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There is the pervasive idea in modern Western academia that nationalism is a modern idea. It is frequently portrayed in education, by public intellectuals, and in general political commentary as a construct imposed from above onto the people below. It is more often than not derided, at best as an illusion, and at worst as a delusion. It is a warning that evokes world wars, prejudice, persecution and genocide.
At its fundamentals being an intellectual issue, it is unclear if this post-war revisionism of Western history is being challenged by the new conservative counter-culture or not. While right-wing populist parties that place emphasis on national identity, belonging, and unity in destiny are growing politically, the academic strain that underpins the public understanding of nationalism might be too obscure for most people to question.
How does one even define nationalism? Is the word practically superfluous for most contexts? What does it matter to the average citizen when, how, and why nationalism arose in Europe, historically? Perhaps as long as people have their economic and social concerns addressed, they will be happy anyway.
It is common for populist parties to also fall back on this simplicity. Most parties of the kind that are spearheading the conservative wave in the West do not care about the history of ideas, not even their own ideas. If one is allowed to speculate, perhaps any such curiosity is clouded by the barrier that is the two world wars. The post-war narrative that nationalism is a product by and for despots and a weapon against the Other may be so ubiquitous that even modern-day nationalists shudder at the idea of their ideological predecessors of the 20th century.
It is hard to break the conditioning of modern culture. But there has been some conservative resistance to the perception that the horrors of the brutal regimes of the 20th century were primarily nationalists, which has stressed that the evils committed were in actuality imperialism. In the modern narrative, imperialism is frequently understood to be a consequence of nationalism, and in some cases a direct synonym to it. The conservative view instead proposes that nationalism is the antidote to imperialism; recognising borders and the right to self-determination is the basis for respecting the equality of all nations.
The tension between these two outlooks on nationalism does not only come down to semantics, or a difference of opinion about whether nationalism is benevolent or not. It carries with it a serious conflict of values that conservatives would do well to prepare for.
The established view of nationalism
In the contemporary common historiography (which may be described alternatively as liberal, progressive, or post-war) nationalism appears as an idea development that is intrinsically tied to the 19th and 20th centuries. It is attributed to industrialism, urbanisation, global trade, and the Napoleonic Wars, associations which pre-emptively casts it as a ‘disruptive’ force. Nationalism was (keyword being ‘was’, as this historiography essentially condemns nationalism as obsolete) according to post-war theory a reaction to the destruction of feudalism, and it subsequently went on to destroy the entire ‘old’ Europe through the First World War, before it met its final violent demise in 1945.
This ‘broad brush’ interpretation is common in schools, popular media, and of course political rhetoric. It is politically potent to enforce the inevitability of a ‘successor’ ideology to nationalism, which is what we are theoretically living through right now. As much as the post-national ideological trends of our time evade succinct labelling, they may variably be described as liberal, socially liberal, or perhaps globalist. Their proponents would argue that unlike nationalism, the current-day paradigm seeks reconciliation, co-existence, and global solidarity in one way or another.
One must not fail to take in the close approximation to Marxist theories of history in this perspective, which similarly uses broad generalisations of complex historical periods to construct a pre-determined chronological development. The successor ideology to nationalism may just as well have been international socialism, if the Marxists of the Cold War were to have had the final say.
Nationalism as conservatism
In the conservative historiography, nationalism is posited as the ‘state of nature’, for a change. Most archaic forms of community and social development throughout history are at their core an expression of nationalism, however in an embryonic form. In this view, nationalism is the confluence of politics with nativity and/or civil community, as opposed to antagonism against and supremacy over any out-groups.
This means that nationalism, as it has been defined as a 19th-century ideology, has always been tacitly present even in pre-modern societies. It is a self-evident truth that ethnic communities throughout history always have resisted encroachment by foreign ethnic groups, whether they be tribes fighting the Romans, or Serbs fighting the Austro-Hungarians. Nationalism, regardless of which word is used to describe it, is merely the structuring of politics around the in-group’s customs, traditions, and self-interest. That this was a fair and ideal way to structure a state was not a new invention of the time around the French Revolution.
The question then is of course, if nationalism was ubiquitous even before the advent of “modern” nationalism in the 19th century, where were the nation-states and the distinctly ethnic conflicts that are conceptually linked to nationalism as the modern audience understands it?
The answer, as the post-war theory of nationalism hardly addresses, is that both the nation-state and the idea of politically primed ethnic consciousness by far pre-date the French Revolution, and even the Enlightenment.
The nation is older than the state
There isn’t a lack of scholarship that supports the idea of nationalism(s) having real impact on the political development of medieval and early modern Europe, even though the post-war historiography typically would have that implied. In Sweden, decades of studies of the growth of the Swedish state over the early modern period has yielded a number of theories that help the modern citizen understand how Europe truly functioned during the “ancien régime”.
Historian Harald Gustafsson’s description of the “conglomerate state” paints a picture of the Swedish Empire as a state of regional and provincial constituencies that had a highly asymmetrical relationship to the central power. This means that the state was not synonymous with any one nation; the Swedes themselves of the 17th century understood this, as they differentiated between the traditional Swedish parts of the “realm” and the culturally distinct “provinces” that were not traditionally Swedish. The discourse about a “realm” contra a set of “provinces” not only acknowledged a practical political subdivision within their empire, but it also demonstrated that political limitations were respected along linguistic, religious, and cultural borders inside multi-ethnic empires.
Gustafsson’s thesis about the “conglomerate state“ is that the early modern state was geographically compartmentalised according to custom, as opposed to according to the practicality of the ruler or the bureaucracy. In other words, that distinct communities, such as a linguistically or religiously unique province, negotiated their relationship with the central power separately means that regional identities were politically potent even before the ‘invention’ of modern nationalism. Expressions of politically active national consciousness can also be identified in late medieval Scandinavia during the many conflicts of the Kalmar Union, as well as in countries such as the Netherlands during the Reformation and the foundation of the Dutch Republic.
The Netherlands and Sweden in fact stand out as the prime 17th-century examples of Europe’s very first nation-states, where national consciousness both existed, was promoted by the state – for the time highly effective and sophisticated states at that – and served as a source for political legitimacy.
It follows of course that nations can be politically dispossessed, and most still existing nations have throughout history been so at one point or another. Does this mean that the nation has ceased to be?
Hardly. The origins of Germany is a popular centre piece for the post-war theory of nationalism, and it serves as a good example of how a nation can exist, yet not correspond to any one successful political entity. According to the popular narrative of German history as diffused in many cultures, the country was practically invented in the mid-1800s. Historical references to the Kingdom of Germany dating back to the medieval period are largely obscured, as are the attempted but ultimately unsuccessful evocations for German unity during the Thirty Years’ War.
Before modern state-building, bureaucracy, standardisation of language, and instant communication, many nations continued to exist, although politically inactive, under the auspices of empires or feudal states. The power of such states to effectively suppress local identities, customs, languages and religions did not always exist.
With the consolidation of the modern nation-state in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, something else began to happen: the nation became synonymous with the state. This is where one may trace the modern view of nationalism.
How nationalism became discredited
When the state and the nation become conceptually united, it becomes harder for the citizens to imagine a time when nations existed as social structures independently of states. The rise of the modern State and its bureaucracy in the 19th century easily becomes transposed as the rise of the Nation, when generations further down the line skip over the complexities of the early modern world that no longer exists.
Thus, the interests of the State are conflated with the interests of the Nation. This is how an ideology about self-determination, tradition, and customary government gets blamed for atrocities such as world wars and genocides. Today, even the word nation-state may even be confusing to those unfamiliar with the term, as the word nation has been reinterpreted as a stand-in for the state. Experiences of identities constructed or at least enforced top-down by authoritarian governments throughout the 20th century have further diluted the concept of the nation as rooted in organic communitarianism, and morphed it into something that sounds almost menacing to the casual observer.
It is thus both accidental, but also convenient for progressives and anti-national liberals, that nationalism has accrued such a negative reputation in the post-war West. The benevolence that can be inherent in nationalism is habitually met with scepticism in the public debate, and it is automatically shrugged off as an artefact of a time and place that generally also has a bad reputation in the mind of most contemporary Westerners. Nationalism routinely gets sorted into the same category as colonialism, slavery, eugenics, religious fanaticism, and of course, imperialism, and then thrown onto the “dung heap of history”, in classrooms and educational contexts all over Europe.
It would do conservatives well to push back against the historical revisionism that seeks to undo the natural role that patriotism and traditionalism has had in building successful societies across our continent. It is not just about clarifying its the historical basis for nationalism, but also reaffirming the virtues that comes with it – such as democracy and equality before the law.