In today's world, think of nationalism as a distinctly old-fashioned liqueur, like absinthe, that's enjoying a burst of renewed popularity. Politicians of all stripes have recently been adding a splash of it to their policy cocktails to get the public's attention. Worse yet, some of the more aggressive politicians like Modi, Putin, and Donald Trump are drinking the stuff straight. Beware: undiluted nationalism can go right to the head and make you do crazy things like invading neighboring countries or trying to overturn elections.
So, here's a question to consider: at a time when the most extreme problems facing the world -- climate change, resource depletion, and a possible nuclear Armageddon -- know no borders, why has such a parochial philosophy once again become the global ideology du jour?
Not So Flat
Like colonialism, nationalism was supposed to be extinct by now, a relic of another century, an ideology that should emit a distinct odor of mothballs. After all, over the past hundred years, the prerogatives of nation-states have been gradually eroded by U.N. treaties, the growth of transnational corporations, and the spread of a global civil society.
At a time when everyone seems in touch, no matter where we are geographically speaking, borders seem so nineteenth-century. In such a flat world, crisscrossed by TikTok, Facebook, and Zoom, shouldn't nationalism be your granddaddy's moldy old philosophy?
During the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union each had its post-nationalist dream. With proletarian internationalism, communism was supposed to leave nationalism in the dust, as was capitalism with its transnational corporations and its borderless business world. The European Economic Community -- later the European Union (EU) -- came up with an even stronger variation on that theme as European countries began to remove barriers to trade, then to the movement of capital, and ultimately to the movement of people.
In one scenario, the EU was to serve as the building block for a more peaceful, far less nationalist global order. As Richard Caplan and I wrote in an introduction to a 1996 book on Europe's new nationalism, "National differences -- Scottish kilts, Polish hand-kissing, Swiss neutrality -- would presumably continue; [however] nationalist differences, which made the continent a killing ground for centuries, would gradually fade into the history books." The rest of the world, astounded by the tranquil prosperity of European integration, would presumably follow suit.
That, unfortunately, didn't happen. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, nationalism came roaring back with a vengeance, particularly in Europe. Anti-immigrant fervor spiked in eastern Germany, new independence movements gained ground in Scotland and Catalonia, and, most terrifyingly, the former country of Yugoslavia dissolved into a bloodbath of ethnic groups turning on one another.
In that immediate post-Cold War era, nationalism proved to be an effective tool wielded by the periphery against a domineering center. Decades of formal accommodation within Yugoslavia among Albanians, Bosniaks, Croats, Serbs, and Slovenes produced much intermarriage along with all too many suppressed inter-ethnic resentments, as well as rage at Belgrade for dictating policies to the other Yugoslav republics. Fratricide also surged in the former Soviet Union between Armenians and Azeris, among ethnic groups in Georgia, and most recently, of course, between Russians and Ukrainians. When not directing outright hostility toward the Kremlin, as in Ukraine, these post-Soviet conflicts displaced their anger onto regional power centers like Tbilisi and Baku.
Nor has the supposedly post-nationalist European Union proved immune to such trends. Just replace Moscow or Belgrade with the regulatory "overreach" of the EU's capital city, Brussels, and the last eight years of political developments make more sense, starting with Great Britain's Brexit vote in 2016. A disgust with supposedly interfering Eurocrats merged with a hitherto underappreciated nativism to send that otherwise cosmopolitan country skittering into a parochial corner.
Inspired by the British vote, Frexit, Nexit, and Grexit seemed to loom on the horizon until European sovereignistas decided that it was more useful to hijack the EU's institutions than abandon them completely. The far right not only took over national governments in Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, and almost France but also challenged Europeanists on their own turf in European Parliamentary elections. In fact, in June, the far right registered its best results ever and has formed both the third and fourth largest voting blocs in that parliament.
Why Nationalism, Why Now?
Nationalism was initially a weapon deployed against imperial centers -- with the French rising up against their king, the Greeks revolting against the Ottomans, and virtually all of Latin America breaking away from Spanish or Portuguese colonials. While it can still serve that function today (just ask the Ukrainians), it's now more often mobilized in response to a different kind of power: globalization and its political, economic, and social avatars.
The growth of the economic version of globalization, which began with steamships and the telegraph and, in our time, accelerated to the container ship and the Internet, has led, not surprisingly, to serious pushback. Nationalists now decry the way the architects of the global economy have lined the pockets of the rich, while robbing nation-states of the tools to steer their own economies. In a classic version of bait and switch, those architects of the world's economy justified the removal of tariff walls and the construction of a global assembly line by pointing not to the increased wealth of the billionaire class, but to all the millions of people lifted from poverty.
Neglected until recently were the enormous numbers of middle- and working-class people who lost their jobs, savings, and dignity to the tsunami of globalization. Although some of the disgruntled did direct their anger at the "globalists," they also focused it on that other vector of globalization, the ever-increasing number of desperate border-crossers searching for jobs and better lives. In that way, the rage at being left behind merged with a potent xenophobia, fueling a populist rejection of traditional parties of the center-left and center-right that backed the economic and social transformations of globalization.
But don't forget the backlash of the sovereignistas, those distinctly nationalistic autocratic leaders like Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, Syria's Bashar al-Assad, and the military junta in Myanmar who continue to fervently defend the inviolability of their countries' laws and culture. Those sovereignistas have taken aim at international agreements that chipped away at national sovereignty by limiting what countries can produce (not chlorofluorocarbons, thanks to the Montreal Protocol), whom they can discriminate against (not minority groups, according to various human rights agreements), and how many people they can kill (not entire communities, as detailed in the genocide convention).
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