It is usually the ubiquitous things that we least notice in everyday life and about which we know the least. In English there is even an idiom for this:“Hiding in plain sight ', hiding 'in sight'. This applies in particular to things that shape our lives day after day but are somehow too abstract to always be visible. This includes the way we organize our states. Today we mostly accept without questioning that we live in a nation state. After all, everyone in the world lives in such states! It's the most normal thing imaginable, and few would think of calling this type of nation-state organization "nationalism." Nationalism. That's actually a synonym for right-wing extremism. That's not true.
After all, we live in a world in which the national is above everything else. Almost all countries in the world see themselves as nation states. They are a state by and for a specific nation. As a result, those citizens who do not meet national criteria are not really part of the system. They are then called either foreigners or minorities. Either way, something is wrong with them. The fact that this form of government is quite normal for the vast majority of us today also makes it so unquestioned. But nationalism also appears to have an ancient history of its own. Nations have always existed and the nation state is therefore the natural organizational form of man. The pinnacle of our development, so to speak. In fact, it's a damn young invention.
What is nationalism?
It's such a thing with "normality". Just because something seems normal to us today doesn't mean that it was always and everywhere like that. So too with nationalism. If you look around in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, there can be no question of that at all! At that time, the states of Europe were still what they had been for a long time:kingdoms and empires. The "state borders" mostly had nothing to do with ethnic or linguistic borders. A state simply ended where one king's rule ended and another began. The result of countless wars, barter transactions, donations and inheritances. It would therefore not have occurred to any of the inhabitants of these countries to define themselves as members of the "nation" of their empire. You had family, village and the respective local count. You knew where you belonged and didn't need a national definition. In short:you weren't German or French. One lived in Oberhausen or Noisy-le-Sec.
Nationalism without a modern state is therefore completely unthinkable. In pre-modern, non-centralized states, the question did not even arise. However, this idea was by far not always a consensus in the scientific treatment. For a long time, too, the debate was dominated by theories which, like the nationalists themselves, proceeded from the ancient roots of today's nations, which then consequently culminated in today's nation states. Today, however, most researchers represent a different idea:the so-called modernism theory. It goes in exactly the opposite direction:without modernity there is no nationalism, because in a pre-modern society the problems that nationalism supposedly solves do not even arise.
A product of modernity
With this modern age, especially with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, interesting problems actually arose for the states of Europe. Up to this point in time, the rulers of Europe still saw themselves as installed by God's grace. Their power, at least in theory, did not come from any source in this world, but was preordained by a greater power. There was of course little reason to particularly legitimize this rule in the direction of the common people. And there were other ways to keep the nobility, who were important for the rulers, in a good mood. With gifts, violence or a mixture of these, for example. For the ruled, on the other hand, the question of identity did not arise in pre-modern times either. As a marker of identity, there was social class, there was belonging to a village and, on a large scale, there was religion. It didn't matter too much what language you spoke.
At the latest with the French Revolution, however, this system crumbled on both sides. One way of restoring the stability of the state was offered by nationalism, which had existed for some time as a theoretical-romantic construct. The former subjects of the French king became citizens with the revolution, which incidentally also brought the concept of foreigners into the world. Belonging to the state was now suddenly determined by origin. French parents had French children. At a time when religion and status were becoming less and less important, a new identity factor emerged:the nation. The rulers, in turn, now saw themselves as national leaders who served the people and the nation. A win-win situation. This is the basics of the modernist theory of nationalism research, as first advocated by Ernest Gellner in his book "Nations and Nationalism".
The invention of today's nation
With this we have almost arrived with the story in the present. After France and England, where proto-national ideas already had deep roots, nationalism prevailed as a new idea of the state in more and more European countries. Today, almost every European state sees itself as a nation state. It has become perfectly normal for humanity to identify primarily with a nation and language. Religion, class and all other things that make us different play a smaller and smaller role. Yet this community of the nation is damned impractical! You define yourself as part of a group, although you will never meet and get to know the overwhelming majority of the other group members. That was fundamentally different in village communities, a dilemma that Benedict Anderson tries to explain with his theory of imagined communities. Incidentally, a surprisingly easy-to-read and entertaining book that I can only recommend.
He also first gets to the bottom of the idea of nationalism itself and concludes that it is often misleadingly described as an ideology, which clouds our understanding of the whole. And that's certainly true, at least in my experience. Politicians and academics alike often conflate nationalism with phenomena such as communism or liberalism. In fact, however, it does not function as such an ideology. The people of the world are not just indoctrinated and all follow an ideology because they think nationalism is so great. Rather, they live in a nationalistic system, which is why they no longer notice it. And in that sense, nationalism is much closer to other systems like religion than ideologies like communism.
In connection with the central state, nationalism then quickly had the opportunity to spread in people's lives. This is exactly why nationalism is modern! The centralized school system, administration and national media used the newly discovered national languages as early as the 18th century and suddenly people who had basically nothing in common and lived hundreds of kilometers apart had very similar life experiences. They learned the same things at school, they read the same newspapers day after day. Before you knew it, the idea of nationalism – totally unimaginable a hundred years earlier – had become the new normal in Europe by the end of the 19th century. The world followed and soon people were willing to die for their "nation". So in that sense it really is like religion.
I wrote this article because the topic of nationalism and its nature came up in this week's podcast episode. I'm talking to Danijel and Krsto from the "News from the Ballaballa Balkans" podcast about national myths in the Balkans. After reading this article, you're well prepared for it, so listen!