Nationalism and National Identity in Politics

Core Idea

Nationalism is the political project of aligning national identity with state boundaries and creating or strengthening national communities. Nationalism can be civic (shared political institutions and values) or ethnic (shared ancestry and culture), and can motivate both liberation from imperialism and territorial expansion. National identity shapes foreign policy, domestic conflict, and state legitimacy.

Explainer

You have studied state power and sovereignty — the way states claim exclusive authority over territory and populations, backed by the monopoly on legitimate violence. But state power alone does not make a nation. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a powerful state; it was not a nation-state. Nationalism is the ideology that claims state authority should align with national communities — that the boundaries of the state should match the boundaries of a people who share identity, culture, or history. Understanding nationalism requires separating two concepts that are often fused: the nation (a community that imagines itself as sharing a common identity) and the state (the political-legal organization that claims sovereignty over a territory). Nationalism is the political project of making those two things coincide.

The fundamental distinction in nationalism scholarship is between civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism. Civic nationalism defines the nation by shared commitment to political institutions and values — citizenship is available to anyone who accepts those terms, regardless of ancestry or culture. The French republican tradition is paradigmatic: one becomes French by assimilating into French civic culture and accepting republican principles. Ethnic nationalism defines the nation by shared descent, language, culture, or religion — membership is based on who you are, not what you choose. German Romanticism supplied the theoretical foundations: the Volk as an organic community bound by language and Geist. In practice, most nationalist movements blend both elements, but the relative emphasis matters enormously for how they treat minorities, immigrants, and territorial claims. Ethnic nationalisms tend to be exclusive and can mobilize toward cleansing or expulsion; civic nationalisms are more inclusive but can still impose assimilationist pressures.

Benedict Anderson's concept of the imagined community is the most influential account of how nations work. Nations are imagined because no member can know most other members personally — the sense of shared identity is constructed through common media, literature, language, educational systems, and commemorative practices. This does not mean nations are fake; it means that national identity is socially produced, not biologically given. Newspapers, in Anderson's account, were critical: reading the same daily paper created a sense of simultaneous community across a vast territory. Today, national broadcasting, state educational curricula, public monuments, and national holidays perform the same function — they are nation-building technologies that create and sustain the imagined bond.

Nation-building becomes a central task of new states, especially postcolonial ones that inherited colonial borders cutting across pre-existing ethnic and linguistic communities. The state faces a choice — or more often a set of pressures — about which identity to promote as the national one. Selecting a single ethnic or linguistic group as the national standard (as many postcolonial states have done by choosing one colonial language as the official tongue) creates winners and losers among existing communities and can generate conflicts that destabilize the state. Federal arrangements, power-sharing, and official multilingualism are alternative designs that attempt to hold diverse communities together without requiring cultural assimilation.

Nationalism's relationship to the international state system is circular. The norm of national self-determination — that nations deserve their own states — underpinned decolonization and continues to motivate independence movements (Catalonia, Kurdistan, Quebec, Scotland). But the very concept of sovereignty you studied assumes that existing state borders are legitimate, which means self-determination claims threaten the territorial integrity of existing states. International law has never fully resolved this tension. When states are stable, the international community favors territorial integrity; when states collapse or commit atrocities against minorities, self-determination claims gain traction. This tension is not a technical problem to be solved but a structural feature of a world organized simultaneously around state sovereignty and national identity — two principles that point in different directions when the state and the nation do not match.