ARENA: Centre for European Studies ; ARENA is a research centre at the University of Oslo studying the dynamics of the evolving European systems of governance. This site contains a good selection of papers on ethics of international relations.
• Global Policy Forum , has papers on the future of nation-states.
• Academy of European Law , at the European University Institute.
• Territory and Justice network: repository of pre-publication papers .

communitarianism | cosmopolitanism | globalization | identity politics | liberalism | prisoner’s dilemma | secession | war

Copyright © 2020 by Nenad Miscevic

• Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

• Info about mirror sites

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright © 2023 by The Metaphysics Research Lab , Department of Philosophy, Stanford University

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

The Role of Nationalism in Nation-State Creating and Nation-Building

The paper focuses on a philosophical discussion on the history and concepts of nationalism and nation-building through time.

Related Papers

SHUBHAM SAXENA

Grounded Nationalisms: A Sociological Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

Sinisa Malesevic

Globalisation is not the enemy of nationalism; instead, as this book shows, the two forces have developed together through modern history. Malešević challenges dominant views which see nationalism as a declining social force. He explains why the recent escalations of populist nationalism throughout the world do not represent a social anomaly but are, in fact, a historical norm. By focusing on ever-increasing organisational capacity, greater ideological penetration and networks of micro-solidarity, Malešević shows how and why nationalism has become deeply grounded in the everyday life of modern human beings. The author explores the social dynamics of these grounded nationalisms via an analysis of varied contexts, from Ireland to the Balkans. His findings show that increased ideological diffusion and the rising coercive capacities of states and other organisations have enabled nationalism to expand and establish itself as the dominant operative ideology of modernity.

David Nwogbaga

Honours Thesis

Alessio Claudi

The European Union (EU) is a supranational entity that is formed by twenty-eight European states, and it is both an economic and political entity. The EU is often perceived as an immutable entity and the possibility of its collapse has not been explored in detail by political experts and scholars. However, in the EU are present several issues that might endanger its future existence. Overall, these issues create an imbalance of power that affect the stability and the aims of the EU project. To date, experts have focused on the analysis of the effects rather than the causes of EU’s fragility. This thesis argues that the causes of contemporary issues are found in the past. This thesis focuses on the imbalance of power in the EU, unpacking this through both contemporary and historical analysis of the EU. Due to the broadness of the topic, the thesis focuses mainly on three key aspects: the history of European attempts of unity, the current situation of the EU, and the nationalist-populist sentiment that re-emerged in Europe in the recent years. The thesis examines these three themes from a historical and political point of view, using policy and media analysis as wells as core political theory. It examines the nationalist-populist phenomenon through a case study on the Italian Five Star Movement, arguably the first openly populist party to govern a major EU country. Overall, the thesis demonstrates that the EU is burdened by historical legacies and, if it not solved, these will lead to the failure of the EU project.

Kimeu N Joseph

Gabriel C . Gherasim

Journal of Politics and Law

Andrey Kinyakin

The article is devoted to the comparative analysis of the far right (nationalist) as political actors in Russia and in Europe. Whereas the European far-right movements over the last years managed to achieve significant success turning into influential political forces as a result of surging popular support, in Russia the far-right organizations failed to become the fully-fledged political actors. This looks particularly surprising, given the historically deep-rooted nationalist tradition, which stems from the times Russian Empire. Before the 1917 revolution, the so-called «Black Hundred» was one of the major far-right organizations, exploiting nationalistic and anti-Semitic rhetoric, which had representation in the Russian parliament-The State Duma. During the most Soviet period all the far-right movements in Russia were suppressed, re-emerging in the late 1980s as rather vocal political force. But currently the majority of them are marginal groups, partly due to the harsh party regulation, partly due to the fact, that despite state-sponsored nationalism the position of Russian far right does not stand in-line with the position of Russian authorities, trying to suppress the Russian nationalists. This is sharply contrasting to the situation with the far right in Europe, which are more well-established and institutionalized as political actors, using conventional forms of political activity. However, despite development gap in comparison with the European counterparts, the Russian far right have obvious potential as political actors, which can be realized under certain circumstances, enabling them to play more significant in the political system of Russia.

Dr. ANIL ÇİÇEK

This paper argues that nationalism is gaining strength in Russia. The recent demonstrations in Moscow and in various cities are revealing the fact that the growing nationalist tendencies in Russia are now deviating into a racist and xenophobic character. The paper defines Kremlin's policies to use nationalist ideas as tools to reconfigure general political discourse as being one of the most important factors in nationalism's recent resurgence in Russia. Thus, in an attempt to explore the main ideologies and concepts which shape Kremlin's nationalist doctrine, the paper takes a brief look into the development of the Russian idea, National identity and nationalism in Russia. Finally, the paper tries to make a clear definition of the ideology of state nationalism in Russia under Putin administration.

Preschool and Primary Education

Sofia Chatzistefanidou

RELATED PAPERS

Nada Khatib

Handbook of Education Systems in South Asia. Global Education Systems.

Naureen Durrani

Handbook of Education Systems in South Asia

Ahmed Salehin Kaderi

Postcommunism / Postcolonialism: Siblings of Subalternity

Bogdan Stefanescu

Global Affairs

Hilde Restad

Kavita Pillai

Connexe : les espaces postcommunistes en question(s)

Trevor Erlacher

Socialist History

Samuel Foster

Konstantinos A . Tasopoulos

Kirk Henderson

The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism

Aminah Wallace

Frank Jacob , Carsten Schapkow

Zadam'houston Kahia

Christophe Jaffrelot

Guy Breakingbury

Mohammad Ashraf Khwaja

Perpectives Asia: Political Analyses and Commentary

Islam and Civilisational Renewal

Elmira Akhmetova

Sandeep Kumar

Mariam Chkhartishvili

Michael Murphy

Daut Dauti , Eugene Michail

Michael Auwers

Black Consciousness, Black Nationalism and Black Theology: Is there a possibility for theology of dialogue?

Kelebogile Thomas Resane

Dynamics of Community Formation

Robert Ostergard

Abigail Nylander

Betül Sinantorunu Ay

Studia Europaea

raluca moldovan , Sergiu Mișcoiu , Moldovan Raluca , Daniel Neil , Andreea Urs , Bourdjolbo Tchoudiba , Ladislas Bekale , Kevis Landry , Kadundu Karhamikire

Pan-Slavism

PD Dr. Adamantios Theodor Skordos

Matthias Schanz

LEGAL SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY: New perspectives of psychology at the interface with justice.

Ornette Clennon , Cláudia Sampaio

Michaela Buňáková

Yasmeen Daifallah

European Journal of Social Sciences

Ugur C Özgöker

Didem KİZİR

In: JOHANSEN, Bruce E. and AKANDE, Adebowale (ed.), Nationalism: past as prologue. New York: Nova Science Publishers. p. 183‑220. Political Science and History. ISBN 978-1-5361-9231-5.

Ronan LE COADIC

Utopian Studies

Antonis Balasopoulos

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

• Search Menu
• Sign in through your institution
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Acquisition
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Religion
• Music and Media
• Music and Culture
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Politics
• Law and Society
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Ethics
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Security
• Computer Games
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Strategy
• Business Ethics
• Business History
• Business and Government
• Business and Technology
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic Systems
• Economic History
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Theory
• Politics and Law
• Politics of Development
• Public Administration
• Public Policy
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

25 Nation-Building and Nationalism: South Asia, 1947–90

Christophe Jaffrelot, Senior Research Fellow at CERI-Sciences Po/CNRS, France, and Professor at the King’s India Institute, UK

• Published: 01 May 2013
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

South Asia has been a true laboratory for the students of nation-building and nationalism. No other region has experienced two partitions of the magnitude of those of 1947 and 1971. Such a violent history did not stem from the religious and linguistic diversity of the Indian subcontinent—that would be a simplistic interpretation—but from the ideologies and strategies of political actors in India and Pakistan, the two countries on which this chapter focuses. In both places, two types of nationalism have been in competition: a multicultural one (epitomized by Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah) and an ethno-religious one (represented by the Hindu nationalists in India and the Islamic parties in Pakistan). In India, the second brand of nationalism has gained momentum at the expense of the first one from the 1980s. In Pakistan, in addition to the Islamization of politics by both civilians such as Z.A. Bhutto and generals like Zia-ul-Haq, ethno-linguistic nationalists have prevailed (as in East Bengal) or shown a remarkable resilience (as in Baluchistan and among the Mohajirs).

South Asia has been a real laboratory for the students of nation-building and nationalism over the last sixty years. No region has experienced two Partitions of this magnitude—the one in 1947, which gave birth to India and Pakistan through a massive exercise in ethnic cleansing (10 million refugees and 1 million casualties), and the one in 1971, which resulted in the creation of Bangladesh.

Such a chaotic history may stem from the unique religious and linguistic diversity of the Indian subcontinent. But such an interpretation would be too simplistic—or ‘primordialist’ to use the jargon of the specialists of nationalism. In fact, one needs to analyse ideologies and strategies of the relevant political actors to understand the trajectories of the nationalisms of India and Pakistan.

India’s ‘Unity in Diversity’?

The legacy of the colonial era: two types of nationalism.

The Indian nationalist movement, embodied since 1885 by the Indian National Congress, rapidly split into two currents, moderates and extremists during the 1890s: the former conceived of the nation in a universalistic perspective, free from any reference to ethnicity, while the latter lay ready claim to a prime status for the Hindu community (see Chapter 12 by Joya Chatterji).

After the 1920s, however, there was a subdivision of the first school of thought. Mahatma Gandhi advocated a form of multiculturalism that recognized the right of existence of all religious communities in public life. In fact, in his eyes, the Indian nation was a collection of religious communities, all on an equal footing. The progressive intelligentsia, epitomized by Jawaharlal Nehru, attempted to prune the role of religious communities in political life, advocating that the individual was the basic unit of the nation. 1 Nevertheless, Gandhi and Nehru represented two faces of the same coin.

Heirs of the extremists, the Hindu nationalists and the Hindu traditionalist wing of the Congress Party, opposed this twofold current. Although less extreme than the Hindu nationalists, the position of Hindu traditionalists was characterized by the fact that it sought to protect Hindu culture in the widest sense of the term. Ayurvedic medicine, Sanskrit, et cetera, were thus viewed as elements of a legacy to be preserved. 2

This trend further strengthened its position as the voice of separatism gained ground amongst an increasing number of Muslims. Indeed in the years following 1906, yet another pole was formed in the interplay of Indian politics embodied, this time, by the Muslim League. This political grouping first succeeded in acquiring a separate electorate for the Muslims just before the progressively elected provincial assemblies were set up in 1909. The Muslim League further propounded the theory according to which Hindus and Muslims constituted ‘two nations’. It was by virtue of this theory that the group, arousing interest amongst an increasing number of people, demanded the formation of Pakistan in the 1940s.

The Constitutional Moment 3

The Constituent Assembly elected in 1946 comprised mostly congressmen who, however, belonged to two different schools of thought, the Gandhi/Nehru one, and the Hindu traditionalist one. Gandhi died in January 1948—killed by a Hindu nationalist—more than one year before the assembly finalized the text of the Constitution, but Nehru actively represented the secular viewpoint there. He wanted to build a multifaceted nation by combining the need for unity and respect for pluralism. For him the genius of the Indian nation lay in its capacity for melting together Hindu culture and successive waves of invaders or migrants. 4 On the other hand, the Hindu traditionalists who suspected the Muslims of harbouring separatist tendencies wanted a standardized, Hindu-dominated culture for the country. Leading figures amongst them included Vallabhbhai Patel, the deputy prime minister and home minister, and Rajendra Prasad, the president of the Assembly.

Nehru’s position prevailed most of the time during the three years over which the Constituent Assembly debates were held. Secularism, as a result, became the official doctrine of the Republic, Hindu nationalists, the only proponents of some Hindu State, being almost totally absent from the Assembly anyway. The Indian version of secularism did not equate with the French concept of laïcité , which did not recognize religious or other cultural differences in the public sphere; instead the State recognized all religious communities on an equal footing. Consequently, Article 30 of the Constitution considered religious and linguistic minorities’ schools as legal and allowed them to apply for public funding.

Not only did the Indian Constitution acknowledge the role of religions in the public sphere, but it also made special concessions to some minorities, including the Muslims whom Nehru was keen to reassure since they had chosen to stay in India instead of joining Pakistan and were now only one-tenth of the population. 5 While they lost the separate electorate the British had granted them, Muslims retained the right to use the Shariat as a personal law. Muslims had, in fact, expressed their attachment to the Shariat quite early in the Constituent Assembly debates. Hindu traditionalists such as K. M. Munshi were, however, in favour of a Uniform Civil Code and invoked the need to ‘consolidate and unify our personal law in such a way that the way of life of the whole country may in course of time be unified and secular’. 6 Nehru objected that Muslims should themselves freely choose the path of reform. Eventually, Article 44 of the Constitution merely stated: ‘The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.’ Similarly, while Hindu traditionalists objected that freedom to profess one’s religion would result in a huge number of conversions to the detriment of Hinduism, given the organizational strength and missionary zeal of the Muslim clerics and the Catholic Church, freedom of religious practice and to propagate one’s faith was officially recognized in Article 25 of the Fundamental Rights.

Multilingualism was achieved with greater difficulties. Soon after the Assembly met for the first time, Hindu traditionalist members raised the question of the language in which the Constitution would be written and they spoke in favour of Hindi, the language they equated with the Hindu civilization, Urdu now being regarded by them as the language of Pakistan (and the Muslims). 7 Members from South India objected that Hindi was hardly spoken in their area and declared that English seemed to be the most suitable language at the national level. Nehru agreed that there should be a Hindi version of the Constitution but he preferred that an English version should be first voted on. He strongly opposed Rajendra Prasad on this issue. 8

The controversy bounced back when the question of choosing the official language of the country arose. G. Ayyangar, an eminent Congress Party member of the Constitution Drafting Committee, proposed a compromise formula: while the official language must be Hindi in Devanagari script, English would be used at the same time at the national level for a period of fifteen years after the promulgation of the Constitution in 1950, a period that could be extended by the Parliament. A list of thirteen vernacular languages concluded Ayyangar’s amendment, a sure sign of respect towards regional languages that were to be used at the province level for administrative purpose and as languages of instruction. 9 Nehru supported this proposition forcefully against Hindu traditionalists who lost by one vote.

In 1963, with the 1965 deadline approaching, the Parliament reviewed the issue and the Official Languages Act upheld the situation prevailing since 1950, with English becoming the ‘associate official language’. After a final attempt by supporters of Hindi, which spurred a number of demonstrations in South India, a 1967 amendment dispelled the fears of non-Hindi-speaking states by clarifying that this arrangement would not be challenged as long as even one of them remained attached to it. Last but not least, as mentioned above, Article 30 of the Constitution allowed not only religious communities but also linguistic groups to establish their own educational institutions, and to seek State subsidies to help them function.

Linguistic Federalism

The Constitution of 1950 recognized fifteen official languages. With the exception of English, these were regional languages to which the local populations were very attached. Language-linked patriotism fed authentic ethnic regionalisms in certain provinces of the Dravidian South, for example in the Tamil lands. These movements penetrated the Congress Party and influenced it from within. They managed in this way to contest the all-powerful nature of the central State inherited from the British, and served as a source of support for political pluralism without putting the nation’s integrity into question, as illustrated by the decisive episode of the reordering of the states of the Indian Union along linguistic lines.

Within the Constituent Assembly, partisans of such a reorganization had argued sporadically in the years 1946–50 that the administrative borders inherited from the British were artificial as they did not correspond to any linguistic reality. 10 Nehru was hostile to these claims because he feared that a recognition of regionalisms would hinder the process of nation-building. 11 He was also particularly concerned with keeping a strong State, not just because the British had bequeathed him one and no one lightly reduces his own power, but also because his brand of socialism required that he have a powerful administration at his disposal. However, the idea of ‘linguistic states’ gained ground within the local branches of his Congress Party, because regional identities, to which language was often the key, were taking hold throughout India on the rubble of the ‘all English’ system imposed by the British. On 15 December 1952 a former disciple of Gandhi, Potti Srisamullu, who had called for the formation of a province, ‘Andhra’, to be constituted from the division of Madras Province, died as a result of a hunger strike. His death aroused such emotion that Nehru resigned himself to announcing the formation of Andhra Pradesh, whose frontiers coincided with the extent of the Telugu language. This new entity was to be followed by several other linguistic states. The prime minister decreed on 22 December 1953 the creation of a commission charged with setting out ‘the broad lines according to which states should be reorganized.’ 12 He received the report of the States Reorganization Commission on 30 September 1955. This text recommended the replacement of the twenty-seven existing states by three Union Territories administered by New Delhi and sixteen states, of which only three would be created along linguistic lines. This provoked violent demonstrations, notably in Maharashtra, where Marathi-speakers sought to free themselves from the domination of the Gujaratis to whom they found themselves bound, artificially in their eyes, within the Bombay Presidency. The reorganization of the majority of states on a linguistic basis was agreed to in 1956. Maharashtra and Gujarat were created in 1960.

The debate around linguistic states, and its outcomes, reveal the importance of regional linguistic identity and the capacity of an accommodating federal system to defuse these centrifugal forces. This dynamic acquired an even greater significance when the political parties playing the federal game articulated the interests of linguistic groups. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)—a Dravidian Party in Tamil Nadu—was a case in point. After having been tempted by separatism, the DMK decided to play the electoral game, recognizing that the federal framework allowed them to manage their province themselves. Far from wrapping themselves up in nationalism and rejecting the system, these groups went into politics and fought in elections from the 1950s on.

Similarly, the Sikh people of Punjab who had asked for a separate Sikhistan in 1947 eventually decided to play the constitutional game fully when it occurred to them that they might benefit from the linguistic logic of the Indian federal system. Their main party, the Akali Dal, asked for a redrawing of the frontier of the province according to the linguistic criterion—Sikhs speaking Punjabi while Hindus spoke Hindi. Such a reform was bound to transform Sikhs into a majority in Punjab. Their movement for a Punjabi suba (that is, a Punjabi-speaking ‘province’) succeeded in 1966, the central government having displayed a great deal of pragmatism, eventually overcoming its initial strong reluctance due to the opposition of the Hindi-speaking community.

The same kind of flexibility was observed in the case of the North-East where Assam shrunk as new states and Union Territories—an administrative status giving less autonomy than that of a state—were created in order to give to ethnic groups a land they could call their own. In 1963 the Nagas, a Christianized tribe, obtained Nagaland. In 1966 it was the turn of the Mizos who got a Union territory. In 1972 Meghalaya became a state. Then, the demand for a Gorkhaland gained momentum among the Gorkhas of Darjeeling district. Eventually in the 1980s, they gained a relatively autonomous status within the state of West Bengal, with the creation of a Hill Council.

The Rise of Communalism

The Indian Constituent Assembly debates had echoed the old ideological cleavage within the Congress Party, so far as the conception of the nation was concerned, and it seemed that Nehru had won against Hindu traditionalists. Because of his concerns over religious impartiality, and most certainly, over avoiding giving the regime too many Hindu features, the Indian Republic drew upon Buddhism to adorn itself with symbols that could be both Indian and neutral: the official emblem replicates the lions of Ashoka, the great Buddhist emperor, for instance.

India’s multiculturalism was affected from below, and then from above, within the Congress Party: first, the local leaders were mostly Hindu traditionalists, and second, Nehru’s successors did not maintain his secular attitude. Such an attitude prepared the ground for the Hindu nationalist backlash of the 1980s.

Hindu traditionalists remained in control of the Congress Party at the local and state levels after the vote of India’s Constitution, so much so that its provisions could not be fully implemented. In Uttar Pradesh, the largest state of the Indian Union, G. B. Pant, the chief minister, declared Hindi as the official language. Urdu speakers, who were in large numbers in this stronghold of the Indo-Persian culture, petitioned the President of the Republic in 1954 in order, at least, that Urdu school classes be set up. The central government reiterated this recommendation twice, which led the government of Lucknow to open Urdu classes in only six districts where more than one fifth of the population was Muslim. 13 Urdu was not recognized as an official language of Uttar Pradesh before 1989.

Similar scenarios unfolded themselves in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and most of the states where Hindu traditionalist chief ministers were so strongly entrenched that they could resist the injunctions of Nehru and his progressive colleagues. They not only refused to recognize Urdu as much as they should but also patronized Hindi through associations like the Hindi sahitya academy (Hindi literature academy), supported Ayurvedic medicine, prohibited the slaughter of cows, and passed laws in defence of Hinduism to forbid ‘fraudulent conversions’. In addition to losing ground in terms of education, Muslims were also victims of recurrent violence in places like Aligarh, Varanasi, Jabalpur, and Ahmedabad.

However, the communalization of the Congress Party leadership affected more radically the secular fabric of India’s society from the 1980s onwards. Under Nehru, the government had treated all religious communities equally; under Indira Gandhi, the same arrangement prevailed till the 1980s, but things changed during her third term: now, the ruling party attempted to exploit communal feelings. As early as 1980, the Congress government introduced a bill seeking to revise the constitution of Aligarh University—the matrix of the Muslim League and then of the movement for Pakistan—in order to reaffirm its Muslim identity and to accord it more autonomy.

Soon after, Indira Gandhi secretly supported Sant Bhindranwale, a Sikh nationalist who had initiated a rather radical but popular mobilization in favour of a separate state for his community in Punjab. The prime minister obviously believed that this extremist leader would help her to destabilize the Akali Dal, a Sikh moderate party that was ruling a state she coveted for the Congress Party.

Last but not least, in 1983 Indira Gandhi attended the inauguration of the Bharat Mata Mandir (Temple of Mother India), a Hindu nationalist temple, and took part in the ceremonies marking the centenary of the death of the founder of the Arya Samaj, a socio-religious reform movement founded in 1875 that has been one of the crucibles of the Hindu nationalist movement.

Rajiv Gandhi, who took over from his mother after she was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984, went even further in the communalization of the Congress Party. In 1985 he ensured that the Shariat remained the source of Muslim Civil Law by getting an Act passed in Parliament that removed the Muslim community from the ambit of the Penal Code clause relating to divorce. He did so under pressure from conservative Muslim leaders who were supposed to control the ‘Muslim vote’—which the Congress Party most obviously coveted—and who protested against the Supreme Court ruling in the Shah Bano case. This woman, Shah Bano, having been divorced by her husband according to the Shariat’s procedure, had filed a case in the High Court and won. She won again when her husband went to the Supreme Court on appeal. Thus, Rajiv Gandhi had disowned the judges in order to please a handful of Muslim opinion leaders. This decision prepared the ground for the Hindu backlash that Hindu nationalist movements articulated immediately by claiming that Hindus were second class citizens in their own country.

The Hindu nationalist movement posed the biggest threat to secularism and the Nehruvian multicultural nation-building process. As an ideology Hindu nationalism is heir to a long tradition harking back to the Arya Samaj. It looks at Hindu civilization as the most ancient and perfect one and as the embodiment of Indian culture. Consequently it expects from the religious minorities that they practise their faith privately but pay allegiance to Hindu symbols and beliefs in the public sphere. The main incarnation of Hindu nationalism today, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Corps), was founded in 1925 and developed from its birthplace, Nagpur, all over India. With about 37,000 local branches and more than 2 million members, it has become one of the largest organizations in India.

After setting up its own network, the RSS started to develop front organizations in different directions. In 1948 RSS cadres based in Delhi founded the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP, the Indian Student Association), a student union whose primary aim was to combat communist influence on university campuses and that currently ranks among the first student unions in terms of membership. In 1955 the RSS created a worker union, the Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS—Indian Workers’ Association), whose primary mission was also to counter the ‘red unions’ in the name of Hindu nationalist ideology, promoting a doctrine of social cohesion over class struggle. In the 1990s the BMS became India’s largest trade union.

In addition to these unions, the RSS developed more focused organizations. In 1952 it founded a tribal movement, the Vanavasi Kalyan Ashram (VKA, an Ashram for the welfare of the tribals), 14 which above all aimed to counter the influence of Christian movements among the aboriginals of India where proselytism and the social work of priests have resulted in numerous conversions. The VKA applied itself to imitating the methods of missionaries and thus achieved numbers of ‘reconversions’.

In 1964, in association with Hindu clerics, the RSS set up the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP—World Council of Hindus), a movement responsible for grouping together the heads of the various Hindu sects in order to give this rather unorganized religion a sort of centralized structure. 15 Another subsidiary, Vidya Bharati (Indian Knowledge), was established in 1977 to coordinate a network of schools developed by the RSS, which started in the 1950s on the basis of local initiatives. Lastly, in 1979, the RSS founded Seva Bharati (Indian Service), to penetrate the slums through social activities (free schools, low-cost medicines, et cetera).

Taken together, these bridgeheads are presented by the mother organization as forming the ‘Sangh Parivar’, ‘the family of the Sangh’, that is of the RSS. 16 Their action plans, each in its own field, have naturally weakened the secular fabric of India’s society, and developed anti-Muslim feelings.

The Political Influence of Hindu Nationalism

Among the most important members of the ‘RSS family’ figures a political party, the Jana Sangh, which was founded in 1951 for the first general election and that Nehru immediately identified as the chief enemy of the Congress Party. This party has always wavered between two strategies. One, moderate, involved positioning itself as a patriotic party on behalf of national unity and as the protector of both the poor and small privately owned businesses in a populist vein that nevertheless stopped short of including the non-Hindus. The other line, more militant, was based on the promotion of an aggressive form of ‘Hinduness’, symbolized by vigorous campaigns in the defence of the cow, a sacred animal for the Hindus but not for the Muslims. The latter were the implicit target of a fight against slaughtering cows initiated in 1966 in the context of the fourth general election campaign.

Although the militant strategy was more in keeping with the wishes of the RSS and the feelings of its activists, it ran up against India’s rules of secularism and kept the Jana Sangh isolated by preventing it from striking up alliances with other parties, except the very few ones that accepted its communal discourse. This strategy changed in the 1970s. In 1977, after the state of emergency declared by Indira Gandhi was lifted, the Jana Sangh—which had resigned itself to following a moderate line—merged with the Janata Party. This party won the sixth general election in March 1977 against the Congress Party. However, the former Jana Sangh had not broken with the RSS, to the great displeasure of some of its partners in power, particularly the socialists. This group, associated with the government’s second in command, Charan Singh, who sought to destabilize Prime Minister Morarji Desai all the better to take his place, drew their argument from an upsurge in Hindu-Muslim riots in which RSS activists were involved, to demand that the former Jana Sanghis break with this movement. Their refusal precipitated the dissolution of the Janata Party, paving the way for Indira Gandhi’s return.

In 1980 the former Jana Sangh leaders started a new party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which remained faithful to the moderate strategy. The BJP, which had Atal Bihari Vajpayee as its first president, diluted the original ideology of the Jana Sangh in order to become more acceptable in the Indian party system and to find allies in this arena. This more moderate approach to politics was very much resented by the rest of the Sangh Parivar.

The RSS, in irritation, adopted some distance and made greater use of the VHP to rekindle its militant strategy. This strategy found its main expression in the launching of the Ayodhya movement in the mid-1980s. Ayodhya, a town in Uttar Pradesh, is described in the Hindu tradition as the birthplace and capital of the god-king Lord Ram. The site was supposedly once occupied by a Ram temple until it was destroyed in the sixteenth century on the orders of Babur, the first Mughal emperor, in order to build a mosque. In 1984 the VHP called for this site to be returned to the Hindus. In 1989, throughout the entire summer, with the logistical support of the RSS, it organized Ram Shila Pujan festivals, which involved worshipping bricks ( shila ) printed with Ram’s name. These holy bricks were to be used to build the Ayodhya temple.

The BJP then rallied to the ethno-religious mobilization strategy and even participated in these processions, which took place all over India: the agitation contributed to its success at the polls, taking it from two seats in 1984 to eighty-eight seats in 1989. In 1990, while the party was a major component of the coalition in power that had just ousted the Congress Party, its president, L. K. Advani, headed a 10,000-kilometre ‘chariot-journey’ ( Rath Yatra ) that was to end with the construction of the Ayodhya temple. Advani was stopped before entering Uttar Pradesh and the repression of activists who attacked the mosque left some dozen dead. This episode reinforced the image that the BJP was trying to acquire among the majority community, of being a champion of Hinduism. The 1991 general elections actually enabled the party to win 20.08 per cent of the vote and 120 seats in the Lok Sabha, but its success in Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP was able to form the government, did not enable it to solve the issue of Ayodhya.

Hindu nationalist militants tried to put an end to this deadlock by demolishing the mosque on 6 December 1992. This operation and the ensuing Hindu-Muslim riots—around twelve hundred dead in a few days—prompted the Congress government that had been formed in 1991 to take a number of repressive measures, including the dissolution of the assemblies in states where the BJP was in power (Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, and Rajasthan) and the ban of the RSS and the VHP—a temporary measure that did not affect the Sangh Parivar.

From the Nehru era to the rise of the Hindu nationalist movement the centre of gravity of Indian politics has moved from a secular (in other words multicultural) brand of nationalism to a clearly ethno-religious one. The minorities are the losers to the growing Hindu-oriented xenophobia that started in the 1980s, partly as a reaction to the communalization of politics by the Congress Party: while Nehru and Indira Gandhi during her two first terms had made a point of excluding communal forces from the legitimate political space, Indira Gandhi and then her son Rajiv prepared the ground for a Hindu backlash by playing one community against another in the 1980s. At the same time, India has maintained the initial multilinguistic option and thereby defused ethno-linguistic centrifugal forces that had manifested themselves, especially in South India, as early as the 1940s. In contrast, Pakistan has never been able to use Islam as a cementing force transcending ethno-linguistic identities.

Islam is Not Enough in Pakistan

When the word ‘Pakistan’ was introduced in the 1930s, ‘P’ stood for Punjab, ‘A’ for the Afghans (the Pathans of the North-West Frontier Province, NWFP), ‘K’ for Kashmir, and ‘S’ for Sindh. Interestingly, no reference was made to the Bengalis. The resolution of Lahore in which the Muslim League asked for the creation of Pakistan for the first time in 1940, regarded the Pakistan claim as a means to give a country to the Muslims of British India since Hindus and Muslims represented, according to the League, much more than religious communities: they form ‘two nations’. After 1947, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the first governor general of Pakistan, looked to Islam as a cementing force that would be able to surmount the regional cleavages. 17 General Ayub Khan, who ruled Pakistan between 1958 and 1969, also made use of Islam—certainly in a modernized and reformist form—and the Constitution of 1962 stipulated that the laws of the State could not contradict the precepts of the religion. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto inscribed the notion of an Islamic Pakistan in the Constitution of 1973 and went one step further: he declared the Ahmadis 18 non-Muslims. General Zia reasserted this approach forcefully in the late 1970s, stating: ‘The basis of Pakistan was Islam. The basis of Pakistan was that the Muslims of the subcontinent are a separate culture.’ 19

Parallel to their effort to make Islam the ideological cement of the Pakistani nation, the establishment opted early for a centralized authoritarian pattern of state-building. One of Jinnah’s first gestures was to dismiss the government of the North-West Frontier Province, a forewarning of the coming power relations between the centre and the provinces.

In fact none of the Constitutions of Pakistan have really been respectful of federalism. That of 1956 and of 1962, for instance, gave to the centre the task of collecting the most lucrative taxes as well as dispatching the fiscal resources and enabled the president to veto the laws voted by the provincial assemblies. The Constitution of 1973 gave representation to the provinces in the Council of Common Interests and the National Finance Commission, two new bodies in charge of allocating State resources. But the State remained very much centralized. The laws passed by the provincial assemblies could be declared null and void by the federal Parliament, for instance.

The dialectical tension between an Islamic, centralized (even authoritarian) State and ethno-linguistic groups forms the framework of what may be called the Pakistan pattern of nation-(un)making.

The Punjabization of the State

In contrast to India, Pakistan is inhabited by a clearly identified small number of linguistic groups whose elites have been gradually tightening control. The ‘Mohajirs’ were the initial architects of Pakistan. This term applies to all ‘those who migrated’ from what became India in August 1947 but it has come to define more especially those who came from the provinces of India where the Muslims were in a minority (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bombay Presidency). It is in this social milieu, which shares a common language, Urdu (except for those who spoke Gujarati), that the Muslim League, and then the idea of Pakistan, found their first support, in particular, amongst a literary elite that was more and more threatened by the Hindu majority and hence anxious to find a base into which to withdraw, or even a state to govern. In 1947, one hundred thousand Urdu-speaking Biharis opted for eastern Pakistan and one million Muslims of Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat migrated to western Pakistan. They settled down above all in the cities of Sindh, in particular Karachi, the big industrial, commercial, and administrative centre of the new country that was then its capital.

The Mohajirs then dominated the State through the Muslim League, ‘their’ party, and its two chiefs, Governor General Jinnah (initially from the province of Bombay), and Prime Minister Liaqat Ali Khan (initially from Uttar Pradesh) whose government had a majority of Mohajirs. 20 These men made Urdu the official language of Pakistan. The Mohajirs were also over-represented in the administration: out of 101 Muslim members of the Indian Civil Service, 95 opted for Pakistan. Whereas they represented only 3.5 per cent of the population, in the early years of the new State, Mohajirs occupied 21 per cent of the posts of the Pakistan Civil Service. 21

Mohajirs started to lose ground quickly though. Jinnah died in 1948, Liaqat Ali Khan in 1951, and the Muslim League rapidly lost its influence due to the weakness of its organization. Besides, the Mohajirs were ill-accepted in Sindh. Even though they were in a small minority, businessmen—mainly from Gujarat—were also influential and their quick recovery was resented by the ‘locals’. 22

From the beginning the Punjabis shared a dominant position with the Mohajirs because of their former status as the ‘martial race’: in British India they had provided 80 per cent of the armed forces. 23 The authoritarian reign of General Ayub Khan (1958–69) reinforced the rise of the Punjabis at the expense of the Mohajirs.

The rise of the Punjabis went on a par with the centralization of the State and the establishment of authoritarian regimes in the successive Constitutions. In 1959 Ayub Khan instituted the regime of ‘Basic Democracies’ that banned the political parties and relied on local notables who formed an ad hoc electorate for designating the president. This scheme was a good means to avoid the verdict of free elections, which would have placed the Punjabis at a disadvantage since they were in a minority. In fact, the law of numbers would have benefited the Bengalis of East Pakistan.

Bengali Separatism and the Making of Bangladesh

After 1947 the Bengalis were more numerous than the inhabitants of West Pakistan, 41.9 million as against 33.7 million, and on this basis demanded a representation superior to that of the ‘western wing’ in the institutions that the Constituent Assembly was responsible for establishing. This demand, which annoyed the Punjabis and the Mohajirs, paralyzed the Constituent Assembly.

The Bengalis also protested against the elevation of Urdu to the status of the national language at the expense of their language. After violent protests, Bengali was also recognized as a state language. But the Bengalis increasingly complained of economic exploitation by West Pakistan which, in fact, paid for many of its imports with the excess commercial balance of East Pakistan. 24 The Awami League that orchestrated their protest was subjected to severe repression. Its leader, Mujibhar Rahman, radicalized the movement and advanced in 1966 an openly autonomist programme. Ayub Khan replied with more repression but had to retire in 1969. His successor, General Yahya Khan, organized free elections in December 1970: it was a triumph for the Awami League, which got 160 seats against 81 for the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) of Ali Bhutto, for which the Sindh and Punjab voted massively. The new Pakistani establishment refused the verdict of the ballot box and sent thousands of soldiers to East Bengal. The repression that followed resulted in innumerable victims and provoked an exodus of 10 million Bengalis into India. New Delhi then launched a military operation that obliged Islamabad to release their hold over East Pakistan. This resulted in outright secession and the creation of Bangladesh in December 1971.

Sindhi Nationalism: On the Decline or Cyclical?

The Sindhis are possibly the only ethnic minority whose nationalism has declined in the course of time. There is one good reason for that: even though, after the Bengali secession of December 1971, the Punjabis represented about 60 per cent of the population of Pakistan and occupied 70 per cent of jobs in the armed forces, 25 for the first time a Sindhi, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, took over from Yahya Khan as Head of State.

In 1972 the PPP also won the elections in Sindh and formed the government in Karachi. The state government made Sindhi compulsory in school for those who had another mother tongue and even forced bureaucrats to use Sindhi as an official language. These decisions triggered violent resistance from the Mohajirs. Bhutto, who had supported the initial measures, intervened and persuaded the government of Sindh to give bureaucrats twelve years to learn Sindhi. However, a quota of 11.4 per cent was established in favour of rural Sindh—where most of the local Sindhis lived—in the central administration, as a way of redressing the imbalance of which the Mohajirs were the principal beneficiaries: in 1973 they still occupied 33.5 per cent of the posts in public administration whereas they only represented 8 per cent of the total population; the rural Sindhis themselves occupied only 2.7 per cent of the posts of employees and 4.3 per cent of the posts of the officer grade. 26 In the army, Sindhis represented only .22 per cent of the total in 1947 (as against 80 per cent of Punjabis), and according to S. P. Cohen these proportions have remained more or less the same ever since. 27

In the late 1970s Sindhi nationalism found itself exacerbated by the dismissal of Bhutto from power by General Zia-ul-Haq, a Punjabi. Bhutto’s condemnation (by a tribunal consisting of a Punjabi majority) 28 and later his execution in April 1979 made him a martyr in the opinion of many Sindhis. Zia then favoured Punjabis at the expense of Sindhis. Some of them were evicted from the provincial administration. In the mid-1980s, the central administration was over-dominated by the Punjabis, who retained 56 per cent of the jobs, whereas the rural Sindhis got only 3 per cent (almost as little as the Balochs, 2.5 per cent, and much less than the Mohajirs, 25 per cent, and the people from the NWFP, 11 per cent).

Not surprisingly, the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy, a PPP- sponsored alliance of opposition parties, which organized a series of demonstrations against Zia in 1983, was especially successful in Sindh. Some 45,000 soldiers were deployed for a repression that lasted six months, which resulted in 300 deaths and 100,000 arrests. The charter of the movement demanded the establishment of a confederation where Sindh would enjoy the maximum autonomy.

The movement was not well structured but it got demobilized and lost its Sindhi nationalist overtone for another reason: the electoral successes of the PPP and the appointment of Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister in 1988. The PPP, in fact, appeared as a Sindhi Party winning all the electoral seats in the constituencies of rural Sindh, and that a Sindhi could be at the helm of power militated in favour of a renewed loyalty of its ‘compatriots’ to the notion of a Pakistani nation, even in the form of a centralized State. This fluctuating identification with the State as a function of the ethnic affiliations of those in power shows that the State does not transcend social conflicts but rather represents a stake in the competition between different communities. Such a pendulum-like oscillation according to who is in power is also obvious in the case of the Mohajirs.

The Mohajir Backlash

The Mohajirs are, indeed, very revealing of the malleability of political identity according to the interests one pursues. To begin with, they identified themselves with the new State of Pakistan which was largely their creation. However, the more they felt threatened, the more they projected themselves as an oppressed minority with a distinct identity.

The Mohajirs were affected by long-term sociological trends. On the one hand the Green Revolution, of which Punjab was the first beneficiary, since the end of the 1970s reinforced the domination of this province and permitted its natives to invest in industry, including in Karachi. On the other hand, migrants poured into this city and benefited from its dynamism: in 1984 the city accounted for 3.3 million Mohajirs compared with 1 million Punjabis, 1.1 million Balochis, 700,000 Pakhtuns—a good number of them refugees from Afghanistan—and a few hundred thousand Sindhis.

The Mohajir Qaumi Mahaz (Mohajir National Movement) was created in this context in 1984. Its cadre and even its chief, Altaf Hussain, came from the middle class and above all recruited its members from amongst students frustrated in their aspirations of social mobility. The MQM demanded that only persons settled for a minimum of twenty years in Sindh should be considered as residents and enjoy the right to vote; that foreigners could not acquire properties in Sindh; that the Mohajirs should be recognized as the fifth ‘nationality’ of Pakistan; finally, that Karachi, the first city of the country, should be named a province (Karachi suba), which would in fact be a Mohajir province. 29 Altaf Hussain occasionally claimed that he wished to partition Sindh in the same way that Bangladesh was carved out, if Islamabad continued to ignore his demands. 30 Yet, his strategies of contesting elections and allying the MQM with other national parties suggested that he was still more interested in exerting power within the institutional framework of Pakistan than anything else.

Yet, the MQM also resorted to violent methods, so much so that in June 1992 the army was deployed in Karachi for ‘Operation Clean Up’. The leaders of the MQM went into hiding or abroad. (Altaf Hussain had already established himself in London.) ‘Operation Clean Up’ only radicalized the population in favour of the MQM, and the military implicitly admitted this before leaving Karachi in November 1994.

‘Balochistan to the Balochs!’

Balochistan contains only about 3 per cent of the population of Pakistan, but it represents 42 per cent of the country’s territory. In 1947 the ruler of Kalat, the largest Baloch princely state, opted for independence, but the Pakistani army broke his resistance in a few months. The government then succeeded in co-opting influential local notables (Sardars) and even their chief, the Khan of Kalat. The national movement, inhibited by rivalries, did not survive, except through guerrilla warfare of low intensity that persisted under the rule of Ayub Khan (1958–69). It really crystallized rather late as a reaction to the centralization of the Pakistani state.

In 1972, an alliance of the Awami Party and the Jamiat-Ulema-Islam (a conservative Islamic party supported by the Sardars) won the elections in Balochistan, as well as in the NWFP. One of the first decisions of the new government was to make the administration more indigenous by replacing officers from other provinces, mainly from the Punjab, with ‘sons of the soil’. The central government denounced this spoils system, which would have deprived the members of the national elite (above all, Punjabis) of coveted posts. The direction of industrial investments constituted another bone of contention. Balochistan and the NWFP blamed Islamabad for failing to advance the economic development of their territory and demanded control over the industrialization process.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto dismissed the government of Balochistan in 1973, justifying this by invoking separatist activities. The Balochi Peoples’ Liberation Front (BPLF) and the Baloch Students’ Organization (BSO) then initiated an uprising that mobilized some 55,000 militants (including 11,500 regular combatants) over four years. The Pakistani army deployed some 88,000 men for a war that resulted in about 5,300 deaths in the ranks of the Balochs and 3,300 amongst the soldiers. 31

General Zia appeased a section of the Baloch nationalists by liberating thousands of prisoners in the late 1970s and pardoning those who had taken refuge in Afghanistan. Some nationalists chose exile, like Attaullah Khan Mengal, who left for London to found the Sindh Baloch and Pakhtun Front with the help of Mumtaz Bhutto (first cousin of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto). Mengal still did not want anything short of a confederal Pakistan, enabling Balochistan to become an independent country. But most of the other Baloch leaders showed greater moderation, partly because of Zia’s ability to co-opt them.

The democratization process that commenced in 1988 did not result in the re-emergence of regionalist forces, since the Sardars preferred to form alliances with parties in power in Islamabad, either the PPP or the PML(N).

From Pakhtunistan to Pakhtunkwa

The Pakhtuns live in the only province of Pakistan, the NWFP, with a name that, until 2010, did not reflect any ethnic feature, even though the province contains most of the 16 per cent of the Pashto speakers who live in the country. In 1947 the Pakhtuns engaged in an anti-British struggle that had been organized inside a movement called the Red Shirts, which was opposed to integration into Pakistan and instead demanded, through its main leader, Khan Ghaffar Khan, the formation of a Pakhtunistan that would cover the Afhgan Pakhtun and the Pakhtuns (or Pathans) of the NWFP. Ghaffar Khan and his supporters boycotted the referendum by which NWFP was finally integrated into Pakistan and later demanded at the Constituent Assembly of which he was a member that the Province be named Pakhtunistan. He was arrested soon after and his brother, Dr Khan Sahib Zada, the then chief minister of the NWFP, was dismissed by Jinnah.

Yet, the heirs of the Red Shirts movement were integrated into the new regime. In 1956 the son of Ghaffar Khan, Wali Khan, founded the National Awami Party (NAP), which became part of the political system. This sign of moderation can partly be explained by socioeconomic factors. The Pakhtuns were already well represented inside the Pakistani state because of their place in the army (a legacy of the colonial period, the British having classified them among the martial races), of which they composed 19.5 per cent of the personnel in 1948. 32 In 1968 they constituted almost 40 per cent of the 48 top military elite—a bigger share than the Punjabis (35.4 per cent). Right from the beginning, the intensity of Pakhtun nationalism declined in proportion to the possibilities of upward mobility opened by the new state. For all these reasons the NAP obtained less than 20 per cent of the valid votes in the general as well as provincial elections of 1970, a strong incentive for the NAP to dilute its programme, which had already accepted the borders of Balochistan and the NWFP in 1969.

The fact that the Pakhtuns had close contacts with their Afghan counterparts favoured a form of irredentism. Kabul had always had designs on part of the NWFP, so much so that it has been a bone of contention going back at least to the drawing of the Durand line which, in 1893, partitioned the territory of this ethnic group into two almost equal halves. In 1947 the Afghan government asked the British to give the Pakhtuns two other choices, in addition to the possibilities of acceding to Pakistan or India: to merge with Afghanistan or to form an independent Pashtunistan. Subsequently, this question poisoned the diplomatic relations between Britain and Afghanistan to the point of provoking their break in 1961–2. This thaw in their relations did not last long. However, tension remained, especially after the rise to power of Mohammed Daoud Khan, one of the staunchest partisans of Pashtunistan in Kabul. In his first speech and in his official position, he singled out Pakistan as the only country with which Afghanistan had unresolved problems and mentioned Pashtunistan in this respect. Daoud was then helping Ajmal Khattak, the General Secretary of the NAP, who was self-exiled in Kabul where he declared in 1973 that his aim was to carve out an independent Pashtunistan on the model of Bangladesh. The irredentist dimension of the Pathan movement thus helped the NAP by providing its self-exiled leaders with some logistics and support.

However, this external factor would not have played a major role if, at the same time, the Pakistani Pakhtuns had not been alienated by the centralized authoritarianism of Ali Bhutto. When Bhutto dismissed the Awami Party-led government of Balochistan in 1973, the government of the NWFP resigned immediately as a sign of solidarity. Two years later Bhutto had Wali Khan arrested under the pretext of his implication in the murder of a minister of the NWFP, and he dissolved the Awami Party. The trial of Wali Khan lasted right up till the dismissal of Bhutto in 1977 by General Zia, when the accusations were withdrawn. After his release from prison in 1978, Wali Khan decisively downplayed his Pakhtun nationalism.

The Afghan War from 1979 to 1989, between the USSR and those it supported on the one hand and the Mujahideen on the other hand, revived the Pakistani fears of an eventual revival of Pakhtun irredentism as a result of the massive influx of refugees. Between 1979 and 1981, 2.4 million Afghans settled in the NWFP, which now had 16 million inhabitants, as compared to Afghanistan’s 14 million. However, Islamabad was not under the threat of a Pakhtun mobilization, and again there were good socioeconomic reasons for this. The NWFP saw its economic situation improving from the end of the 1970s. The Pakhtuns joined the army and the bureaucracy in great numbers and those who did so came primarily from those districts that had traditionally been strongholds of the Pakhtunistan movement. Secondly, after Punjab, it was the NWFP that profited most from the rural exodus towards Karachi and the emigration to the Gulf countries: the Pakhtuns represented 35 per cent of the Pakistanis who went abroad between 1976 and 1981. For all these reasons, the ANP of Wali Khan showed some solidarity with Zia (during the Movement for the Restoration of Democracy [MRD] of 1981, for example). The Pakhtun leaders who were still exiled in Afghanistan returned to Pakistan in 1986.

The process of democratization that began in 1988 did not result in the revival of Pakhtun nationalism. The collaboration between Pakhtun notables and the national elite remained the rule at the moment of the elections to the provincial assembly. After the 1988 elections the ANP made an unprecedented alliance with the PPP, and then in 1990 formed part of a coalition government led by the Muslim League.

Two interrelated conclusions may be drawn from the comparison between India and Pakistan in terms of nation-building and nationalism.

So far as the nation-building process is concerned, the Indian pattern relies on an accommodating linguistic federalism reflected in the official multilingualism already established in 1950 and the creation of linguistic states as early as the 1950s. India continued to create new states in order to defuse centrifugal forces after 1990: in 2000 Uttaranchal was carved out of Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh out of Madhya Pradesh, and Jharkhand out of Bihar. By contrast, though it designed official regions according to linguistic criteria, the Pakistani State remained highly centralized and suspicious vis-à-vis the provinces to which it gave little autonomy until the 2010 18th amendment. State governments were repeatedly dismissed by the centre and their prerogatives limited, something that occurred only occasionally in India during the third term of Indira Gandhi—or more generally in relation to Jammu and Kashmir. As a result, whereas New Delhi has been able to defuse ethno-nationalist separatisms—except in a few cases such as Kashmir, Nagaland and Assam—Islamabad has radicalized the centrifugal forces it wanted to suppress. These movements either succeeded in creating a new nation state—like Bangladesh in 1971—or developed resilient guerrillas—as in Balochistan, where separatist groups have once again been active since the late 1990s, still in reaction to the exploitation of the region’s resources by outsiders from Punjab and Karachi.

The second conclusion one can draw from the India/Pakistan comparison concerns the roots and trajectories of different forms of nationalism. Certainly, ideological motivations play a key part in most of the nationalist movements mentioned above. This is why the term ‘schools of thought’ has been used so often. Indian activists belonging to the Gandhian, Nehruvian, and Hindu nationalist traditions did refer to competing world views. However, South African trajectories of nationalism show that one cannot ignore the political and socioeconomic dimensions of this ‘ism’. Ideologues are also political entrepreneurs exercising cultural identities in order to mobilize supporters and voters. The Muslim League leaders were a case in point in the 1940s when they launched the Pakistan movement in order to get a separate State to administer, and the BJP has become an adept at manipulating Hindu symbols of identity for electoral gain. Socioeconomic factors are also prominent at times: ethnic groups may become nationalist—and ‘discover’ (that is, construct) a separate political identity—because they suffer from socioeconomic discrimination. Interestingly, this state of affairs was more prominent in Pakistan, largely because of the centralization and punjabization of the State, which caused a lot of resentment.

The political and socioeconomic dimensions of nationalism help explain its varying forms, but this cannot be divorced from the previous variable, namely, the degree of centralization of the State. The militancy of the Mohajir, Sindhi, and even Pakhtun leaders varied according to their access to state power, which had much to do with the absence or resurgence of federalism. Bengali separatism derived largely from the excessive centralization of the State and Baloch nationalism really crystallized in reaction to the reduction of provincial autonomy granted by Islamabad. Atul Kohli argues that in contrast to India, Pakistan cannot accommodate centrifugal movements (as in Tamil Nadu and Punjab in India) because it does not have a federal framework and the democratic culture to do so. 33 These two characteristics enable—or oblige—India to make concessions in such a way that eventually ethnic movements recede; hence the metaphor of the inverted ‘U’ curve that Kohli applies to movements such as that of the Tamils asking for a Dravidistan in the 1940s–1960s and the Sikhs demanding a separate Khalistan in the 1980s and then contenting themselves with more autonomy. One could object that in Pakistan, too, some ethnic movements followed the shape of an inverted ‘U’ curve: in the NWFP the tensions were much less in 1990 than in the 1970s. However, this may not be because the state granted the province more autonomy but rather because of the co-option of local leaders and economic development that led to the formation of a bourgeoisie.

1. This typology draws inspiration from the one established by G. Pandey (1990) The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India , Delhi .

2. I have borrowed this definition of Hindu traditionalism from B. Graham (1990) Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics , Cambridge .

3. For more details, see C. Jaffrelot (2004) ‘Composite Culture is not Multiculturalism: A Study of the Indian Constituent Assembly Debates’, in A. Varshney (ed.) India and the Politics of Developing Countries: Essays in Memory of Myron Weiner , New Delhi .

4. See J. Nehru (1946, 1989) The Discovery of India , New Delhi, 50ff .

5. S. Gopal (1984) Jawaharlal Nehru , London, 3, l72 .

Constituent Assembly Debates [hereafter CAD] (1989) New Delhi, Lok Sabha Secretariat, I, 547.

7. G. Austin (1972) The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation , Bombay, 297.

8. Austin, The Indian Constitution , 285.

CAD , vol. IX, 1,323.

Such was, for example, the case of N. G. Ranga. CAD , VII. 351—debate of 9 November 1948.

Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru , 262.

12. Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru , 373. However, he let his worries be known to the provincial heads of government. Letter dated 24 December 1954, in G. Parthasarathi (ed.) (1988) Jawaharlal Nehru: Letters to Chief Ministers vol. 4 (1951–1957), Delhi , 116. See also the letters of 20 May 1955 (p. 181) and 2 August 1959 (p. 224).

13. B. D. Graham (1990) Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics: The Origins and Development of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh , Cambridge, 113 ff.

Hindu nationalists translate ‘indigenous peoples’ as vanavasi , literally, ‘those who live in the forest’ instead of the more commonly used term throughout India, adivasi , in other words, ‘those who were there first’, because from their very ideological standpoint the initial inhabitants of the country were ‘Aryans’ and not the aboriginals, driven away or conquered by Aryan invasions, from which the tribes today descend.

15. C. Jaffrelot (2001) ‘The Vishva Hindu Parishad: A Nationalist but Mimetic Attempt at Federating the Hindu Sects’, in V. Dalmia , A. Malinar , and M. Christof (eds.) Charisma and Canon: Essays on the Religious History of the Indian Subcontinent , Delhi .

16. For more details, see C. Jaffrelot (ed.) (2005) The Sangh Parivar: A Reader , Delhi .

17. A. Jalal (1990) The State of the Martial Rule , Cambridge, 280 .

The sect of the Ahmadis was founded in 1889 by Mirza Ghulam Ahmed. He is venerated equal to the Prophet by the members of the community and this heresy very early drove the most orthodox guardians of Islamic law to demand that the Ahmadis should not be recognized as Muslims.

19. Cited in T. Amin (1993) Ethno-National Movements of Pakistan: Domestic and International Factors? , Islamabad, 171 .

20. L. Binder (1961) Religion and Politics in Pakistan , Berkeley, CA, 205 .

21. K. B. Sayeed (1967) The Political System of Pakistan , Boston, MA, 132 .

22. F. Ahmed (1998) Ethnicity and Politics in Pakistan , Karachi, 95–7 .

23. S. P. Cohen (1987) ‘State Building in Pakistan’, in A. Bannazizi and M.Weiner (eds.) The State, Religion and Ethnic Politics: Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan , Lahore, 318 . They represented about 55 per cent of the administration (C. H. Kennedy [1987] Bureaucracy in Pakistan , Karachi, 194).

24. M. Rashiduzzaman (1982) ‘East-West Conflicts in Pakistan: Bengali Regionalism, 1947–1970’, in A. J. Wilson and D. Dalton (eds.) The States of South Asia: Problems of National Integration , London, 117 .

25. A. Jajal (1995) Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia , Cambridge .

26. C. H. Kennedy (1991) ‘The Politics of Ethnicity in Sindh’, Asian Survey , 31, no. 10 (October), 938–55 .

27. S. P. Cohen (1998) The Pakistan Army , Karachi, 44 .

The four Punjabi judges considered he was guilty whereas all the others, who came from other provinces, were in favour of acquitting him (O. Noman [1992] Pakistan: Political and Economic History since 1947 , London, 193).

29. J. Rehman (1994) ‘Self-Determination, State-Building and the Mohajirs: An International Legal Perspective of the Role of the Indian Muslim Refugees in the Constitutional Development of Pakistan’, Contemporary South Asia , 3, no. 2, 122–3 .

Interview in India Today , 15 July 1995, 42.

31. K. B. Sayeed (1980) Politics in Pakistan: The Nature and Direction of Change , New York . See ch. 6 entitled ‘Pakistan’s Central Government versus Balochi and Pashtun Aspirations’, 113–38.

Cohen, The Pakistan Army , 44.

33. A. Kohli (1997) ‘Can Democracies Accommodate Ethnic Nationalism? The Rise and Decline of Self-Determination Movements in India’, Journal of Asian Studies , 56, no. 2 (May), 325–44 .

Suggested Further Reading

Ahmed, F. ( 1998 ) Ethnicity and Politics in Pakistan , Karachi and Oxford.

Austin, G. ( 1972 ) The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation , Bombay.

Brass, P. ( 1974 ) Language, Religion and Politics in North India , Cambridge.

Cohen, S. ( 2005 ) The Idea of Pakistan , Lahore.

Gandhi, M. K. ( 1922 ) India Home Rule , Madras.

Gould, W. ( 2004 ) Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late Colonial India , Cambridge.

Graham, B. ( 1990 ) Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics , Cambridge.

Hardy, P. ( 1972 ) The Muslims of British India , Cambridge.

Google Scholar

Google Preview

Jaffrelot, C. ( 1996 ) Hindu Nationalism and Indian Politics , London.

Jaffrelot, C. (ed.) ( 2004 ) Pakistan, Nationalism without a Nation? , London and New York.

Khilnani, J. (2004) The Idea of India , Delhi.

Nehru, J. (1945, 1985 ) The Discovery of India , Delhi.

Pandey, G. ( 1990 ) The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India , Delhi.

Rahman, T. ( 1998 ) Language and Politics in Pakistan , Karachi.

Robinson, F. ( 1975 ) Separatism among Indian Muslims: The Politics of the United Provinces Muslims, 1860–1923 , Cambridge.

Sisson, R. and Wolpert, S. (eds.) ( 1988 ) Congress and Indian Nationalism—The Pre-Independence Phase , Delhi.

Zavos, J. ( 2000 ) The Emergence of Hindu Nationalism in India , Delhi.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Nations and Nationalism: Ancient or Modern?

Cite this chapter.

• Oliver Zimmer  

Part of the book series: Studies in European History ((SEURH))

403 Accesses

Why start this book with a chapter on theories and concepts? The question is worth posing. While genuine progress in the study of nationalism will always result from innovative historical research, it is nevertheless important that historians continue to engage with the theoretical frameworks available. Not because these models provide answers to key questions. Most historians will always remain highly sceptical of general theories of nationalism, and a spate of innovative recent case studies has increased rather than removed existing doubts regarding their general applicability. As this and subsequent chapters will show, there is now a movement away from the grand theories of nationalism (to which all students in the field remain indebted) and towards more specific conceptual debates and controversies. Even so, as ideal types, concepts and theories offer a foil of comparison and contrast that can help facilitate communication between scholars working in different chronological and geographical areas.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

Unable to display preview.  Download preview PDF.

Select Bibliography

*Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism , new edn (London/New York: Verso, 1991).

Google Scholar  

Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London/New York: Verso, 1996 [1974]).

Urs Altermatt, Katholizismus und Moderne. Zur Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der Schweizer Katholiken im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Zürich: Benziger, 1989).

F. M. Barnard, J. G. Herder on Social and Political Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1969).

David A. Bell, The Cult of the Nation in France: Inventing Nationalism , 1680–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas (London: Hogarth Press, 1976).

Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current: Essay in the History of Ideas , ed. Henry Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979).

T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe , 1660–1789 (Oxford University Press, 2002).

*John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State , 2nd edn (Manchester University Press, 1993).

Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1690–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation , 1707–1837 (London: Vintage, 1996).

Karl W. Deutsch and William J. Foltz (eds), Nation-Building (New York: Atherton Press, 1966).

Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964).

*Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).

Ernest Gellner, Culture, Identity, and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1987).

*Ernest Gellner, ‘Reply (to Anthony D. Smith): Do Nations Have Navels?’, Nations and Nationalism , 2/3 (1996), pp. 366–7.

Article   Google Scholar  

*Philipp Gorski, ‘The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism’, American Journal of Sociology , 105/5 (March 2000), pp. 1428–68.

*Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

*Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London: Abacus, 1994 [1962]).

*Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality , 2nd edn (Cambridge University Press, 1992).

Miroslav Hroch, Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000 [1985]).

John Hutchinson, The Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism: The Gaelic Revival and the Creation of the Irish Nation State (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987).

*Elie Kedourie, Nationalism , 4th edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993 [1960]).

Dieter Langewiesche, Nation, Nationalismus und Nationalstaat in Deutschland und Europa (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000).

John Plamenatz, ‘Two Types of Nationalism’, in Eugene Kamenka (ed.), Nationalism: The Nature and Evolution of an Idea (London: Edward Arnold, 1976), pp. 23–36.

H. M. Scott (ed.), Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1990).

Anthony D. Smith, ‘Neo-Classicist and Romantic Elements in the Emergence of Nationalist Conceptions’, in A. D. Smith (ed.), Nationalist Movements (London: Macmillan — now Palgrave Macmillan, 1976).

Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Revival in the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 1981).

Anthony D. Smith, Theories of Nationalism , 2nd edn (London: Duckworth, 1983).

*Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

*Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991).

Anthony D. Smith, ‘Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations’, Nations and Nationalism , 1 (March 1995), pp. 3–24.

Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton University Press, 1995).

Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 1995).

Oliver Zimmer, A Contested Nation: History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland , 1761–1891 (Cambridge University Press, 2003).

Download references

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Copyright information

© 2003 Oliver Zimmer

About this chapter

Zimmer, O. (2003). Nations and Nationalism: Ancient or Modern?. In: Nationalism in Europe, 1890–1940. Studies in European History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-4388-0_2

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-4388-0_2

Publisher Name : Palgrave, London

Print ISBN : 978-0-333-94720-3

Online ISBN : 978-1-4039-4388-0

eBook Packages : Palgrave History Collection History (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

a journal of research & art

• Contributors
• How to Cite EuropeNow
• Special Features
• Special Series
• Call for Applications: EuropeNow Editorial Committee 
• Current Issue
• Past Issues
• Editor’s Pick
• COVID-19 Series
• Ukraine Series
• Sponsored Research
• The Borders Project
• Favorite Books in Translation
• Campus Spotlights
• Campus Dispatches
• Campus Book Reviews
• Campus Interviews
• Special Campus Series
• Campus Round-Up
• Assessments & Lesson Plans
• Student Contributions
• CES-Sponsored Student Research
• Digital Classroom

Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Others Fall Apart

by Andreas Wimmer. 2018. Princeton University Press

Key words: nation-building, ethnic diversity, state capacity Summary by Margaux Dandrifosse – IBEI

Micro-summary: Successful nation-building happens due to pre-existing inclusive political institutions and national identification.

Summary: In this book, the author investigates the puzzle of why certain ethnically diverse countries were able to create solid and resilient nation-states while others have broken down. To do so, he examines the underlying factors behind a successful nation-building in ethnically diverse societies.

This book sits within the political science literature and makes a significant contribution to the scholarships on nationalism and ethnic conflict. The author finds little support for the theories according to which democratization, economic development, or the absence of a colonial experience lead to nation-building. Rather, he argues that states in which there already exists inclusive political institutions and national identification are more likely to democratize, feature good governance and economic growth, and less likely to experience ethnic polarization or civil wars. Accordingly, the main argument presented is that successful nation-building occurs in states which have, over generations, built inclusive institutions in which minorities and majorities are equally represented through multi-ethnic coalitions. This is achieved when 1) political integration and alliances run throughout the whole territory and transcend ethnic divisions and 2) when identification with the national institutions reaches across all ethnic groups and is stronger than particular ethnic, social, or class identities.

Nation-building occurs through three long-term historical mechanisms. First, when a state has developed alongside large networks of civil society organizations, such organizations spread throughout the territory and across groups. They gather individuals around interests, rather than ethnicity, enabling the state to mobilize political coalitions and leaders across different ethnic groups. This argument is demonstrated by comparing the successful historical case of Switzerland to Belgium. Second, states which are able to provide public goods efficiently and equally across regions and groups acquire cross-ethnic legitimacy, thereby fostering national ownership and identification. To illustrate this process, the effective and equalitarian public goods provision in Botswana is compared to clan-based resources allocation in Somalia. Third, states which have historically promoted a shared nationwide language reduce the costs of transcending ethnic boundaries, and fuel equal political opportunities, multi-ethnic alliances, and national identification. This is exemplified by looking at the Chinese common written language as compared to linguistically fragmented Russia. Lastly, the author claims that the capacity of states to provide public goods equally and promote a national language, and thereby achieve successful nation-building, largely depends on the degree of centralisation of the pre-colonial state, directly related to its bureaucratic quality. The book concludes by providing policy-recommendations. It emphasizes the inadequacy of Western interventionism aimed at democratization and regime change to build national cohesion in foreign countries. Rather, it advocates long-term capacity building of national institutions and state ownership of public goods provision.

Follow-up: The book has been critically reviewed by Vera Tolz and Eliot Green, which has given rise to a lively debate with the author, mainly over the selection of case studies. Moreover, Andreas Wimmer has published a short article in 2019 “”Why Nationalism Works: And Why It Isn’t Going Away”. It builds on the argument of this book to claim that nationalism is a positive force in societies which have historically established inclusive institutions, while it is related to conflicts in countries with exclusionary power centers. In 2021, the author has also participated in an innovative article on the possibilities to quantitatively measure national and ethnic identity.

Relevance for the SECUREU Project: Wimmer’s argument provides a conceptual lens to analyze how the EU’s performance in nation-building may have influenced the contemporary rise of xenophobia and the securitization of minorities in Europe. Are those phenomena resulting from the failure of European integration to build inclusive political institutions and civil society organizations, equally provide public goods, and promote language homogeneity? Moreover, it points out to the EU’s North-South and West-East inequalities as potential illustrations of the failure of European nation-building and as an important basis to understand the securitization of minorities. Lastly, it suggests that the differences in xenophobia, right-wing populism, and minorities’ securitization among EU member-states may be explained by the countries’ varying degrees of success in building inclusive institutions.

© 2016-2024 EuropeNow. All Rights Reserved.

• Increase Font Size

18 Nation, nationality and nation building in India

Chandan Kumar Sharma

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1.  Introduction: Defining the Concepts

2.  Nation State and Nation Building

3.  Nation and Nation Building in India

4.  Conclusion

5.  Summary

NATION, NATIONALITY AND NATION BUILDING IN INDIA

Introduction: Defining the Concepts

Defining Nation, nationality or nationalism is a complicated exercise. These terms are often used to imply a multiplicity of interrelated phenomena, leading to their ambivalence. One reason for such ambivalence is that they all have the etymological origin in the same Latin word ‘ natio ’ which implies birth or descent.

A dominant view in the past was that to become a nation, a people sharing common race, language, religion, etc must live together in a geographical area. However, this view does not have much currency now. The generally accepted view today holds that rather than sharing attributes like common race, language, religion, etc it is the sentiment of common consciousness that forms the basis of a nation. A nation has a political meaning which is distinct from a nationality. A nationality is transformed into a nation when it organises a state or at least cherishes a common will to live together in a state for the future.

When the territorial boundary of a state is co-terminus with the cultural, linguistic and ethnic division of the people (nation) within it, it becomes a nation state which is different from the state forms, for example, the empires, of the earlier times which constituted more than one, and often several, national groups. The concept of nation state based on the concept of ‘one nation, one state’ became a dominant mode of state forms in the Western Europe. This also subsequently came to form the nation building projects of the newly independent states in various parts of the world. But problems emerged as most of these countries were multi-national in nature, incorporating several nations or groups with near-nation status. Empirical experiences have shown that there rarely exists a country in the modern world where ‘one nation, one state’ model can be observed. On the contrary, one witnesses not only several nations within the territorial boundary of a single state but also a single nation spreading over more than one state. For example, the United Kingdom, Russian Federation, India, the United States of America, etc are  examples of multi-national states while the Kurds, the Tamils, the Hazaras, etc are examples of trans-state nations implying they are spread over more than one state.

Historian Eric Hobsbawm writes that ‘nations’, contrary to popular belief, are not as old as history. “The modern sense of the word is no longer than the eighteenth century…” (1990: 3). He admits that what characteristics classify a group of human beings as a ‘nation’ is difficult to answer (ibid: 5). Nevertheless, he points out that attempts have been made to establish objective criteria for defining a ‘nation’ based “on single criteria such as language or ethnicity, or a combination of criteria such as language, common territory, common history, cultural traits or whatever else.” But all such objective definitions have failed because “only some members of the large class of entities which fit such definitions can at any time be described as ‘nations’” though exceptions are there. Hobsbawm also shows that “the criteria used for this purpose – language, ethnicity or whatever – are themselves fuzzy, shifting and ambiguous” (ibid: 6).

Sociologist T.K. Oommen offers what he calls, “some tentative definitional proposals of a nation/nationality, state/citizenship and ethnic/ethnicity” (1997: 19). In his definition the “nation is a territorial entity to which the nationals have an emotional attachment and in which they invest a moral meaning; it is a homeland – ancestral or adopted”.(ibid) The state, on the other hand, “is a legally constituted institution, which provides its residents with protection from internal insecurity and external aggression” (ibid). Making the distinction between the state and nation, he says that while territory is common to both, “there is a crucial difference between national territory and the state territory; the former is a moral, and the latter a legal entity…If the state and the nation are coterminous, we have a nation-state. But most states today are multi-national, poly-ethnic, or a combination of the two” (ibid).

He then goes on to say that for the sustenance of a nation, “the people should be in a position to communicate with one another, that is, they should have a common language…(however,) it is not the case that all those who communicate in the same language necessarily make a nation…It  is the combination, the fusion of territory and language, that makes a nation; a nation is a community in communication in its homeland” (ibid). Thus, according to Oommen, “a common homeland and a common language (ancestral or adopted) are the critical minimum markers of a nation and national identity” (ibid: 20). On the other hand, Oommen defines nationality as “the collective identity that the people of a nation acquire by identifying with the nation” (1997: 19). This view equates nationality with citizenship. However, nationality is often used as a synonym for ethnicity. In this sense, various cultural groups constituting a nation are described as nationalities.

Anthony D. Smith defines nation as “named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths, and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members” (1991: 14). However, Smith’s definition of nation is criticized on the ground that it does not distinguish a nation from an ethnic group. Barrington points out that the idea of territory is central to all definitions of nation and is the distinguishing feature between nation and other social categories such as an ethnic group (Barrington 1997: 712). According to Barrington, nations are groups of people linked by unifying traits (myths, values, symbols, etc) and the desire to control a territory that is thought of as group’s national homeland. It is not necessary that they actually control any such territory (ibid: 713). He further points out that the word ‘nation’ is often mistakenly used as synonyms with ‘ethnic group’ or ‘ethnicity’. However, although a nation can evolve from an ethnic group it is more than an ethnic group because of its belief in its right to territorial control. More importantly, nations need not be based on certain ethnic identity. For example, the American nation is not based on any shared ethnic identity although the Americans share certain cultural features such as origin myths and symbols and language (ibid).

Emphasizing the difficulty in offering a stable definition of nation, historian Prasenjit Duara writes, “The instability of the concept of the nation is such that we are unable to even say whether it is in ascendancy or in decline” (1996: 4). The definitional ambiguities associated with the term ‘nation’ have its own impact on the conceptualization of the term ‘nationalism’. It is  pointed out that the definitions of nationalism reveal more about the definers than about the defined (Aloysius 2000 [1997]: 11). Under such a situation, “to expect a consensus on contested political realities or a single, overarching paradigm explanatory of all manifestations of the national phenomena is illusory, at least for the time being” (ibid: 14).

Renowned theorist of nationalism Benedict Anderson (1995 [1983]) contends that nationality, nation-ness as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind (ibid: 13). They are “notoriously difficult to define, let alone analyze” (ibid: 126). He argues that a nation is an act of imagination (ibid: 15) by underlining the fact that nations were not the determinate products of some given sociological conditions like language or race or religion— they had been imagined into existence. He also describes some of the major institutional forms through which this imagined community comes to acquire concrete shape. He further emphasizes that the “twentieth-century nationalisms and nation states have a profoundly modular character” (ibid: 123). Historical experience of nationalism in the west provided all subsequent nationalisms with a set of modular forms from which nationalist elites in Asia and Africa had chosen the ones they liked.

Etienne Balibar writes that he and Immanuel Wallerstein consider, “‘nation’ and ‘people’ as historical constructs, by means of which current institutions and antagonisms can be projected into the past to confer a relative stability on the communities on which the sense of individual ‘identity’ depends.”(Balibar and Wallerstein 1998: 10) According to them,  No nation, that is, no national state, has an ethnic basis, which means that nationalism cannot be defined as an ethnocentrism except precisely in the sense of the product of a fictive ethnicity. To reason any other way would be to forget that ‘peoples’ do not exist naturally…either by virtue of their ancestry, a community of culture or pre-existing interests. But they have to institute in real (and therefore in historical) time their imaginary unity against other possible unities (ibid: 49).

Balibar further writes that the term ‘fiction’ should not be taken in the sense of a pure and simple illusion without historical effects. As he contends,  No nation possesses an ethnic base naturally, but as social formations are nationalized, the populations included within them, divided up among them or dominated by them are ethnicized— that is represented in the past or in the future as if they formed a natural community, possessing of itself an identity of origins, culture and interests which transcends individuals and social conditions (ibid: 96).

According to Social anthropologist and political philosopher Ernest Gellner, “Nationalism is primarily a political principle,” Gellner emphasizes, “which holds that the political and the national units should be congruent.” (1983: 1). He further writes, “…nations, like states, are a contingency, and not a universal necessity…” (1983: 6). Explaining the relationship between ‘nationality’ (or ‘ethnicity’) and ‘nationalism’, Gellner has this to say,  Ethnicity or ‘nationality’ is simply the name for the condition which prevails when many of these boundaries converge and overlap, so that the boundaries of conversation, easy commensality, shared pastimes, etc., are the same, and when the community of the people delimited by these boundaries is endowed with an ethnonym, and is suffused with powerful feelings; ethnicity becomes ‘political’. It gives rise to ‘nationalism’, when the ‘ethnic’ group defined by these overlapping cultural boundaries is not merely acutely conscious of its own existence, but also imbued with the conviction that the ethnic boundary ought also to be a political one. The requirement is that the boundaries of ethnicity should also be the boundaries of the political unit, and, above all, that the rulers within that unit should be of the same ethnicity as the ruled (1994: 35).

In the ‘Preface’ to his Ethnicity and Nationalism (1991), Political theorist Paul Brass states that “ethnicity and nationalism are not ‘givens’, but are social and political constructions” (Ibid: 8). They are created by the elites of ethnic groups with the object of “protecting their well-being or existence or to gain political and economic advantage for their groups as well as themselves” (Ibid: 8). He further argues that ethnicity and nationalism are modern phenomena inseparably connected with the activities of the modern centralizing state arising out of specific types of  interactions between the leadership of centralizing states and elites from non-dominant ethnic groups, especially but not exclusively on the peripheries of those states” (Ibid: 8-9).

Brass argues that when an ethnic group demands “a major say for the group in the political system as a whole or control over a piece of territory within the country, or they demand a country of their own with full sovereignty” with an aspiration to “national status and recognition” and achieves “any one of these goals either within an existing state or in a state of its own” it becomes “a nationality or a nation” (1991: 20). From this viewpoint, a nation “may be seen as a particular type of ethnic community, or, rather, as an ethnic community politicized, with recognised group rights in the political system” (ibid). It follows from this that “nations may be created by the transformation of an ethnic group in a multiethnic state into a self-conscious political entity or by the amalgamation of diverse groups and the formation of an inter-ethnic, composite or homogeneous national culture through the agency of the modern state” (ibid).

Nation State and Nation Building

When modern nation states came into being especially in Western Europe, the ethnic identities of many of the constituent groups within the nation states were lying dormant so much so that their ‘distinct’ identities were almost ignored. The concept of the nation state subscribed to a definition of nation that accords a central place to the idea of state in which the term ‘nation’ was held synonymous with the most dominant group within the so-called nation state. The idea working behind this concept of nation was that the smaller or marginal communities living within a particular nation state in course of time would assimilate with the dominant group or else over a period of time would move toward the formation of their own nation states.

It is this perception that has inspired the dominant group within the nation state to assimilate the other smaller constituents in the name of the nation-building exercise. In some cases, this exercise achieved relative success depending on the “effectiveness of their projects of cultural standardization” (Baruah 1999: 4). But in most of the cases this project faced serious problems. The dominant groups in these cases carried out their agenda of nation construction through the exercise of their influence in the economic, political, cultural, and demographic spheres without taking into consideration the ethos and aspirations of the smaller communities. The concept of nation-building thus comes to be metaphorically described by McCloskey as a “handsome neo- classical building in which political prisoners scream in the basement” (cited in Baruah 1999: 1) which treats people, as Bauer puts, as “lifeless bricks, to be moved by some master builder”(Ibid: 1).

At this stage, it is worthwhile to take note of Wallerstein’s observation on the phenomenon of nation-building. Addressing the question as to why should the establishment of any particular sovereign state within the interstate system create a corresponding ‘nation’, ‘a people’, he states that this happens as states in this system have problems of cohesion as they often face threat of both internal disintegration and external aggression. The creation of a ‘national’ sentiment reduces such a threat (Balibar and Wal1erstein 1998: 81). He writes, “(T)he government in power has an interest in promoting the sentiment, as do all sorts of subgroups within the state. Any group who sees advantage in using the state’s legal powers to advance its interests against groups outside the state or in any sub-region of the state has an interest in promoting nationalist sentiment as a legitimation of its claims. States furthermore have an interest in administrative uniformity that increases the efficacy of their policies. Nationalism is the expression, the promoter and the consequence of such state-level uniformities”(ibid: 2).

The attempt at creating such uniformities, however, leads to politico-economic and cultural suppression and marginalization of the smaller nationalities within these states. This eventually reinforces a sense of separate identity among the latter vis-à-vis the dominant community/communities as being deprived and repressed. In an attempt to politically mobilize this new identity consciousness, against the hegemonic designs of the centralizing state, the elites of the smaller nationalities take recourse to a project of cultural hegemony rooted in their history— partly real, but largely imagined — much after the model of the modern state. It is through this process that the nationality movements emerge in the modern nation state. Led by their elites, these movements mobilize themselves asking for more political, economic, and cultural rights from the state. The latter naturally attempts to subvert the aspirations of the smaller groups in order to maintain its existing status. This intensifies the political expression of the smaller groups even farther. However, the struggle of a nationality group demanding more rights and privileges for itself and its simultaneous interaction with the State, does not necessarily lead to  the consolidation of its identity, it also often leads to the growth of fissiparous tendencies underscoring the existence of cleavages within it.

Nation and Nation Building in India

It has been pointed out that the post-independence Indian state despite its multi-ethnic character has been engaged in a project of nation building which subscribes to the western notions of nation-state in which, ideally speaking, language, religion, and political sovereignty have co-terminus boundaries. Dwelling on the overall nation-building experience in India and other parts of South Asia, Phadnis and Ganguly write, “post colonial nation-building approaches (in the region) focused almost exclusively on creating a unified ‘national identity’ based around either common political values and citizenship or a putative majoritarian ‘ethnic’ identity. The aim of both approaches, on the whole, has been to produce a pulverized and uniform sense of national identity to coincide with the state boundaries that seldom reflect ethnic divisions on the ground. This type of outlook towards nation-building, as promoted vigorously by the modernization school of thought, refused to accept the notion that states incorporating more than one ‘ethnic nation’ could be both stable and harmonious” (2001: 13).

Political scientist Ishtiaq Ahmed commenting on the nation-building enterprise in the South Asian elites argues, “(T)he elites which took over power at the time of British withdrawal were compelled by a host of internal and external pressures to reduce or eliminate the incongruence between state and society…the nation-building process in all…(the) countries have been confronted by serious separatist challenge. Each case of separatism constitutes a unique specimen of state-society contradiction…” (1996: 15).

This nation-building exercise that the post-independence Indian state adopted with the objective of the construction of a pan-Indian identity stood in the way of the fulfilment of economic, political, and cultural aspirations of various ethnic groups located within its territory fuelling protest movements among them. As Krishna says, “(W)henever state elites in the region (South Asia) have attempted to ride roughshod over the rights and aspirations of so-called peripheral minorities (religious, linguistic, regional, or other), the result has been either a violent partition/secession or that emergence of ethnonationalist movements that have attempted to achieve those ends.” (Ibid: 13-14).

This point finds support in other scholars too. Ghose and Chakrabarti, for example, point out that despite the recognition of the fact that the future survival of the nation-state in India would depend on acceptance of the plurality of nationalities, there continued to be a strong strain of thought that sought to do away with group identities in the name of national integration generating a lot of resistance in areas like the northeastern region of the country (cited in Misra 2000: 155).

On the other hand, these groups are also not homogenous identities. They are often constituted by a number of other smaller ethnic configurations living in geo-social proximity. This process of the formation of a crystallized ethnic identity by incorporating such smaller groups is still operative in several parts of India, especially its north-eastern region. It is to be recognized that prior to the establishment of the colonial rule, India did not exist as an integrated politico-territorial entity. There existed various nationality groups with different, if not conflicting, territorial and political loyalties. Quite a few of them emerged simultaneously with the pan-Indian identity and some even predated it. Some of these nationalities were engaged in their own project of cultural hegemony (Baruah 1999: 8).

The colonial regime, besides making India into an integrated politico-territorial entity, also created new regional politico-territorial units incorporating willy-nilly more than one, in most cases several, such nationalities. This integration, however, was impelled by the administrative and economic motives with the total exclusion of attempts to bind the territory with the feelings and emotions of nationalism. On the contrary, in order to continue its exploitation unabated, the colonial administration took full recourse to the policy of ‘divide and rule’, thereby also hindering the ongoing process of nationality formation among the above-mentioned nationality groups.

But colonial exploitation and repression, so universal throughout the British India, had instilled in various communities within it a common sense of bondage, as being deprived and marginalized. This in turn inspired them to fight united against the colonial regime. The fact that India long existed as a cultural and social entity, despite all its internal variations, helped. Although, the constitution of leadership of the Indian freedom movement was not exactly all Indian in character in that it did not have any noteworthy representation from the smaller or peripheral communities, not much opposition was raised against the former in view of the ultimate objective of the movement.

Eric Hobsbawm (1990: 164), thus, very aptly describes India as a polity that grew out of anti-colonial movement. It is in the wake of this movement that the Indian nationalist leadership woke up to the idea of one Indian nation by incorporating the various ethnic and linguistic entities within the colonial state. The Indian nationalist leadership tried to carry out this objective after independence in the name of the policy of nation-building, through its own project of cultural hegemony. However, some scholars point out that treating the Indian response to the British colonial rule under the unified title of the nationalist movement is nothing but a rarefied reading of the movement which is insensitive to the regional variations and is ideological in intent and character (Aloysius 1999: 6).

Regional Nationalist Identities and Linguistic States

Nevertheless, almost simultaneously to the independence of the country, demands came from various nationalities from its regions for a greater recognition of their identity within the new dispensation of the state. Language became the mainstay of this new identity aspiration. It posed a new challenge to the nation building exercise of the recently-independent Indian state.

The colonial state created territorial units that were not based on any obvious principle, except administrative convenience, and the quite accidental timing of conquests (Kaviraj 1999: 224). This practice gave, “…sub-colonial advantages for some linguistic groups, simply because those were the first to receive colonial education and formed the natural reservoir for personnel for colonial administrative expansion…Resentment against this kind of sub-colonial dominance was bound to find expression after independence…(M)ovements for regional autonomy began soon after independence with the demand for the recognition of an Andhra state (Ibid: 224-5).

The post-independence Indian State was initially unsympathetic to the demand for statehood based on distinct linguistic identity. Jawaharlal Nehru opposed such a scenario for fear of creating inward-looking states that would imperil the consolidation of Indian nationhood, and even encourage separatism (Tillin 2013). Political scientist Sudipta Kaviraj also holds that Nehru’s opposition to the linguistic states was due to the “anxiety that more homogeneous regional units might lead to the weakening of the political imagination of the Indian nation” (Kaviraj 1999: 225).

However, in the face of pressing demands, the States Reorganization Commission (1956), recommended the reorganization of states on linguistic lines and a number of new states were created staring with the creation of a separate Andhra state from the erstwhile Madras state as a result of a very strong campaign launched in the Andhra region in the early 1950s for the reorganisation of state boundaries around linguistic communities – rather than administrative histories. In the subsequent years, more linguistic states were created in south and west India. States were created for speakers of Kannada (present-day Karnataka), Malayalam (Kerala), Marathi (Maharashtra) and Gujarati (Gujarat); and later Punjab and Haryana were divided too (although religion, as well as language – Punjabi and Hindi – was at stake in the latter instance) (Tillin 2013).

Although the cultural foundation of India’s regionally based sub-nationalism was the languages of the region, the problem with the north-east region of the country arises from the fact that the region has so many linguistic groups that it is not realistically possible to reorganize it on linguistic lines. Assam, the home of the largest linguistic community in the region, viz., the Assamese, was for long a separate British province which incorporated many areas like the districts of Naga Hills (present Nagaland), Khasi and Jaintia Hills (present Meghalaya), and Lushai Hills (present Mizoram). These areas, after independence, have been made into separate provinces not on the basis of the linguistic principle. Rather, the guiding principle(s), singularly or collectively, that led to the making of these provinces were religion, race, geographical and physical distinctiveness, etc. beginning with the formation of separate province of Nagaland in 1963. Subsequently, states of Meghalaya and Mizoram were also created.

However, the demands for separate states from different regions did not stop. Creation of Jharkhand (bifurcating Bihar), Uttarakhand (from Uttar Pradesh) and Chhattisgarh (from Madhya Pradesh) in the year 2000 was in response to such demands. Statehood demands for Vidarbha (from Maharashtra), Budelkhand (from Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh) have been continuing for quite long. There has been demand for further division of Uttar Pradesh. Statehood demands for separate Gorkhaland (bifurcating West Bengal), Bodoland (from Assam), etc also have been there for quite some time now. A number of the statehood movements mentioned above, however, moved away from the language-based identity assertion and made regional inequality as the basis of their demand. The most recent example of this is the creation  of the new state of Telangana by bifurcating Andhra Pradesh in 2014 although this demand can be traced back to late 1960s. Further, some scholars argue that such demands for creation of new states have to be understood in the context of the decentralization of political life and economic change in India (Tillin 2013).

Rise in the Politics of Regionalism

Politics of regionalism in India can be traced back to the Dravidian identity assertion in Tamil Nadu. Interestingly, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) of Tamil Nadu at an early stage asserted its aim for an independent state for the Dravidians. Although they dropped this idea afterwards, they vehemently opposed the move of the Central Government to introduce Hindi as the official language of Government of India in 1965 and it was mainly their opposition which prompted the Central government to continue with both Hindi and English as official languages of the Government of India. In April 1974, the DMK government brought in a resolution in the state assembly urging the Centre to accept the Rajamannar Committee

(http://interstatecouncil.nic.in/rajamannar.html) recommendations on state autonomy and amend the Constitution of India to pave the way for a true federal system.

Similarly, the Shiromani Akali in Punjab articulated their political, economic and cultural views in the Anandpur Sahib Resolution in 1973

(http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/countries/india/states/punjab/document/papers/anantpur_sahib_re solution.htm). It clearly underscored that India is a federal and republican geographical entity of different languages, religions and cultures. It stated that in order to safeguard the fundamental rights of the religious and linguistic minorities, to fulfill the demands of the democratic traditions and to pave the way for economic progress, it was imperative that the Indian constitutional infrastructure should be given a real federal shape by redefining the Central and State relations.

Early 1980s witnessed the emergence of some new political parties such as the Telegu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh and Asom Gana Parishad in Assam asserting regional aspirations against the alleged domination of the Central government. Gradually, the country also saw the emergence of political parties like Shiv Sena in Maharashtra founded on anti-immigrant ideology. As Indians from one region have moved in far more greater numbers to another region in the last couple of decades, such anti-immigrant ideology has spread into various other parts of India in recent times posing questions about one Indian identity for all its citizens and the nation  building exercise of the Indian state. As Aloysius puts, Indian “(N)ationalism, instead of giving birth to one national society, seems to have delivered a whole litter of communities divided from one another in terms of language, religion, region and caste” (1997 (2000): 1).

Secessionist Challenges

The regional nationalist assertion in India has not been confined only to the demand for creation of linguistic states or for fulfilment of other regional aspirations within the Indian nation state. The latter has had to face the challenges of secessionism from its various regions. Starting with the Naga insurgency in the northeastern region immediately after the independence, such secessionist movements had spread to other groups in the region such as the Mizos, the Manipuri Meteis, the tribal groups in Tripura and the Assamese. Since the early 1980s, the Khalistani insurgency in the state of Punjab assumed a serious turn. Similarly, separatist movement in Kashmir has been a continuous source of challenge to the Indian nation state. Although, Indian state has been negotiating with these movements by various means, sometimes with success, questions have also been raised about the faultlines that using of some of such means, especially military force and repressive laws, have unfolded.

It is, however, to be noted that the Indian state has tried to address the question of diversity of the country in terms of various constitutional provisions for a number of groups and states. In fact, much before the independence of the country, the leadership of the anti-colonial freedom movement acknowledged its staggering diversity which makes it impossible to imagine India in the frame of the western nation states. Therefore, they adopted an inclusive approach to the future nation building in India which was embedded in the phrase “unity in diversity” emphasizing an underlying unity of the people of India despite the differences in language, culture, history, and so on.

After the independence of the country, the leadership of the freedom movement got this understanding enshrined in various provisions of the constitutions. For example, backward groups and communities within the country have been accorded with various provisions to safeguard their political, cultural and economic interests. While the state of Jammu and Kashmir, a Muslim majority state, was given a special constitutional status under article 370, several states  in the northeastern India, inhabited by a majority of tribal population, have also been given special constitutional status where the traditional customary laws of the tribal groups often get precedence over provisions of the Indian constitution. Similarly, many tribal communities which have not been given separate states have been given special status under the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the constitution. This is how Indian state has accommodated not only regional aspirations but also the aspirations of the minorities and disadvantaged groups.

Despite a more inclusive constitutional mandate, critics point out that the Indian state often shows a tendency to engage in a project of cultural homogenization in the mold of the dominant Hindi-Hindu culture (Jaffrelot 1993; Hansen 1998) seeking to establish a culturally more uniform nation state. Oommen also contends, “the central issues of nation building in India revolve around the persistent tension between the Hindi-speaking twice born Hindus, who define themselves as the norm-setters and value-givers, the cultural mainstream, and a multiplicity of other primordial collectivities occupying the periphery of the system, depending upon their positioning in the socio-cultural space of India (1993: 473).

Such a tendency of privileging one set of language, culture and religion, mainly belonging to the politically and demographically dominant north India, over others pose to marginalize language, culture and religions of other regions as well as minority communities. In fact, within the followers of Hinduism too there are many and serious regional variations in terms of their rituals, customs and food habits. In a multi-cultural, multi-linguistic, multi-religious society like India, such attempts at homogenization have thus generated apprehensions among the communities which are at the receiving end of such homogenization projects. The attempt of the Government of India to introduce Hindi as the official language of India, for example, has faced repeated resistance time and again. The Anti-Hindi agitations of 1965 forced the central government to abandon its efforts to introduce Hindi as the only official language of the country and to continue with English as the other official language.

Further, the Indian Centre is enormously strong. In constitutional terms itself, India is a union of states. The Indian polity was so designed professedly to keep the newly independent nation with a large number of ethnic identities politically/territorially intact. But the power of the Centre vis-à-vis the states kept on growing far exceeding the original constitutional sanction. Such  centralizing tendencies have given rise to rise of politics of regionalism in different parts of India.

Nevertheless, it is to be noted that many of these regional or sub-national articulations and movements, often steered by the interest of the regional elites, have been addressed by the Indian state within the broader framework of the Indian nation state. However, for a long term solution to the conflict between the nation building project of the Indian nation state and the aspirations of smaller nationalities and communities, scholars have argued for a creation of a federal state sensitive to the identities and aspirations of various groups within it. Misra, for example, advocates for “greater decentralization of powers and a radical restructuring of Centre-state relations” (2000: 161) as a solution to the problem.

Sanjib Baruah argues for a shift in the policy of the Indian State from nation building to that of federation building. Referring to the recurrent secessionist movements in the northeastern region of India, he says, “(O)nly a bold new project of genuine federation–building that takes our complex multinational history seriously — and framed as an alternative to nation-building — can become a viable alternative to independentist thought that captures the hearts and minds of so many young people in India’s troubled northeast” (2002: 37). Similar recommendations were made by the Sarkaria Commission (http://interstatecouncil.nic.in/Sarkaria_Commission.html), constituted by the Government of India, which submitted its report on the centre-state relationship in India in 1988. But these recommendations are yet to see implementation. There is no gainsaying that how Indian state negotiates between its concerns about the unity and security of the Indian nation and the rising aspirations of a large number of nationalities within its territorial boundary will largely shape the nature of the Indian nation and nationalism in the times to come.

In the above, we have discussed about the concepts of nation and the other related concepts such as nation state, nationality, nationalism and nation building. A nation is often confused with ethnic group and state. While a people sharing common myths, language, customs, history, religion, etc may constitute an ethnic group, to become a nation it must have an association with a homeland, real or imagined. The state, on the other hand, is a legally constituted institution. While, territory is common to both, there is a crucial difference between national territory and  the state territory in that the former is a moral and the latter a legal entity. When the territorial boundary of a state is co-terminus with the cultural, linguistic and ethnic division of the people (nation) within it, it becomes a nation state. The concept of nation state based on the concept of ‘one nation, one state’ became a dominant mode of state forms in the Western Europe and subsequently came to inform the nation building projects of the newly independent states in various parts of the world including India.

The Indian state is constituted by many groups and nationalities. Some of these preceded and some emerged simultaneous to the Indian nation which grew out of the colonial rule in India. The anti-colonial rule gave rise to the idea of Indian nation and nationalism which went on to inform the nation building exercise of the post-independence Indian state. Although the Indian constitution offers a more inclusive mandate with regard to the Indian nation building, critics argue that the Indian state have been engaged in a project of cultural homogenization in the mold of the dominant culture seeking to establish a culturally more uniform nation state. This has stood in the way of political, economic and cultural aspirations of the smaller nationalities and other minorities prompting different kinds of protest and assertions among them. While the Indian state has achieved some success in addressing some of these issues and concerns, problems remain calling for a more inclusive nation building in India.

• Ahmed , I.      1996 State, Nation and Ethnicity in Contemporary South Asia . Pinter. London.
• Aloysius , G. 1997 (2000) Nationalism Without a Nation in India . Oxford University Press. Delhi
• Anderson , Benedict 1995 (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso. London.
• Balibar , E. and I. Wallerstein 1998     Race, Nation, Class . Verso. London.
• Barrington , Lowell W.  1997 “Nation” and “Nationalism”: The Misuse of Key Concepts in  Political Science. PS: Political Science and Politics. Vol. 30 (4).
• Baruah , Sanjib1997 “Cutting the States to Size”, Seminar, November, No. 459.  1999 India Against Itself: Assam and the Politics of Nationality. Oxford University Press. Delhi  2002    “ India’s Failure in the Northeast ”, The Book Review, Vol. 26 (1), New  Delhi.
• Brass , Paul R. 1991 Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison , Sage Publications, New Delhi.
• Brown , David 1994    The State and Ethnic Politics in Southeast India , Routledge, London.
• Chaube , S. K.     1973     Hill Politics in Northeast India , Orient Longman, Bombay.
• Duara , Prasenjit 1996 Rescuing History from the Nation State . University of Chicago Press.  Chicago.
• Gellner , Ernst 1983 Nations and Nationalism. Basil Blackwell. Oxford.
• Hansen , Thomas Blom 1998‘The Ethics of Hindutva and the Spirit of capitalism’ in The BJP and the Compulsion of Politics in India. Ed. Christophe Jaffrelot. Oxford University Press. New Delhi.
• Jaffrelot , Christophe 1993 The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. Viking. New Delhi.
• Kaviraj , Sudipta (ed.) 1999 Politics in India, Oxford University Press, Delhi.
• Misra, Udayan 2000 The Periphery Strikes Back: Challenges to the Nation-State in Assam and Nagaland. Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla.
• Oommen, T. K. 1993 “Insiders and Outsiders in India: Primordial Collectivities in Nation Building ”, in Understanding Indian Society. Ed. Yogesh Atal. Har-Anand Publications. New Delhi.  1997  Citizenship, Nationality and Ethnicity . Polity Press. Cambridge.
• Phadnis, U. and R. Ganguly 989/2001 Ethnicity and Nation-building in South Asia. Sage.  New Delhi.
• Smith, Anthony D. 1991 National Identity. Penguin Press. London.
• Tillin , Louise 2013 “What new Telangana state means for India”  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-23499533 (accessed on 13 January, 2015)

Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Nation Building — Nation-building Process

Nation-building Process

• Categories: Nation Building National Identity Patriotism

About this sample

Words: 2315 |

12 min read

Published: Mar 28, 2019

Words: 2315 | Pages: 5 | 12 min read

Table of contents

The concept of nation-building, implementation strategy, new approach, imact of national development policy, works cited.

• Maintain the basic strategy of NEP is the eradication of poverty and restructuring social and economic imbalances between the races and this contribute to strengthening national unity
• To ensure balance development of main economic sectors (mining, service, agricul true, and farming)
• Building a society that has social value and appreciate the positive feelings of pride and patriotism
• Reduce and eliminate social inequality and to promote the sharing of the national economic in a more fair and equitable benefits
• Reduce the inequalities in economic development between urban and rural areas
• Concentrate on the development of a community of Bumiputera Commercial and Industrial
• Ensure appropriate attention is given to environment of protection and ecology so that in the long term to ensure sustainable development of the country continued
• Making science and technology as an integral part of the planning and socio-economic development

Competition in International Markets

Vision 2020, poverty reduction, restructuring society, achivevement of ndp.

• women participation in the labour force increases to 53.6 per cent
• rural road coverage increases to 51,262 km
• rural electricity coverage increases to 98 per cent
• rural water supply increases to 94 per cent
• 5,737 villages connected through the wireless village programme
• RM175 billion invested in five regional economic corridors, creating 427,100 jobs
• Malaysian life expectancy increases to 74.8 years
• 102,200 affordable houses completed
• unemployment rate decreases to 2.9 per cent
• 1.8 million new job opportunities created
• 90.7 per cent pre-school enrolment
• 36.5 per cent academic staff with PhD qualification in public universities
• 15 per cent household waste recycling rate
• forest cover increases to 61 per cent
• 23,264 hectares of forest gazetted as Permanent Reserve Forest
• 93,100 km of new roads built
• 46 per cent increase in passenger rate at KL International Airport (KLIA)
• KLIA2 opened and third runway operationalised at KLIA
• urban rail commuters increase 32 per cent
• 70 per cent households with broadband penetration
• 14 areas nationwide with access to Digital Terrestrial Television
• 95 per cent of population receives clean and treated water
• services sector contributes RM2,550 billion to GDP
• manufacturing sector contributes RM1,111 billion to GDP
• agriculture sector contributes RM455 billion to GDP
• construction sector contributes RM194 billion to GDP
• small and medium enterprises contribute RM1,606 billion to GDP
• Malaysia ranked 18th out 189 economies in the 2015 World Bank ‘Doing Business’ Report
• Malaysia ranked 33rd on the Global Innovation Index out of 143 countries
• Abdul Rahman, A. (2000). From Malayan Union to Singapore Separation. Singapore: Eastern University Press.
• Faaland, J., Parkinson, J., & Saniman, R. (1991). Growth and Ethnic Inequality: Malaysia’s New Economic Policy. Oxford University Press.
• Hippler, J. (2002). Nation-building: A Key Concept for Peaceful Conflict Transformation? Berghof Handbook for Conflict Transformation.
• Mohamed Noordin, S. (2005). The Malays: Their Problems and Future. Petaling Jaya: Pelanduk Publications.
• Najib Tun Abdul Razak. (2008). 1Malaysia: People First, Performance Now. Pelanduk Publications.
• Purcell, V. (1965). The Malayan Communist Party and the Indonesian Revolution. London: Oxford University Press.
• Ratnam, K. J. (1965). Nation-Building in Malaysia 1946–1964. London: Oxford University Press.
• Savunen, J. (2003). Nation-Building and Identity Conflicts: Facilitating the Mediation Process in Southern Philippines. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Schwartz, L. (1991). The State of Malaysia: Ethnicity, Equity, and Reform. Routledge.
• Tambiah, S. J. (1985). Culture, Ethnicity and Nationalism: The Tamil Renaissance and the Hill Country Tamils in Sri Lanka. Cambridge University Press.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Verified writer

• Expert in: Government & Politics Sociology

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

2 pages / 913 words

5 pages / 2247 words

4 pages / 1608 words

1 pages / 521 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

A nation is more than just a geographical entity with defined borders; it is a complex tapestry of people, culture, history, and values. In this essay, we will explore the multifaceted nature of nations, focusing on the [...]

“The Irish Party System appears to be in a state of flux at the moment, but what is uncertain is whether this is a temporary situation or a ‘new normal’”. My opinion is what we have experienced in recent elections will be the [...]

Political corruption occurs when political leaders abuse their power in order to further their own agenda. This corruption takes place in the US in many different forms including, bribery, extortion, cronyism, nepotism, [...]

There are high risks of corruption in most sectors in Thailand. Even though Thailand has a legal framework and a range of institutions to counter corruption, companies may regularly encounter bribery or other corrupt practices. [...]

Interest groups often appeal to the federal, state and local government with an aim of expressing their preference. They usually contact the elected official, their staffs, and bureaucrats face to face in order to solve a [...]

Lincoln Steffens was a political journalist. He became famous when he began to write a series on the corruption of American Cities, called The Shame of Cities. Steffens focused mainly on political corruption of the municipal [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Essay on Role of Youths in Nation Building for Students and Children

500 words essay on role of youths in nation building.

It is a well-known fact that the youth of any country is a great asset. They are indeed the future of the country and represent it at every level. The role of youths in nation-building is more important than you might think. In other words, the intelligence and work of the youth will take the country on the pathway of success. As every citizen is equally responsible, the youth is too. They are the building blocks of a country.

Role of Youth

The youth is important because they will be our future. Today they might be our partners, tomorrow they will go on to become leaders. The youths are very energetic and enthusiastic. They have the ability to learn and adapt to the environment . Similarly, they are willing to learn and act on it as well to achieve their goals.

Our youth can bring social reform and improvement in society. We cannot make do without the youth of a country. Furthermore, the nation requires their participation to achieve the goals and help in taking the country towards progress.

Likewise, we see how the development of any country requires active participation from the youth. It does not matter which field we want to progress in, whether it is the technical field or sports field, youth is needed. It is up to us how to help the youth in playing this role properly. We must make all the youth aware of their power and the role they have to play in nation-building.

Ways to Help the Youth

There are many ways in which we can help the youth of our country to achieve their potential. For that, the government must introduce programs that will help in fighting off issues like unemployment, poor education institutes and more to help them prosper without any hindrance.

Similarly, citizens must make sure to encourage our youth to do better in every field. When we constantly discourage our youth and don’t believe in them, they will lose their spark. We all must make sure that they should be given the wind beneath their wings to fly high instead of bringing them down by tying chains to their wings.

Furthermore, equal opportunities must be provided for all irrespective of caste, creed, gender , race, religion and more. There are various issues of nepotism and favoritism that is eating away the actual talent of the country. This must be done away with as soon as possible. We must make sure that every youth has the chance to prove themselves worthy and that must be offered equally to all.

In short, our youth has the power to build a nation so we must give them the opportunity. They are the future and they have the perspective which the older generations lack. Their zeal and enthusiasm must be channelized properly to help a nation prosper and flourish.

FAQ on Essay on Role of Youths in Nation Building

Q.1 What role does youth play in nation-building?

A.1 The youth plays a great role in nation-building. It has the power to help a country develop and move towards progress. It also is responsible for bringing social reform within a country. The youth of a country determine the future of a nation.

Q.2 How can we help youth?

A.2 As well all know youth is facing too many problems nowadays. We need to give them equal opportunities in every field so they can succeed well. They must be given all the facilities and also encouraged to take the challenge to achieve success.

Customize your course in 30 seconds

Which class are you in.

• Travelling Essay
• Picnic Essay
• Our Country Essay
• My Parents Essay
• Essay on Favourite Personality
• Essay on Memorable Day of My Life
• Essay on Knowledge is Power
• Essay on Gurpurab
• Essay on My Favourite Season
• Essay on Types of Sports

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Download the App

• Facebook Icon
• Twitter Icon

What Does Left Internationalism Mean in the 21st Century?

• Back Issues

“Religion,” our new issue, is out now. Subscribe to our print edition today.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has put international concerns front and center for the US left today. Jacobin spoke with three leading internationalist organizers about how leftists should think about international solidarity in the 21st century.

Students of City College of New York camp on the campus and take part in Gaza protest against Israeli attacks in New York, United States on April 25, 2024. (Fatih Aktas / Anadolu via Getty Images)

The new US socialist movement that sprung from the 2016 presidential campaign was, in a certain sense, an “America First” left. Not because it was nationalistic, xenophobic, or isolationist, but because it focused largely on domestic political questions: Medicare for All, student debt cancellation, and police racism and violence, among others.

October 7 changed this overnight. Since last fall, the overwhelming focus of the US left has been on protesting the US government’s deep complicity in Israel’s murderous retaliation against Palestinians. One of the biggest stories in American politics today is the wave of protest and repression that has swept university campuses, and which seems poised to affect the outcome of this fall’s presidential election. Commencement day has already arrived for many students, but one thing seems clear — summer vacation will not end the movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

The Palestine solidarity movement raises a set of larger questions that the new left has yet to address. What is the meaning of internationalism today? What should socialist internationalism look like in an increasingly multipolar era? Would a multipolar world be more peaceful and progressive or just the latest version of great-power geopolitics? Jacobin contributing editor Chris Maisano recently spoke with three leading practitioners of internationalism on the US left — Phyllis Bennis, Bill Fletcher Jr, and Van Gosse — about their experiences in this field and their views of what it means to be an internationalist in the twenty-first century.

What was your path to internationalist politics?

For me, it was a matter of timing. I graduated high school in the big year of the anti–Vietnam War movement, which was 1968. If you went to college or were around universities, it was hard not to get pulled into antiwar stuff.

The draft played a huge role in that because people were directly affected. But it wasn’t only that; it was also a moment of what we would now call intersectionality. This was the height of the black student uprisings where I was in school in California. There was also a Latino student mobilization, and the student-rights issues were all over the place. The cops were on campus every other week, and the responses were dramatic.

I spent my childhood and youth as a hardcore Zionist — I suppose that’s a perverse kind of internationalism in a way. But I left all that stuff behind and went off to work on Vietnam.

Several years later, after studying imperialism and colonialism — because that’s what you did if you were a young lefty in those days — I realized this Israel stuff I always assumed was correct no longer sounded right. I went to my father’s library and read Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, and found his letters to Cecil Rhodes where Herzl asked Rhodes for his support because, as he put it, their projects were “both something colonial.” That was that, and I started looking at Palestinian rights.

It was definitely the Vietnam antiwar movement for me. My parents were academics in a typical college town, and it came up as the thing that was happening there. When I was ten, in 1968, my older brother explained to me that what the Vietnamese were doing was like what the Americans had done in 1776. They were fighting for their freedom as a country, and they were on the right side, and it suddenly made total sense.

I got involved in antiwar politics as a boy — I went to the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam with my mother. I was in New York City at that point, and if you were in New York City in the late 1960s or early ’70s the antiwar movement was all around you. There was a lot of electoral work too, like the George McGovern campaign in 1972.

In 1982, I got involved in El Salvador solidarity and stayed in that for thirteen years. That was really the formative thing for me, but everything was shaped by Vietnam.

I’ve been interested in international issues since I was very young, like nine or ten years old. I was very influenced by anti-communist propaganda in connection with the Vietnam War. Then in 1965, the United States invaded the Dominican Republic (DR). I had an uncle who had been a member of the Communist Party; after the Dominican Republic invasion, he came over to my great-grandmother’s house, where I was for some reason, and he was furious about it in a way you rarely see when something is not happening to someone personally. This shook me and shook my backward views.

That incident in connection with the DR left an impression on me that worked its way around in my head. A couple of years later, I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X , and that was the defining moment in terms of who I was to become and what I wanted to do. Malcolm’s internationalism was very influential on me, and subsequently I became very close to the Black Panther Party. I became very involved in Vietnam work and issues around Africa.

The post-9/11 antiwar movement was very formative for me. I was in college when 9/11 happened, and I very quickly threw myself into antiwar organizing with my friends on campus. The three of you were involved in founding United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), which organized a number of very big antiwar demonstrations that I went to and remember quite well. What was your motivation for starting the group, and what in your estimation did it accomplish?

During the Vietnam antiwar movement, there was a broad movement that was basically saying, “Get the troops out, the US should not be there, the US should stop intervening,” and so on. Then there was a smaller core within that movement who said the Vietnamese are right. The chant was, “One side’s right, one side’s wrong, we’re on the side of the Vietcong.” It clearly identified with the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese. That was never a major component of the antiwar movement in terms of its numbers, but it was central to building the movement.

During the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, there was a similar situation. I was in the middle of one of the big antiwar coalitions, the precursor to UFPJ ten years later. We thought there was nothing progressive about the Iraqi government, which had actually been supported by the United States for many years — but others did, which was why there were two coalitions at the time.

The same split happened again ten years later. We thought US troops should get out of the Middle East, but we also recognized there were huge human rights issues in countries like Iraq. In the case of the Vietnamese, unlike Iraq, [the National Liberation Front and North Vietnam] were fighting for a kind of progressive social program. They didn’t do it well all the time, but it was a set of principles we believed in too. That was true in the Central American wars and in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. But it was not the case in the first Gulf War or the Iraq War or the Afghanistan war.

The day after 9/11, some of us met at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and started talking about how a disastrous war was inevitably coming and how it was going to shape the next political period. We thought that what was needed after the attacks was justice, not vengeance. So we initiated a statement called “Justice, Not Vengeance” and worked with Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover to get other high-profile people to sign it.

Our sense was that the American people were not being given any other options for how to respond to such a horrific crime. They were not being told that there were options other than war. The government and the media told the American people, either we go to war or we let the perpetrators get away with it. This was the context in which the three of us and a bunch of other people came together to form UFPJ.

I was on vacation in the summer of 2002. One day it really hit me that George W. Bush was going to take us to war — that it wasn’t just rhetoric. So I got on the phone with Van and I said, what the hell? What are we going to do?

Van went to work on this, and we both started thinking about people to bring together. Some efforts had already been started; Medea Benjamin had put together a website that was called United for Peace. Then, on October 25, 2002, we founded UFPJ. It was the broadest of the antiwar coalitions. It was very anti-sectarian, which distinguished it from ANSWER [Act Now to Stop War and End Racism]. We did some remarkable work, and the work that led to the February 15, 2003, global march against the war was amazing.

The work was so good that we missed some important things that we should have been thinking about, like how difficult it is to stop a ruling class from pulling the trigger unless there are real fractures and divisions within that ruling class. We also didn’t have much in the way of a strategy for what to do after the war started.

I was organizing director of Peace Action for five years, from 1995 to 2000. We did some good work, but there was a kind of political abstentionism going on in the peace movement after the Cold War, in the sense that none of the national peace organizations was prepared to call for full-on national mobilization. There was lobbying, “dear colleague” letters, and what have you.

ANSWER walked into that vacuum. That was extremely problematic because it meant when you wanted to protest the bombing of Kosovo, you went to a demonstration where there were people with big photos of Slobodan Milošević. I don’t want to be marching with Milošević photos. By the spring of 2002, it was clear that the United States wanted to go to war in Iraq. I remember thinking, are we really only going to have a narrow, sectarian coalition? A coalition in name only, really; there was no national organization in it.

We didn’t have a strategy. We were just desperately trying to stop the war. I remember Phyllis saying to us at a meeting that we had a chance to stop it, and I think we did. What nobody seems to remember is that around 60 percent of the House Democratic caucus voted against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, and almost a majority of the Democratic caucus in the Senate did. The potential was there; there was nothing like lockstep support for war in Vietnam after the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

The origins of that February 15, 2003, protest were not with UFPJ — it came out of the global justice movement in Europe, particularly the European Social Forum meeting in Italy that happened in November 2002. There were two or three thousand people crammed into the meeting place.

They were not mainly antiwar people; it was basically people from the anti–corporate globalization movement, which was on a roll at that point. That movement pivoted to focus on stopping this war. That was an incredible moment. UFPJ was pulled into that as the clear US counterpart to the Europeans and the Asian contingents that were part of it. There was less participation in planning from Africa and Latin America, but it was quite international when it took place.

What I regret the most, in some ways, is we didn’t recognize sooner that it was not a failure. Mobilizing fifteen million people in eight hundred cities around the world on one day was going to have an impact in the future, and we couldn’t anticipate exactly what that would look like at the time. But we know now that it’s one of the big reasons why Bush did not go to war against Iran in 2007. It’s one of the things that gave rise to the leadership of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Protests almost never win the exact demand they’re fighting for now, but they set the stage for future mobilization, and we didn’t recognize that enough.

Bill and Van, some years ago you wrote an essay called “ A New Internationalism .” In that essay, you argued:

In the second decade of the 21st century, however, our practice of internationalism is confused and stuck in old habits and discourses left over from the era of Third World liberation, beginning early in the twentieth century, and the Cold War of 1945–1991.

What did you mean by that, and do you still think this is the case?

A rift has developed within the global left and progressive movements around international issues and authoritarianism. In 2002 or 2003, there was massive repression in Zimbabwe under then president Robert Mugabe. All kinds of dissidents were being jailed. Trade unionists, including people that I knew personally, were jailed and tortured.

I had become the president of TransAfrica Forum (2002) and was in the leadership of the Black Radical Congress (BRC) around this time. The BRC’s coordinating committee discussed the Zimbabwe repression. An organization called Africa Action put out a sign-on letter protesting the repression in Zimbabwe; the letter came to us in the BRC, and the coordinating committee unanimously said, let’s sign onto this on behalf of the BRC.

Lordy, did all hell break loose. It became clear there was a whole section of the organization that was defiantly pro-Mugabe, which took the position that Mugabe was right to carry out this repression against alleged counterrevolutionaries, completely ignoring the neoliberal economic policies his government was carrying out. The coordinating committee had made a mistake in assessing what was going on within the organization.

But separate from that was the difference that was emerging about what constitutes internationalism, and how you deal with contradictions within countries that claim to be anti-imperialist, or at a minimum, anti–United States. It was a shock to the system for me, and at that point I realized the Left was in a whole new ball game — that we were going to have to rethink how we approach the global situation.

We had a similar debate at IPS about Zimbabwe, but we didn’t have a project at that point dealing with African policy so it wasn’t as sharp. But we’re seeing it now around Nicaragua and around Venezuela, and it’s no easier.

I have my own criticisms of what governments that I once supported when they were liberation movements are doing now, and I am not so happy about them now. But I’m not there. It’s not my place to be organizing against what the Vietnamese, for example, have done over the years in terms of labor rights or environmental concerns. But we certainly don’t defend it, and we do call it out. I still think our main work is challenging what our government is doing — but as internationalists we do recognize other governments’ human rights or other violations as well, and at times join with social movements in other countries to fight back against those violations.

It goes to the question of what we say about what our government is doing. One thing that’s hovering over this is our differences around Ukraine, which are less about what happened or what’s happening there than what the US government does about it. That is, I think, a more useful area of contention and debate within the Left, because people can have all kinds of different views about history and about who’s on what side.

There is still this reflexive mode of thinking you should be on the side of whoever the United States is opposed to. It’s crude thinking, and I felt it long before the Ukraine crisis. I remember talking to you, Bill, in 2002 or 2003 about the Taliban and Afghanistan, and you said the Taliban is a form of clerical fascism, and I thought that’s getting right at it.

There’s an idea dating from the twentieth century that anti-imperialism is necessarily on the Left or progressive, and that’s inaccurate historically. Plenty of anti-imperialism has come from the Right — from traditional power holders, warlords, religious leaders who have been displaced by the modern imperialists and are going to fight back.

This requires a certain kind of analysis of what is actually going on. It doesn’t mean you take the side of the imperialists. But that inability to name what the Taliban actually was was striking. Many of these people, whether the Taliban or Saddam Hussein or others, had been supported by the United States at one point or another.

The idea that the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” discredits us as a left. I remember sitting in a living room in 1973 or ’74 with a representative from the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) in Angola who gave an incredible Marxist analysis of the struggle there and of what he claimed UNITA stood for, and his criticism of many other movements within the continent in terms of what they were doing.

Most of us were very familiar with the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, the MPLA, which was seen by us as problematically pro-Soviet. When UNITA emerged, many of us thought it was great. But then we found out that the story behind UNITA was a lot more complicated, including a mixture of legitimate revolutionaries with Portuguese agents and with tribalist forces in Angola. In fact, the guy that I met was later executed by Jonas Savimbi.

When it came to the Khmer Rouge, at the time many of us [thought] that the situation couldn’t have been that bad. Many of us refused to acknowledge what was going on. What that all taught me was the need for humility, and the need to investigate. I’ve seen countless people visiting the United States from alleged national liberation or left groups, and they say all the right things. But it’s not clear who they are, and you can easily jump to conclusions. We need to be prepared to do a concrete analysis and be willing to admit when we just don’t know.

Going back to when the repression went down in Zimbabwe, I remember having a discussion with this younger African American guy about it, and he was giving me the whole routine about Mugabe’s alleged anti-imperialism. I said, but they’re torturing people; I know people that are being tortured. What do you have to say about that? And this guy had no way of responding to it. That told me a lot about some of the deep weaknesses within the Left.

I had different kinds of experiences that led me to some of the same concerns around Vietnam. I was in Vietnam at the end of 1978, and it was just a couple of years after the war ended. Vietnam was still devastated.

The process of integration between north and south was just beginning, and Cambodia was still pretty much in a civil war. It wasn’t at the same level it had been, but the war was still going on. We began hearing strange rumors that the Vietnamese were thinking of going over the border and taking out the Khmer Rouge. I was there with an official delegation, and the Vietnamese officials who were with us assured us, no, that’s not going to happen.

We accepted that and went home, but shortly after we got back, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. We were like, whoa, let’s rethink all this.

It led to a sense that we need to be a little more careful. We had been hearing all this stuff about how terrible the Khmer Rouge were, and having the Vietnamese do what they did made those claims easier in some ways to accept because we still respected them so much. This kind of proved the claims about the Khmer Rouge to us, and it came at a time when it was hard to imagine how it could have been OK for the Vietnamese — who had always fought against China, Japan, France, and the United States for the notion of national sovereignty being primary — to overthrow another country’s government.

The other place where these concerns come up is on the question of armed struggle. We know that a nation under military occupation has the right to use military force to oppose that occupation. It does not have the right to use that force against civilians. We all know how to spout that idea about armed struggle in principle, but it doesn’t tell us when it’s the right thing to do.

The Palestinians are the last population in the traditional situation of being occupied by the top rank of US imperialist allies. There’s no question that a military occupation means they have the right to use military force, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the right thing to do strategically. It’s a different era now. We’re no longer in an era where armed force is taken for granted as part of a global struggle against colonialism. There isn’t an armed global struggle against colonialism underway around the world.

If we look at the difference between the First and Second Intifada, the Palestinian uprisings that began in 1987 and then again in 2000, what stands out was the mass character of the First — overwhelmingly nonviolent — Intifada. The Second Intifada was an armed uprising that did include a lot of military targets, but it had plenty of civilian targets too. The biggest impact it had on Palestinians, in my view, is that it eliminated the mass character of the First Intifada, because when people with guns come out, everybody else goes home because it’s not safe. The children, the elders, the women who all played such a key role in the First Intifada had no role in the second one.

Many of us in the boomer generation used to think that a legitimate revolutionary movement equaled armed struggle, and armed struggle equaled a legitimate revolutionary movement.  When you look at a lot of the splits that happened in the Left in the 1960s, they were precisely over the question of armed struggle raised to the level of principle, not over whether it was tactically the right thing to do in the given conditions. Is this what we really need to do, or are we saying that this is what one does if one’s a “real” revolutionary? Many people did not move past that framework.

There is a growing strategic question being posed globally around what one does under very adverse circumstances, when there don’t appear to be nonviolent options. That’s why I think we have to be cautious about certain things that we say. In Myanmar, do the people have any option other than armed struggle? Probably not. In Kashmir, what should happen there? I don’t know. How do you build an anti-occupation struggle when you have this semi-fascist government in New Delhi?

The twentieth-century left had a great deal of trouble acknowledging the dangers of militarism. There’s a quotation from Che Guevara that nobody ever cites where he says that every other road must be explored before you turn to armed struggle. He said that — but we know how he set the completely opposite example with disastrous consequences. Foquismo didn’t work, as far as I can see, anywhere, and it got a lot of people slaughtered.

Even the most justified armed struggle is still going to leave some deep wounds; there’s nothing positive about militarism. Violence will be inflicted on the innocent no matter what, and that’s a political and moral-ethical issue that people should take seriously. [On that point,] I think Dr Martin Luther King Jr was a great revolutionary with great strategic sense.

A lot of my thinking about this has been shaped by interest in and engagement with, from boyhood, the liberation struggle in Northern Ireland. There are people there who have a hundred or more years of history of unbroken anti-colonial struggle in their families. Seeing that, and the very negative consequences that have resulted from it, has taught me a lot about the costs of militarism. The Left has not really moved beyond the era of national liberation struggles, or ever really analyzed them and asked, what are the lessons to be learned?

Van, I think your point about militarization is a good one. Many of the national liberation movements of the mid-twentieth century won power on the strength of armed struggle, and as you’re saying, that has an effect on what comes next.

The means you use to achieve a political goal do a lot to shape the ends. In retrospect, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of the governments that resulted from victorious national liberation struggles took that militaristic quality with them into government, whether you’re talking about Zimbabwe or Nicaragua or wherever.

I don’t think the problems that many of these governments had when they emerged from armed struggle were principally because they engaged in armed struggle. There have been a series of problems about the question of democracy and democracy in transitional circumstances, particularly when you are moving from a former colonial regime or neocolonial regime into something else. How does democracy fit into this process? What does it look like beyond voting? Vanguardism and lack of humility can lead to a whole series of problems.

For example, Amílcar Cabral and a cohort of quite brilliant theorists and strategists led the struggle against the Portuguese in Guinea-Bissau. If you look at some of the writings from the war, you feel fairly certain that Guinea-Bissau is going to come out of this struggle and become a model for Africa. That is exactly what didn’t happen. Cabral was murdered. There were contradictions that very few people wanted to talk about between the Cape Verdeans and the Bissau-Guineans. There was certainly a military element, but the military was largely kept under control by the party, at least during the liberation struggle. But there were underlying problems and fissures that the movement didn’t tackle.

The other thing I would add is that if you think the leading force of a revolutionary change is omniscient, then you immediately run into problems about the contradictions between the regime or state that’s put into place and the people they govern. In Grenada, the revolution that unfolded there from 1979 to 1983 had important and dynamic leadership in the New Jewel Movement. But it also had people represented by Bernard Coard, who followed a very Soviet model that saw the party as all-knowing.

They could not figure out how to build on democracy and recognize what the actual mandate of the revolution was. In Grenada, the mandate was anti-imperialist and anti-corruption. It was not a mandate for socialism. Coard ignored that and decided to plow ahead, irrespective of popular sentiment. So the mass organizations associated with the movement started running into problems and drying up. This was not mainly a problem of militarism — it was much deeper.

Bill, in talking about what a movement’s mandate is, you’ve invoked a more fundamental issue in many ways, which is the legacy of Leninism. Leninism was the overwhelming political practice of people engaged in revolution. Even if they weren’t socialists or Marxists, they were still Leninists. Vanguardism is what Bill called it.

I think it does make sense to identify militarism as a challenge though — while certainly agreeing with both of you that it isn’t the only problem. The role of armed struggle within a broader movement strategy is a hard one.

I think the ANC [African National Congress] during the struggle period in South Africa did better than most at situating armed actions within a strategy with several different pillars, the most important had to do with mass mobilization. Armed action was relatively much less central than that. I’m not sure whether or how it was connected, but I don’t think it’s an accident that the ANC also had a strong strategy for mobilizing and building international solidarity. In fact, I think the openness of the South Africans working on building the case against Israeli genocide at the International Court of Justice to working with and taking seriously civil society is likely a reflection of that earlier strategic approach.

In addition to militarism, self-determination can be incredibly problematic when it’s taken as an absolute principle by anyone who claims it, because it’s ultimately about nationalism. Internationalism can get left behind.

I remember when Yugoslavia was breaking up, I wrote a piece about the transformation of nationalism from an almost-always progressive force — which, in retrospect, it wasn’t either — that existed largely in the Global South, in the formerly colonized countries, and was linked to socialism, anti-imperialism, and all the progressive ideas we supported. But suddenly all these new European nationalisms sprung up, micronationalisms if you will, that seemed to have no end.

Yugoslavia divided, violently, into seven small states. Within those states, there are “nationalist” movements. How do we define the right of self-determination in a way that makes it part of a struggle that makes people’s lives better, and lifts up the most oppressed?

I think what all of this points to is the question of what internationalism means today. This seems very unclear and very unsettled.

Something you hear very often on the Left — and it comes up all the time around Ukraine — is that our main job as leftists in the United States should be to fight our own imperialists. That is often used as a way of saying either that we should have nothing to say about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or that we should do nothing to support the Ukrainian resistance even if we oppose the invasion.

There is an old slogan, “Workers and oppressed people of the world unite.” It is not “workers, oppressed people, and progressive governments unite.” It says workers and oppressed people of the world, unite. If that is your North Star, our attitude toward specific governments is secondary to the question of the people, the masses in various countries. Regardless of who is waving what flag, when there is oppression, when there is exploitation, our internationalism should put us on the side of the oppressed — as opposed to an internationalism that is mainly about geopolitical relationships between states.

You hear a lot of people today saying that we need a multipolar world. With all due respect, that is wrong. We need a nonpolar world. We’ve seen multipolar worlds. September 1939 was a multipolar world; August 1914 was a multipolar world. In fact, when you look through the history of humanity, most of the time there’s a multipolar world.

Between 1945 and 1991, we had two superpowers, and that was fundamentally different, and then in the post-1991 period with US hegemony. The idea that having multiple poles creates better circumstances for peace and for freedom struggles and justice struggles is simply wrong. History does not back that up.

One of the most multipolar moments in European history, at least, was the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe. It was about great power cooperation to protect the status quo against democratic revolution.

“Multipolar” is a polite way of saying a return to great power politics. Look at what that’s already produced — there’s nothing admirable about it.

Polarities in this sense are certainly a huge problem. And it doesn’t do any good to, for instance, expand the BRICS movement to incorporate wealthy and repressive Arab Gulf states into its ranks. It’s kind of like the perpetual effort for United Nations reform that always seems to come back to adding more wealthy and powerful countries to the five permanent members of the Security Council: Should they have a veto like the Perm Five, or maybe only a temporary veto? Why do we need to expand the number of privileged powers, rather than trying to democratize power? That’s a much harder challenge, I’m afraid.