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13 september 2019
Nationalism is an emotionally loaded term. It should not be like that.
Nationalism refers in the first place to the process which started with the French Revolution whereby a nation creates a state or a state a nation with a linguistically homogeneous territory. An ideology that drives the process can an be called nationalistic. The end result of the process is a nation-state. As a consequence of the nationalistic process multinational states were transformed into linguistically homogeneous nation states. As said, the process started with the French Revolution and accelerated around 1848, after World Wars I and II and after the falling apart of the Sovjet-Union in 1989.
The process can take two different forms. Or the State takes the initiative to form the nation (France, Hungary) or a people, a nation takes the initiative to take hold of a territory of its own and impose its own language in that territory. The first process functions top-down while the second one is a bottom-up process. Both are “democratic” in the sense that in both cases the whole nation should learn the same language. Before the French Revolution only the elites had to be familiar with the language of the state. After the French Revolution everybody should learn that language. The new French Republic wanted to be sure that all citizens understood what the revolution was all about and did not hesitate to impose the French language and eliminate languages like Provencal, Breton and Flemish. In that sense the bottom-up approach is more democratic than the top-down approach because in the bottom-up approach a people or nation invoked the right to self-determination to create its own state with its own territory. That in such process the previous rulers were deported, executed or assimilated is then considered acceptable collateral damage.
To summarize : nationalism is a historical process that was realized in Europe in the last twohundred years and led to the creation of linguistically homogeneous nation-states. To the degree that the process can be supported by and boils down to the execution of the right to self-determination, nationalism should be evaluated morally in a positive way.
Nationalism, in the meaning explained above, does not contain a feeling of superiority versus other nations. Nationalism can of course be mingled with phenomena like imperialism and racism, but there is no intrinsic link between these phenomena. Imperialism and racism can as well be linked to ideologies like socialism and capitalism. Socialistists who tend to impose their ideology by force are imperialists ; in case a surge against a rich class is framed in terms of a surge against a certain race or nation, it becomes racist. Capitalists can deem some races so inferior that slavery and imperialism become acceptable.