Nationalism is the belief that people who share a common language, culture, history, and identity should have the right to govern themselves as an independent nation. Nationalists believe that the nation is the most natural and important unit of political organization, and that each group of people with a shared identity deserves its own state. Before the late 18th century, most people in the world identified themselves primarily by their religion, their village, or their loyalty to a king or dynasty rather than by a sense of national identity. Nationalism changed this, transforming the political map of the world and becoming one of the driving forces behind revolutions, wars of independence, and the formation of many of the countries that exist today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The main principles of nationalism center on the idea that nations are the natural foundation of political life and that each nation has the right to self-government. There are several key features that most nationalist movements share.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The most fundamental is the idea of a shared national identity. Nationalists believe that people who share a common language, culture, history, and traditions form a natural community called a nation. This shared identity is what gives the nation its right to exist as a political unit. For instance, the belief that all German-speaking people shared a common national identity was a central argument of those who pushed for the unification of Germany in the 19th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A second key principle is self-determination. Nationalists argue that each nation has the right to determine its own political future and to govern itself without being ruled by a foreign power or a dynasty that does not share its identity. This principle became enormously important in the 19th and 20th centuries, as peoples across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas used nationalist arguments to demand independence from empires and colonial rulers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A third key principle is national loyalty. Nationalism asks citizens to place their loyalty to the nation above loyalty to a king, a religion, or a local community. In fact, one of the most significant changes that nationalism brought about was the shift from identifying primarily as a subject of a monarch to identifying as a citizen of a nation. This shift in loyalty had enormous consequences for how governments organized their armies, collected taxes, and built public support for their policies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A fourth key principle is the importance of national culture. Nationalists typically place great value on preserving and promoting the language, literature, art, and traditions of their nation. For instance, the movement to establish unified literary languages in Germany and Italy in the early 19th century was closely tied to the growth of nationalist sentiment in those regions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nationalism is a relatively modern idea. Before the late 18th century, most people in Europe and elsewhere did not think of themselves as members of a nation in the modern sense. They thought of themselves as subjects of a king, members of a religious community, or inhabitants of a particular village or region. The idea that all people sharing a common language and culture formed a single national community with the right to govern itself was not widely held.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first major developments that gave rise to modern nationalism were the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789. Both revolutions were built on the idea that governments derived their authority from the people rather than from kings or God. The American Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men were created equal and had the right to self-government. The French Revolution went even further, replacing loyalty to the king with loyalty to the French nation and its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The French Revolution was particularly important in spreading nationalism across Europe. When Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies marched across the continent in the early 19th century, they carried revolutionary ideas with them wherever they went. In the countries they conquered, Napoleon’s presence paradoxically helped to create nationalist feeling among the people who resisted French occupation. Germans, Spaniards, and others who resisted French rule developed a stronger sense of their own national identity in opposition to the French invaders. As stated above, nationalism was therefore spread both by those who embraced the ideals of the Revolution and by those who resisted French dominance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not all forms of nationalism are the same. Historians and political scientists identify several distinct types of nationalist thinking, each with its own character and consequences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Civic nationalism is based on the idea that national identity is defined by shared political values, laws, and citizenship rather than by ethnicity or culture. Under civic nationalism, anyone who accepts the laws and values of the nation can be considered a full member of it, regardless of their ethnic background or language. The French Revolutionary concept of the nation was civic in this sense, defining French identity through commitment to the ideals of liberty and equality rather than through ancestry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ethnic nationalism, by contrast, defines national identity primarily through shared ancestry, language, and culture. Under ethnic nationalism, membership in the nation is determined by birth rather than by choice or political commitment. Ethnic nationalism became particularly important in Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th century, where different ethnic groups were often mixed together within the same empires and territories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cultural nationalism focuses on preserving and promoting the distinctive cultural heritage of a people, including their language, literature, art, and traditions. Cultural nationalism was an important part of the 19th-century nationalist movements in Germany, Ireland, and Czechoslovakia, as intellectuals worked to collect folk traditions, standardize national languages, and create a sense of shared cultural heritage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 19th century was the great age of nationalism in Europe. Inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution and the Romantic movement, which celebrated the distinctive cultures and traditions of different peoples, nationalist movements grew across the continent and produced dramatic changes to the political map of Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Italy and Germany, nationalism took the form of movements to unify fragmented regions into single nation-states. Before the 19th century, both Italy and Germany were divided into dozens of small kingdoms, duchies, and city-states. Italian unification, known as the Risorgimento, was largely completed by 1861 under the leadership of figures including Giuseppe Garibaldi and Count Camillo di Cavour. German unification was achieved by 1871 under the leadership of Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, creating a powerful new German Empire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the multi-ethnic empires of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, nationalism took a different form, driving peoples who felt their distinct identities were being suppressed to demand independence or autonomy. Greeks won independence from Ottoman rule following a war of independence in the 1820s. Serbs, Bulgarians, Romanians, and others similarly used nationalist arguments to demand their own states. The Revolutions of 1848, sometimes called the Spring of Nations, represented the most dramatic expression of nationalist feeling in the middle of the century. Revolutions broke out across Europe as peoples from France to Hungary to the Italian states demanded both liberal political reforms and national self-determination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nationalism was one of the most important causes of World War I, which broke out in 1914. In the Balkans, the desire of Slavic peoples within the Austro-Hungarian Empire for independence or union with neighboring Serbia created intense political tension. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary in Sarajevo in June of 1914 by a Bosnian Serb nationalist was the immediate trigger for the war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Pan-Slavic nationalism, the idea that all Slavic peoples shared a common identity and should support each other, led Russia to back Serbia against Austro-Hungarian pressure. Pan-German nationalism promoted the idea of German greatness and the right of Germany to dominate Central Europe. In France, nationalist feeling focused on recovering the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, which had been lost to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and 1871. In this way, the competing nationalist ambitions of the major European powers contributed directly to the outbreak of the most destructive war the world had seen up to that point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After World War I, nationalism continued to reshape the world in significant ways. The peace settlement that ended the war attempted to reorganize the map of Europe along nationalist lines, creating new nation-states in Central and Eastern Europe such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia from the remains of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. In many cases, however, the complex mixture of ethnic groups across the region made it impossible to draw borders that satisfied all nationalist claims, creating new tensions that would contribute to the outbreak of World War II.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When taken to dangerous extremes in the form of ultranationalism, nationalism was one of the driving forces behind the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1930s, contributing directly to the causes of World War II. In fact, the Nazi ideology of racial nationalism and German superiority was one of the most extreme and destructive expressions of nationalist ideas in history, leading directly to the Holocaust and tens of millions of deaths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the decades after World War II, nationalism became a driving force in the process of decolonization, as peoples in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East used nationalist arguments to demand independence from European colonial powers. India, Ghana, Kenya, Vietnam, and dozens of other countries gained independence through nationalist movements that drew on the same principles of self-determination that European nationalists had championed in the previous century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The significance of nationalism in the history of the modern world is enormous. It transformed the political map of Europe in the 19th century, driving the unification of Germany and Italy and the breakup of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. It contributed to the causes of both World War I and World War II. It drove the great wave of decolonization in the 20th century that ended European colonial empires and created dozens of new independent states.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nationalism has been both a positive and a negative force in history. On the positive side, it gave peoples who were ruled by foreign empires the arguments and the motivation to fight for their own self-government and cultural preservation. On the negative side, when taken to extremes, it has been used to justify discrimination, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and aggressive war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Understanding nationalism matters because it remains one of the most important forces in politics today. The desire of peoples to govern themselves, to preserve their cultural identity, and to be recognized as distinct nations continues to drive political movements around the world. As such, nationalism stands as one of the most significant and complex ideas in the history of the modern world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nationalism is the belief that people who share a common identity, language, and history should govern themselves as an independent nation. This article provides a detailed overview of nationalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[158,144,19,21],"tags":[145,15,159,20,22],"class_list":["post-10525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nationalism","category-age-of-nationalism","category-world-war-i","category-world-war-ii","tag-age-of-nationalism","tag-history","tag-nationalism","tag-world-war-i","tag-world-war-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10525"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10528,"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10525\/revisions\/10528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crunchlearning.com\/website_ec2cbfb0\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}