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Tuesday, November 13, 2012

What is NATIONALISM?

alone it is now no longer peculiar to the Christian West. (Hayes, 1960, p. 1)

Again, however, in that respect argon complications. The sixteenth part century was long before the rise of republicalism in the formal guts. Yet if one sees or reads the English diachronic plays of Shakespe be, such as "Henry V," one certainly gets a sense of something like English -- or even British -- patriotism (Shakespeargon, n.d.). In one scene, the " matter" clean-cutions among English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish officers in Henry's army are played for humorous effect, yet they are all fighting in one cause. The French, on the separate hand, are stereotyped in a distinctively chauvinistic way, and the play as a whole has a thoroughly nationalistic spirit.

Today, likewise, nationalism is sometimes closely linked to culturality, plainly sometimes not. Nazism, obviously, cast German nationalism in intensely ethnic and racial terms. In the United States, in that respect are rival traditions of racially-tinged nativism, and of inclusive nationalism. In Brazil, another racially-mixed society, there are racial tensions, but also a sense that Brazilians of African, European, and Indian ancestry (or any mix of the three) all share a Brazilian-ness, and indeed that all three heritages are integral to the indwelling Brazil. Clearly, past, no simple definition captures the whole meaning of nation and nationalism.


school of thought was formulated. Once the doctrine had been

the French Revolution, but nations existed before the

There has never in history been a Kurdish national state, but there is a distinct Kurdish ethnicity, and out of the self-consciousness of this ethnicity arises Kurdish nationalism. On the other hand, Switzerland has a population with three distinct primary ethnicities, French, German, and Italian, each corresponding to a modern adjacent nation-state, and French ethnicity at least to an "old" nation. Yet Swiss of all ethnicities are purely Swiss, bound by a long common history of statehood.
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alism in its formal sense is commonly dated to the French Revolution. According to Hugh Seton-Watson,

The doctrine of nationalism dates from the age of

Seton-Watson, Hugh (1977). Nations and States. Boulder: Westview.

Reviewing the above, we find that nationalism as we extrapolate it today seems to be compounded of two elements, each of which may be present in varying degrees. One is ethnic identity, the other is a state structure. Where neither one is present, there can be no real sense of nationhood. But there appears to be no need for both to be present.

Of the two, ethnic unity seems more fundamental. Since the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, England had been ruled first by a Scottish dynasty, and then by a German one, but English national identity was not weakened. Poland disappeared from the political map entirely in the course of the eighteenth century, yet a distinct attack identity remained. Thus, to one student of nationalism, the essential feature of nationhood is " classify identities rather than institutional structures such as the state" (Armstrong, 1982, p. 3).

throng identity, clearl
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