Definition
Nationalism is the belief that people who share a common language, history, culture, or homeland form a nation, and that the nation is the right unit to govern itself within its own state. It bundles identity and loyalty together, telling individuals that their primary political allegiance belongs to the nation rather than to a dynasty, a religion, a region, or an empire.
As a major political force, nationalism took shape in the long nineteenth century, drawing on the French Revolution's idea that sovereignty belongs to a people rather than a king. It is unusually flexible: the same conviction can weld scattered states into one country, as in Germany and Italy, or split a continent-spanning empire into many countries, as in Latin America, the Balkans, and the post-1945 colonies. Two hundred years on, it is still the default way modern populations imagine themselves, and still the language reached for whenever that self-image feels threatened.
Why it matters
How it works
A French Revolution idea that Napoleon spread by accident
Nationalism's deep root is the French Revolution's claim that sovereignty belongs to a people rather than a monarch. Napoleon weaponised that idea in his own interest — but, by conquering most of continental Europe, he also exported it to populations that promptly turned it against him. Dissolving the Holy Roman Empire, consolidating dozens of petty German principalities, exporting the Code Napoléon, and forcing subject peoples to fight French wars simultaneously stoked resentment against French rule and gave those peoples the political vocabulary to organise against him as nations. German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin American national consciousness all sharpened in opposition to Napoleonic occupation. His most durable political legacy was thus the one he least intended: the rise of the nation-state across the nineteenth century traces partly to the shock of his empire and the imagined communities that formed in resisting it.
Unification: welding small states into one
In Italy and Germany, nationalism worked centripetally. Until 1871 the territory we now call Germany was a loose patchwork of kingdoms, duchies, and free cities held together by language and culture rather than by government. Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian chancellor, manufactured unification through three short, winnable wars — against Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870–71 — each framed as defensive but each engineered to deliver the consent of the southern German kingdoms to a Prussian-led empire. Unification was less the natural outcome of shared ethnicity than a deliberate political product, sold to wary kingdoms by a chancellor who understood that crisis builds nations faster than negotiation does. Italy followed a parallel arc. In both cases, the conviction that people who share an identity should govern themselves welded the pieces together.
Independence: splitting empires apart
In Spanish America and Haiti, the same emotion worked centrifugally. Colonised peoples who shared culture, language, or simply a colonial address with one another, but answered to a distant foreign owner, used nationalism as the argument for breaking away. The Haitian revolution produced the only successful large-scale revolt of enslaved people in history and terrified the slaveholding world precisely because it had succeeded. Across mainland Spanish America, creole and mestizo populations stripped away the empire in waves of independence wars between roughly 1810 and 1825. The corporate analogy is exact: regional offices that share language, customs, and history but answer to a distant owner. Some merge into one strong national division; others break away entirely. Both moves come from the same belief — that people who share an identity should govern themselves.
Resistance to colonisation: nationalism as a weapon of the weak
Across nineteenth-century Asia and Africa, nationalism took the form of revolt against European rule, even when those revolts failed. The 1857 Sepoy Rebellion — known in India as the First War for Independence — was crushed at a cost of roughly 800,000 Indian lives and tightened British control rather than loosening it, but it kept the demand for independence alive for ninety more years. The Boxer Rebellion around 1900 mobilised Chinese resentment of foreign spheres of influence and missionary activity; an Eight-Nation Alliance broke the siege of Beijing, imposed crushing reparations, and helped topple the Qing dynasty by 1912. Vietnamese rebellions were put down by France; bringing the Philippines under American control after 1898 cost roughly 200,000 civilian lives. The clear exception was Ethiopia's defeat of Italy at Adwa in 1896. In this era resistance rarely won, but it preserved the national idea that twentieth-century decolonisation would finally cash in.
Modernisation as a survival strategy
Japan's Meiji Restoration (1868–1912) shows nationalism fused with industrial reform as an explicit defence of independence. Watching China lose sovereignty to European powers, Japan studied the West and adopted its instruments — factories, railways, banking, coal mines, modern communications, a compulsory imperial army from 1871, schools rebuilt on the Western model, students sent abroad, and foreign specialists hired. Within a single generation an agrarian feudal society became an industrial power, defeated China in 1894–95, and shocked the world by defeating Russia in 1904–05. The lesson was generalisable: modernisation was not imitation for its own sake but a calculated national project. Sun Yat-sen's "Three Principles of the People" for republican China — nationalism (against foreign encroachment), democracy (against autocracy), and people's livelihood (against extreme inequality) — set the same frame, and both the Nationalists and the Communists still claim him as a founder.
Nationalism as wartime fuel: the M-A-I-N pressures of 1914
By 1914, four long-building pressures had made Europe a powder keg, remembered with the mnemonic M-A-I-N: Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, and Nationalism. Each pressure alone was manageable; together they formed a system in which one declaration of war forced a dozen more. Nationalism was the fuel. It filled every great power with pride and ambition, and it gave stateless ethnic groups — Serbs, Poles, Irish, Armenians — a burning desire for independence. The Balkans, full of new and restless nations, were the most flammable region of all. When the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, the alliance system did exactly what it had been designed to do, and a regional quarrel became a continental catastrophe with thirty-seven million casualties. Bismarck's elective wars worked spectacularly for one generation and catastrophically for the next: Wilhelm II tried to repeat the trick on a continental scale and discovered that war is much easier to start than to control.
Aggressive nationalism: fascism, militarism, and the totalitarian turn
In the interwar period nationalism merged with grievance, propaganda, and economic ruin to produce regimes that placed the state above the individual. Mussolini's fascist movement in Italy — bitter over its meagre gains from Versailles and afraid of communism — placed the nation above the people and forbade disagreement; the king made him prime minister after the 1922 March on Rome, and "Mussolini Is Always Right" became propaganda doctrine. Japan, an island nation poor in natural resources and battered by the Depression, sought what it lacked in its neighbours' lands: it annexed Korea in 1910, invaded Manchuria in 1931, invaded mainland China in 1937, and committed the Nanjing Massacre. The Weimar Republic, hated by socialists and nationalists alike and unable to stabilise the currency, lost legitimacy faster than parliamentary institutions could be defended; the Nazi Party offered a story — national rebirth, scapegoats for the defeat, restored greatness — that filled the space the institutions had vacated. The pattern recurs across very different ideologies: when democratic institutions are stripped of credibility before a credible replacement exists, the replacement that arrives is rarely democratic.
Self-determination after 1945: decolonisation and Zionism
World War II broke the European empires from two directions at once: it drained the imperial powers of money and military strength, and it discredited the moral claim that Europeans were fit to rule others. Between 1947 and the 1960s the fastest collapse of empire in history produced dozens of new Asian and African nations, nearly tripled the membership of the United Nations, and created the modern "Global South." But independence was not the same as stability — borders drawn by departing colonisers ignored ethnic and religious realities, leaving partitioned families, contested territories like Kashmir, and fragile new states. The 1948 founding of Israel sits inside the same wave. Zionism had existed for decades as a fringe political project — Theodor Herzl crystallised it in Der Judenstaat (1896) after the Dreyfus affair — but the Holocaust converted a competing vision of Jewish modernity into an existential project. The UN's 1947 partition of British Mandate Palestine and the war that followed produced an Israeli state, the displacement of roughly 700,000 Palestinians (the Nakba), and a conflict in which two genuine national claims point at the same finite territory.
Twenty-first century revival: ethno-nationalism in the West
A century of expectation that nationalism would fade as cosmopolitan institutions matured has been confounded since the 2010s. As China and India rise, demographics shift, and the relative dominance of the West fades, white-nationalist and ethno-nationalist movements have moved from the fringe into mainstream politics across the United States and Europe — Brexit (2016), Trump's two US presidencies, Le Pen's National Rally in France, the AfD in Germany, Wilders in the Netherlands, Meloni in Italy, Orbán in Hungary. Many of the most active participants are younger than their less-radicalised parents and grandparents, so the story is not simply inherited. One mechanism is moral self-licensing: a society that has just congratulated itself on a civil-rights victory can paradoxically become more comfortable expressing the prejudices it claims to have surmounted. A second is compound identity anxiety — the lived experience of a country becoming less powerful in the world and less demographically central to the people who once defined it. Ethno-nationalism offers a coherent (if dangerous) story that addresses both anxieties at once: make the country great again externally, and preserve its traditional character internally. The European Union, built on common law, currency, and freedom of movement, has become the natural target of movements that define themselves against multinational governance.
Why nationalism is so flexible — and so durable
Nationalism works by drawing a boundary around a group and giving that group a story. Shared symbols — a flag, an anthem, a remembered past, a common school curriculum, a war memorial, a televised sporting event — make millions of strangers feel like one family. That feeling can be channelled constructively, building public institutions, civic pride, and the capacity for collective sacrifice, or destructively, defining outsiders as threats. Whether it unites or inflames depends almost entirely on whether its story is inclusive (the nation is whoever participates in the project) or exclusive (the nation is whoever shares the blood, language, or faith). The same emotional machinery that built Italy, Germany, India, Israel, and the post-colonial states also produced the wars of 1914 and 1939 and the populist revivals of the present. Every encounter with nationalism in history is worth asking the same question: which direction is it pushing — toward inclusion or exclusion, toward union or independence — and who benefits from the answer.