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This lesson examines the two strands of nationalism most central to the Edexcel specification's account of nationalism as a force compatible with mainstream Western politics: liberal nationalism and conservative nationalism. The two differ profoundly in how they define the nation, what they want the nation-state to do, and how they relate the nation to the wider world — and because the 24-mark question in Section B so often turns on the contrast between strands, mastering this distinction is essential. Liberal nationalism is the optimistic, civic, internationalist face of the ideology, associated with self-determination and democracy; conservative nationalism is the cautious, cultural, sovereignty-minded face, associated with cohesion, tradition, and identity. Setting them side by side reveals just how far a single word, "nationalism", can stretch, and why candidates must specify which strand they mean rather than passing judgement on nationalism in the abstract.
Liberal nationalism fuses the core principles of liberalism — individual rights, democracy, toleration, and above all self-determination — with the belief that the nation is the natural unit within which freedom is realised. For the liberal nationalist the nation-state is not an end in itself but the indispensable framework for self-government: a free people requires a state of its own through which to exercise its sovereignty. The strand is closely associated with the spec-named thinkers Rousseau (whose doctrine of the general will and popular sovereignty supplies its foundations) and Mazzini (its most eloquent nineteenth-century champion).
| Principle | Liberal nationalist view |
|---|---|
| Self-determination | Every nation has the right to govern itself through its own democratic state |
| Civic nationalism | The nation is defined by shared political values and citizenship, not by ethnicity or descent |
| Constitutionalism | The nation-state should be governed by a constitution that protects individual rights and limits power |
| Internationalism | Nations should coexist peacefully; national self-determination is the precondition of international harmony |
| Democracy | National self-governance is expressed through representative, democratic institutions |
| Toleration | The nation-state should respect the rights of minorities within its borders |
The defining feature of liberal nationalism is that its conception of the nation is civic and therefore in principle inclusive. Membership rests on allegiance to shared political values and institutions rather than on bloodline or ancestry, so that the nation is, in theory, open to anyone willing to embrace its civic life. This is what allows liberal nationalists to combine love of nation with a commitment to universal human rights: the nation is valued not because it is superior to others but because it is the community within which this people governs itself, while granting that every other people has the identical right.
Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) was the leading theorist and activist of Italian unification (the Risorgimento), and the strand's central figure. Living much of his life in exile and organising revolutionary movements from abroad, Mazzini held that:
Mazzini's nationalism was emphatically liberal and democratic. He did not assert Italy's superiority over other nations; he asserted Italy's right to exist as a free, self-governing community alongside other free nations, each pursuing its own mission within a cooperative international order.
It is worth dwelling on the moral dimension of Mazzini's thought, because it distinguishes his liberal nationalism from a merely pragmatic demand for independence. For Mazzini, the nation was not simply a convenient administrative unit but a divinely ordained stage on which human beings worked out their duties to one another and to God. National liberation therefore carried an ethical weight: it was a duty, demanding courage, sacrifice, and devotion to the common good, rather than a mere assertion of self-interest. This is why his nationalism is sometimes described as a kind of secular religion of nationhood. Yet — and this is crucial for distinguishing it from the integral nationalism studied later — Mazzini's sense of national mission was always coupled with respect for the equal mission of every nation; the duties of Italians to Italy were mirrored by the duties of every other people to its own nation, within a fraternal order of free peoples. The mission of the nation, in short, was to take its place within humanity, not to dominate it.
The principle of self-determination found its most famous twentieth-century champion in Woodrow Wilson, the US President, who pressed it at the Paris Peace Conference (1919) at the close of the First World War. Wilson argued that the post-war settlement should allow nations to determine their own political destiny, and the conference duly carved new nation-states — Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and others — out of the ruins of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires. Wilson also championed the League of Nations to provide an institutional framework for cooperation among free states, in a recognisably Mazzinian spirit of a world made peaceful by the liberation of its peoples.
Wilson's experience, however, also illustrates the limits and dangers of even liberal nationalism, which is why he is as useful for evaluation as for illustration. In ethnically tangled regions such as Central and Eastern Europe, it proved impossible to draw borders that gave every nation its own homogeneous state; the new nation-states themselves contained substantial national minorities — Germans in Czechoslovakia, Hungarians scattered across several states — who promptly became the focus of fresh grievance and, in time, of inter-war instability. Moreover, the principle was applied with a glaring double standard: self-determination was extended to the peoples of defeated European empires but pointedly withheld from the colonial subjects of the victorious powers, whose own nationalist aspirations were ignored. The Wilsonian moment thus shows both the appeal of liberal nationalism — its principled commitment to self-government — and its practical difficulty, since in a world where nations are intermingled, no redrawing of borders can satisfy every claim, and self-determination for one people repeatedly turns into a new minority problem for another.
The deep roots of liberal nationalism lie in the French Revolution, which first welded together the people, the nation, and the state. The revolutionaries replaced loyalty to the king with loyalty to the nation, understood as the community of citizens, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) asserted in a single breath both individual rights and the sovereignty of the nation. Here, for the first time, national self-government and individual liberty were proclaimed as two aspects of one revolution — the template for liberal nationalism ever after.
| Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|
| Promotes democracy and human rights — the nation-state is the vehicle of self-governance | The national question is rarely clear-cut: in mixed territories, self-determination for one group can mean domination of another (e.g. competing Israeli and Palestinian claims) |
| Opposes imperial domination — every people has the right to govern itself | Civic nationalism can mask ethno-nationalism — even ostensibly civic nations may privilege the majority culture in practice |
| Is inclusive — defines the nation civically, by values, and can accommodate diversity | Self-determination can fragment states indefinitely, since almost any group can claim to be a nation |
| Promotes international cooperation — Mazzini and Wilson envisioned free nations working together | Wilson's legacy was mixed — the 1919 settlement created new minorities and conflicts, and self-determination was granted to Europeans but withheld from colonial subjects |
The deepest objection to liberal nationalism is that its sunny faith in the harmony of free nations has repeatedly been disappointed. Mazzini expected self-determination to usher in peace; the twentieth century, awash with nationalist wars, suggests that liberated nations are quite capable of turning on one another. Liberal nationalists reply that the wars were caused by the illiberal nationalisms — ethnic and expansionist — that betrayed the civic, democratic ideal, not by self-determination as such. Whether that reply succeeds is one of the central evaluative questions in the topic.
Conservative nationalism fuses conservative principles — tradition, social cohesion, authority, the organic conception of society — with a strong attachment to the nation as a source of identity, order, and continuity. Where liberal nationalism prizes the nation as a framework for self-government and rights, conservative nationalism prizes it as the deep bond that holds an otherwise fragmented society together and roots the present in the inherited wisdom of the past.
| Principle | Conservative nationalist view |
|---|---|
| National identity | The nation is defined by shared culture, history, traditions, and values — an inheritance, not a political choice |
| Patriotism | Love of one's country and its traditions is a natural, instinctive, and virtuous sentiment |
| Social cohesion | A strong, shared national identity binds society together and provides order and stability |
| National sovereignty | The nation-state should be sovereign and free from external interference (hence scepticism towards bodies such as the EU) |
| Immigration | Rapid or large-scale immigration is viewed as a potential threat to national identity and cohesion |
| Defence | A strong military and secure borders are essential to protect the nation |
The defining feature of conservative nationalism is that its conception of the nation is cultural rather than civic. The nation is not a voluntary association of citizens who happen to share certain values, but an organic community, slowly grown over centuries, into which one is born and whose customs, language, and history one inherits. This gives conservative nationalism much of its emotional depth — it speaks to a genuine human longing for belonging and rootedness — but it also gives it a tendency towards exclusivity, since those outside the inherited community may be seen as not truly belonging.
Conservative nationalism draws much of its intellectual character from the broader conservative tradition's distrust of abstract reason and its veneration of the inherited and the established. Where the liberal nationalist reasons from universal principle to the rights of nations, the conservative nationalist begins from the concrete fact of national belonging as something given — a pre-rational attachment that binds people to their fellow countrymen as surely as family ties bind kin. On this view the nation functions, in a famous conservative image, as a partnership not only among the living but between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born: a chain of continuity that the present generation holds in trust and must hand on intact. This is why conservative nationalism is characteristically defensive rather than expansionist or revolutionary — its instinct is to conserve an inherited national identity against the corrosions of rapid change, mass immigration, or supranational integration, not to remake the world or to conquer others. It is also why conservative nationalists are typically wary of grand schemes of national glory: their nationalism is the quiet nationalism of attachment to home, not the strident nationalism of mission or domination, though critics rightly note that the two are not always easy to keep apart in practice.
Conservative nationalists frequently distinguish between patriotism — a benign love of one's own country and its institutions — and nationalism in the pejorative sense of a belief in one's nation's superiority over others. They present their own position as patriotic: a defence of national traditions, institutions, and ways of life that implies no hostility towards other peoples. Critics counter that the distinction is slippery, that the same rhetoric of national loyalty can shade imperceptibly from affectionate patriotism into exclusionary or xenophobic nationalism, and that the line between the two is drawn more by approval than by any stable principle.
| Example | Description |
|---|---|
| British Euroscepticism / Brexit | Opposition to the EU on the ground that it erodes national sovereignty; the Brexit campaign's slogan "Take Back Control" expressed conservative nationalist themes of sovereignty and self-government |
| Gaullism (France) | Charles de Gaulle championed French sovereignty and independence — keeping a distance from NATO's integrated command and asserting a strong, independent French role in the world |
| "America First" conservatism (USA) | Scepticism towards international institutions and trade agreements, an emphasis on national sovereignty and secure borders, a strong military, and cultural conservatism |
| Strengths | Weaknesses |
|---|---|
| Provides social cohesion — a shared identity can unite diverse communities and sustain solidarity and mutual obligation | Can be exclusionary — defining the nation by culture, ethnicity, or religion marginalises those who do not share the majority's heritage |
| Preserves traditions and cultural heritage that give meaning and continuity to people's lives | Can be used to resist progressive change, invoking "tradition" against equality, minority rights, or multiculturalism |
| Defends national sovereignty against unaccountable supranational bodies | Can shade into xenophobia — hostility to immigrants, foreigners, and international cooperation |
| Answers a genuine human need for belonging and community | Can be nostalgic, idealising a homogeneous national past that never really existed |
| Issue | Liberal nationalism | Conservative nationalism |
|---|---|---|
| Definition of the nation | Civic — based on shared political values and citizenship | Cultural — based on shared history, language, and traditions |
| Attitude to diversity | Inclusive — accommodates different ethnicities and cultures | Cautious — excessive or rapid diversity may threaten cohesion |
| Attitude to international cooperation | Positive — self-determination promotes international harmony | Sceptical — defends national sovereignty against external bodies |
| Attitude to change | Progressive — supports democratic reform and self-determination | Conservative — defends and conserves existing national traditions |
| Attitude to empire | Anti-imperialist — every nation has the right to self-rule | Complex — some conservative nationalists historically defended empire as a "civilising mission" |
| Emotional register | Rational, principled, universalist (every nation has equal rights) | Affective, instinctive, particularist (devotion to this nation's inheritance) |
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