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Nationalism is the second non-core political idea studied for Edexcel A-Level Politics (the repo pairs it with feminism), and it is examined in Section B of Paper 2 through a 24-mark question. To answer that question well you must be able to define nationalism's central concepts precisely, distinguish its very different strands, deploy the five spec-named thinkers accurately, and reach a balanced, evaluative judgement — because nationalism is the ideology that most resists a single verdict. It has inspired both the liberation of colonised peoples and the genocides of the twentieth century; it has underpinned democratic self-government and aggressive imperial conquest. This lesson establishes the foundations on which the later lessons build: what a nation is, what self-determination means, why nationalism is best understood as a distinctively modern phenomenon, and the core ideas — the nation, self-determination, the nation-state, culturalism, racialism, and internationalism — that recur throughout the topic.
Nationalism is a political ideology holding that the nation is the most important unit of political organisation, and that each nation has the right to self-determination — the right to govern itself, usually through its own sovereign state. At its simplest, nationalism asserts two linked claims:
The crucial feature of nationalism as an ideology is that it is chameleon-like: it attaches itself to other ideologies and takes its colour from them. There is liberal nationalism, conservative nationalism, expansionist nationalism, and anti-colonial nationalism, and these are not merely shades of one position but genuinely rival accounts of what the nation is and what its self-government requires. A strong exam answer never treats "nationalism" as a single thing — it specifies the strand.
This internal diversity raises the same question that haunts the study of feminism: is nationalism a distinct ideology in its own right, or merely a perspective that other ideologies adopt? The case for treating it as free-standing rests on a cluster of ideas found nowhere else — the nation as the supreme political community, self-determination, the organic national culture — which give nationalism a recognisable identity across its many forms. The case for treating it as a "thin" or "cross-cutting" ideology rests on the fact that its strands borrow their wider commitments (to democracy, to tradition, to revolution) from liberalism, conservatism, and socialism respectively, and that nationalists disagree about almost everything except the bare importance of the nation. The most defensible view is that nationalism is a genuine but unusually thin ideology: it supplies a powerful core claim about the political significance of nationhood, but it depends on a host ideology to tell it what kind of nation to build and how. Holding both halves of that judgement in view is the key to writing about nationalism with the necessary precision.
The nation is a community of people who believe themselves to share a common identity, typically grounded in some combination of language, culture and traditions, history and collective memory, a sense of homeland, ethnicity or descent, religion, and shared political values. No single one of these is essential — different nations rest on different combinations — but the sense of belonging together, and of being distinct from outsiders, is common to them all.
It is vital not to confuse the nation with the state:
| Concept | Definition |
|---|---|
| Nation | A community of people who share a common identity and a sense of belonging |
| State | A political entity exercising sovereignty over a defined territory (government, laws, armed forces) |
| Nation-state | A state whose borders coincide with the boundaries of a single nation — the nationalist ideal |
The distinction matters because the world rarely matches the nationalist ideal of one nation, one state. Many states contain several nations: the United Kingdom contains English, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish identities; Spain contains Catalan and Basque national movements alongside a Castilian Spanish majority. Conversely, many nations are divided across several states: the Kurds are spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria without a state of their own. This mismatch between the map of nations and the map of states is the source of much of the political energy — and much of the conflict — that nationalism generates.
A further difficulty is that nations can be defined in two quite different ways, and the choice between them has large consequences. Objective definitions identify the nation by external, observable markers — a shared language, a common religion, a defined territory, a line of descent — and treat membership as a matter of fact. Subjective definitions, by contrast, locate the nation in the consciousness of its members: a nation exists, on this view, wherever a body of people believes itself to be one and wishes to live under common government, regardless of how mixed its language or ancestry may be. Most scholars now lean towards a subjective understanding, because every objective marker turns out to admit exceptions — there are multilingual nations, multi-faith nations, and nations divided across territories — whereas the sense of belonging together is common to them all. The subjective view also helps explain why national identities can be created, strengthened, or dissolved over time, rather than being fixed once and for all.
A central scholarly debate, closely related to this, concerns whether nations are primordial (ancient, natural, and given) or constructed (modern and made). Nationalists themselves typically treat the nation as primordial — an organic community with deep historical roots stretching back into the mists of time — but as the section on origins below explains, most modern scholars regard the nation as a comparatively recent construction, assembled out of older cultural materials by the forces of modernity. This is not merely an academic quarrel: if nations are constructed, then national boundaries and identities are contingent and changeable rather than sacred and eternal, which undercuts the nationalist's tendency to treat the claims of the nation as absolute.
Self-determination is the principle that each nation has the right to determine its own political destiny — usually, though not always, through the creation of a sovereign nation-state of its own. It is the single most important political demand that nationalism makes, and it is the point at which an abstract sense of national identity becomes a concrete political claim against existing rulers or empires.
Self-determination has been championed in several historical contexts:
Self-determination, however, is not as straightforward as it sounds. In ethnically mixed territories, granting self-determination to one group may mean subjecting another to its rule, so that one nation's liberation becomes another's domination. The principle also raises the prior question of which groups count as nations entitled to a state — a question on which there is no neutral answer, and over which much blood has been shed.
The nation-state — a sovereign state whose borders match those of a single nation — is the institutional goal of most nationalism. For nationalists the nation-state is uniquely legitimate because it allows a people to govern itself according to its own culture and will, rather than being ruled by foreigners or by a dynasty indifferent to its identity.
Underlying this ideal is a particular vision of the nation as an organic community: a natural, living entity that has evolved over time rather than an artificial construct assembled for convenience. This idea closely parallels the conservative concept of organic society, transposed to the national level:
This organic conception explains both the strength and the danger of nationalism. Its strength is that it answers a real human need for community and rootedness; its danger is that an "organic" nation can easily be defined so as to exclude those deemed not to belong to it.
Nationalism characteristically stresses the importance of culture — language, literature, music, art, customs, and traditions — as the foundation of national identity. On this view a nation is, above all, a community of shared culture, and the cultivation of that culture is itself a political act. Many nationalist movements began as cultural revivals long before they became political programmes:
Culturalism is most strongly associated with the thought of Herder (studied in detail in a later lesson), for whom each nation possesses a unique spirit, the Volksgeist, expressed above all through its language. In its benign form, culturalism celebrates diversity and treats every national culture as equally valuable. In a harsher form it can shade into the demand for cultural purity and the exclusion of those whose language or customs differ from the majority's.
A small but historically significant current within nationalism rests not on shared culture or citizenship but on race — on the claim that the nation is, fundamentally, a community of blood and descent, and that racial purity must be defended. Racialism holds that humanity is divided into biologically distinct races, that these races are hierarchically ordered, and that the nation coincides with a racial group whose character is fixed by heredity rather than acquired through culture.
It is important to be precise here. Racialism is a fringe view within nationalism as a whole, not its mainstream: most nationalists define the nation by culture or by civic allegiance, not by biology. But where racial nationalism has taken hold — most catastrophically in Nazi Germany, whose ideology of "Aryan" supremacy and "blood and soil" led directly to the Holocaust — it has produced the very worst that nationalism is capable of. Racialism is best understood as the extreme terminus of ethnic nationalism: where ethnic nationalism stresses descent and ancestry, racialism hardens this into a pseudo-biological doctrine of racial superiority. The relationship between culture, ethnicity, and race is a recurring theme in the study of nationalism, and candidates should be careful to distinguish them rather than treating "ethnic" and "racial" nationalism as simply synonyms.
It might seem that nationalism, with its focus on the particular nation, must be hostile to internationalism — cooperation and solidarity across national boundaries. In fact the relationship is more interesting, and it divides the strands sharply.
For liberal nationalists such as Mazzini, nationalism and internationalism are not opposites but complements. Once every nation is free and self-governing, the argument runs, the chief cause of war — the domination of one people by another — will be removed, and free nations will cooperate for the common good in a peaceful "Europe of the peoples". On this view a world properly organised into nation-states is the precondition of genuine internationalism, not its enemy. This is the tradition that anticipates bodies such as the United Nations.
For expansionist and chauvinistic nationalists, by contrast, internationalism is at best naïve and at worst treasonous. If one's own nation is superior and destined to dominate, then international cooperation among equals is a fiction, and the proper relationship between nations is one of struggle and hierarchy. The same word, "nationalism", thus contains within it both a vision of harmonious cooperation among free peoples and a vision of perpetual national struggle — which is one reason the ideology is so difficult to judge as a whole.
Nationalism is a distinctively modern ideology. Although loyalty to tribes, cities, dynasties, and empires existed in earlier periods, the specific idea that humanity is naturally divided into nations, and that each nation ought to have its own state, emerged only during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Recognising this modernity is important, because it cuts against the nationalist's own belief that the nation is ancient and eternal.
| Factor | Significance |
|---|---|
| The French Revolution (1789) | Replaced loyalty to the king with loyalty to the nation; the "citizen" replaced the "subject", and sovereignty was located in the people |
| The Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815) | Spread nationalist ideas across Europe; the peoples conquered by France developed their own nationalist resistance in response |
| Romanticism | Celebrated national cultures, languages, and histories, supplying the emotional and cultural basis on which political nationalism could build |
| Industrialisation | Created new forms of communication — print media, railways, mass schooling — that enabled national consciousness to spread across large populations |
| The decline of empires | The slow collapse of the Ottoman, Habsburg, and later the European colonial empires opened spaces in which submerged nations could demand statehood |
The political scientist Benedict Anderson argued in Imagined Communities (1983) that the nation is an "imagined community". It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never meet most of their fellow nationals, yet each carries in the mind an image of their communion. Crucially, Anderson insisted that "imagined" does not mean "imaginary" or false: the nation is genuinely constructed in the collective imagination, but it has entirely real political consequences, commanding loyalty and sacrifice on an extraordinary scale.
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