Nation-State and
are mostly oriented toward their own citizens. In
Nationalism
SINIŠA MALEŠEVIĆ
University College Dublin, Ireland
TAMARA PAVASOVIĆ TROŠT
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
A nation-state is a form of polity which derives its
political legitimacy from the claims that it repre-
sents a particular nation. This social organization
is characterized by clearly demarcated territory,
centralized political authority, and the propensity
to legitimately monopolize the use of violence,
taxation, education, and legislation over the terri-
tory it controls (Malešević, 2013). A nation-state
is the dominant form of polity in the modern era
and is also popularly regarded as the only legit-
imate form of territorial political organization.
Nevertheless, this contemporary dominance of
the nation-state model is historically speaking a
very recent development.
The Rise of Nation-States
Whereas human beings have lived in different
forms of state for over 10,000 years, it is only
in the last three centuries that the nation-state
has gradually been established as the principal
mode of human sedentary existence. For much
of history, empires, patrimonial kingdoms, and
city-states were the prevailing mode of state orga-
nization, and their organizational and ideological
structure differs profoundly from the ideal type
of the nation-state. For example, in contrast to
nation-states that have stable and internation-
ally recognized borders, the classical imperial
orders had frontiers where territorial claims were
constantly shifting, were regularly contested,
and often poorly defined. This organizational
difference was deeply rooted in the ideological
disparity between empires and nation-states:
While the imperial orders were universalist in a
sense that they were perceived to be the epicenter
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Edited by George Ritzer and Chris Rojek.
© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosn003.pub2
of the whole (known) world, the nation-states
other words, since traditional empires, such as the
ancient Chinese or Roman Empire, were bent on
conquering the entire world, they tended to legit-
imize their existence in global terms by invoking
universalist doctrines such as religious canons,
philosophical principles, or civilizing missions
(e.g., Roman humanitas, Chinese Confucianism,
or later French oeuvre civilisatrice). In contrast,
nation-states are founded on the particularist
principles (i.e., nationalism) that generally center
on the unique and special characteristics of one’s
nation. Furthermore, nation-states differ from
empires in terms of hierarchal order: Whereas
empires presuppose the existence of inherent
status-based rights and obligations where one’s
lineage determines one’s position for life, the
nation-state model is built on the idea that there
are no innate privileges and that all citizens are
of equal moral worth. This does not necessarily
mean that nation-states have no social hierar-
chies, but only that, unlike traditional empires,
they are nominally committed to the principles
of moral equality of their citizens.
Another important feature of a nation-state
model, which differentiates it further from the
imperial orders, is the emphasis on the cultural
cohesion of its populace. Although no nation-
state in the world is culturally homogeneous,
all such polities are established around the
principles that foster national unity and glorify
standardized, hence relatively uniform, models
of nationhood. Even though some nation-states
might be more open than others toward mul-
ticultural and other pluralist forms of rule, the
ideological and organizational structure of the
nation-state model as such tends to push it toward
cultural homogeneity. The main reason for this is
the fact that, unlike empires where society-wide
cultural practices generally do not have political
meaning, the nation-state emerged as, and con-
tinues to be defined by, politicization of cultural
difference. Simply put, unlike empires where
culture was used to reinforce social hierarchies
between the aristocracy and the commoners, in
modern polities culture operates as the social glue
2 N AT I O N- S TAT E
that binds the citizens of individual nation-states
together (Gellner, 1983).
Finally, nation-states also differ from empires
and other premodern forms of polity in their
reliance on secular modes of organization. The
principal sources of political legitimacy in the
modern era have largely shifted from the reli-
gious and other supernatural authorities toward
the citizens (i.e., “the people”) as the primary
raison d’être of modern states. This is not to say
that religion has disappeared from the public
sphere or the constitutions of modern states. It
is quite obvious that some contemporary states,
including Iran, Sudan, and Mauritania strongly
invoke theocratic principles as a part of their
polity’s legitimacy. However, even in such cases,
the state’s organizational structure is heavily
dependent on the existence of secular institutions
and secular principles (e.g. parliaments, presi-
dents, economic systems, the moral equality of
the citizens, etc.) This organizational secularism
of modern nation-states differs substantially from
the nonsecular sources of legitimacy in the pre-
modern world where one would justify the right
to rule invoking the doctrine of divine origins of
monarchs, religious privilege, or kinship-based
mythologies (Brubaker, 2015). In this sense, a
nation-state is the only model of polity organiza-
tion the existence of which is legitimized through
secular concepts.
Although nation-states differ profoundly from
empires, city-states, and other models of polity,
they do not emerge ex nihilo. Conventional
historical narratives emphasize the centrality
of political revolutions for the formation of
nation-states. Hence the French and American
revolutions, together with the Latin American
wars of independence, were often identified as
the pivotal moments in the development and
worldwide proliferation of the nation-state model
(Anderson, 1983; Breuilly, 1993). There is no
doubt that all these three major violent historical
episodes have contributed substantially toward
the transformation of the world. The American
Revolution (1765–1783) inaugurated the idea of
a self-governing republic breaking up from the
tutelage of the larger (British) imperial order.
This early experiment in state-building and
nation-formation drew on the Greek and Roman
traditions of republicanism as well as on the
Enlightenment ideals that prioritized individual
AND N AT I O N A L I S M
autonomy, reason, and rationality, and the moral
equality of human beings over the traditional
monarchist models of rule embedded in the
established and inherited status hierarchies. In
this sense, the declaration of independence issued
by the representatives of the 13 American colonies
became a symbol of a successful anti-imperial
struggle that inspired many nineteenth- and
twentieth-century nationalist movements. In a
similar vein, the French Revolution (1789–1799)
represented a break with the ancien régime as
it too was deeply influenced by Enlightenment
principles. This is clearly evident in the guiding
motto of the Revolution – liberté, égalité, frater-
nité – as well as in the Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen (1789), which emphasized
that the state’s sovereignty does not reside in the
monarch but in the nation, and that the nation
consists of free individuals equally protected
by the law. Some of these ideals were just as
present in the early and mid-nineteenth-century
Latin American wars of independence, where
successful rebellions and wars forced Spanish and
Portuguese imperial orders to recognize the inde-
pendence of Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, and
other Latin American states (Anderson, 1983).
Nevertheless, these three historical episodes,
as important as they are, have not obliterated
the imperial and other traditional models of
political organization. Instead empires remained
the dominant form of rule well into the twentieth
century. In some instances they maintained their
traditional models of organization, as was the
case with the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, or the
Russian Empire under the Romanovs, while other
states combined national and imperial features.
For example, France, Britain, the Netherlands,
and Belgium were all involved in nationalizing
projects at home while also pursuing imperial
expansion abroad. The new American republic
also fits into this pattern as its rulers were soon
involved in imperial-style territorial expansion
throughout the North American continent: con-
tinuous conflicts with the native population, the
war of 1812, the Mexican–American war, the
Spanish–American war, and so on.
Although the American and French revolutions
introduced and to some extent institutionalized
the ideas and practices of nationhood, this pro-
cess of transition from an imperial to the national
world was rather slow and uneven. Not only
 N AT I O N- S TAT E
were rulers often stretched between imperial
and national ambitions, but the majority of the
population were still far off from seeing them-
selves as full-fledged members of their nation.
As Eugen Weber (1976) demonstrated convinc-
ingly, even at the end of the nineteenth century
and early twentieth century, most citizens of
France identified themselves in local, religious, or
kinship-based terms rather than as members of
the French nation. The process of turning peas-
ants into Frenchmen and women was very slow
and patchy. Similarly, Walker Connor’s (1990)
work indicates that the overwhelming majority
of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Euro-
pean immigrants to the United States had little
or no sense of what nation they belonged to, as
they would regularly describe themselves not in
national but only in local, regional, religious, or
kinship-based terms.
The key issue here is that the shift from empire
to nation-state entails complex and protracted
social transformations including the substantially
increased organizational capacity of states and
their ability to penetrate deeply into their respec-
tive societies. In other words, the society-wide
spread of nationalist ideas and practices is depen-
dent on a variety of organizational and ideological
factors: the existence of transport and communi-
cation networks that successfully integrate social
order, the presence of centralized and effective
political authority that can shape that social order,
the expanded coercive capacity of governments
that can tax their citizens at source and also recruit
them in times of war, the development of society-
wide and state-controlled educational systems
that help mould new generations of loyal citi-
zenry, the existence of mass media networks that
stimulate the emergence of a shared public sphere,
and so on. It is only when these organizational
processes were fully in place that nationalism
could gradually become the dominant ideological
discourse (Mann, 1995; Malešević, 2013).
Nationalism
Nationalism is an ideology built around ideas
and practices that recognize the nation as the
central building block of group solidarity and
the only legitimate unit for the sovereign territo-
rial organization of political rule. In nationalist
AND N AT I O N A L I S M 3
understanding, nations are perceived to be
culturally unique expressions of collective being,
and are, as such, regarded as the natural and
optimal units of social organization. For the
proponents of nationalist ideology, nationhood
stands above other group allegiances, and not
expressing loyalty to one’s nation is regularly
understood to be a type of moral alienation.
Most nationalist discourses conceive of fully
developed nations as entities that are sovereign
in their decision-making, culturally autonomous,
economically independent, and politically free
(Anderson, 1983; Malešević, 2013).
The central conceptual pillars of nationalist
ideology, such as autonomy, political sovereignty,
unique cultural features, shared destiny, and col-
lective freedom, have all developed in the wake
of profound ideational conflicts between the
philosophies of Enlightenment and romanticism.
Traditional accounts often associate the Enlight-
enment with the promotion of individual rights,
reason and rationality over superstition, per-
sonal liberty, and tolerance, while romanticism is
conventionally linked to the collective emotional
self-awareness, cultural distinctiveness, spontane-
ity, mysticism, naturalism, and the affirmation
of the collective heritage and shared past. In this
context, the Enlightenment tradition is generally
perceived to have influenced the emergence
and development of civic or political models of
nationalism, whereas the heritage of romanticism
has been connected to the rise of ethnic or cul-
tural nationalisms. The civic model of nationalist
ideology is often attributed to the polities where
states have developed before nations, or where
the states and nations emerged together, such was
the case in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
France, the United States, or Britain. In this civic
version of nationalism, nationhood is conceptu-
alized around the political and territorial markers
of membership: The nation is perceived to be
a voluntary association of individuals. In the
famous pamphlet of Ernest Renan (2018 [1882]),
nation is no more than a “daily plebiscite” where
individuals have to reaffirm their commitment to
each other on a daily basis. In contrast, the eth-
nic model of nationhood has traditionally been
linked to polities where nations develop before
the states and where the nationalist movements
aspire to establish sovereign and independent
polities for the members of one nation. To achieve
4 N AT I O N- S TAT E
this, ethnic nationalists appeal to shared cultural
heritage including language, ethnic descent, com-
mon customs, shared religion, or collective myths
and memories. German philosopher Johann
Fichte’s Address to the German Nation (2013
[1808]: 147) is often identified as the quintessen-
tial example of the ethnic nationalist rhetoric. For
example, Fichte emphasizes the significance of
commemorating one’s ancestors: “It is they whom
we must thank – we, the immediate heirs of their
soil, their language, and their way of thinking – for
being Germans still, for being still borne along
on the stream of original and independent life.”
Nevertheless, this well-established dichotomy
between ethnic and civic nationalisms has been
questioned on several grounds. For one thing,
this typology is often deployed to delegitimize or
discredit minority nationalist movements by the
dominant state nationalist discourses. Thus sep-
aratist and postcolonial nationalist movements
are regularly associated with the lack of civility
and rationality that the label “ethnic nationalist”
implies, whereas hegemonic state nationalisms
are rarely questioned, presuming wrongly that
they are based exclusively on voluntary princi-
ples (Brubaker, 2004). For another, as much of
recent empirical research demonstrates, civic
nationalisms are not immune to intolerant and
violent social action (Hall, 2002). Finally, the civic
versus ethnic dichotomy is neither historically
fixed nor predetermined: Nationalist movements
and ideologies change and no specific state or
social organization can be permanently identified
with either of these two types of nationalism.
Hence, rather than simply assuming that one of
these types of nationalist doctrine is inherently
violence prone or predetermined, it is much more
productive to treat nationalism as a dynamic
and scalar concept that can oscillate and move
between these two, and many other, ideal types
(Malešević, 2006, 2013).
Another important feature of nationalist ideol-
ogy is its conceptual and organizational flexibility.
Unlike other political ideologies, from conser-
vatism, liberalism, and socialism to religious
fundamentalism, nationalism is often perceived
to be a free-floating discourse which can success-
fully coexist with the variety of political positions.
Hence one can find rightwing, leftwing, and cen-
trist nationalist movements, and nationalism is
utilized equally by democratic and authoritarian
AND N AT I O N A L I S M
governments. Its intrinsic litheness has led many
analysts to see nationalism as being a less than
a full-fledged ideology. For example, Freeden
(1996: 751) insists that nationalism lacks a set of
unique conceptual attributes that would distin-
guish it clearly from other mainstream ideologies.
For Freeden, nationalism is a thin-centered ideol-
ogy that does not offer its own distinct answers to
the key societal questions such as “social justice,
distribution of resources and conflict manage-
ment which mainstream ideologies address.”
However, these political theory perspectives
focus too much on the intellectual constructs that
underpin specific ideological messages and pay
insufficient attention to the sociological features
of nationalist ideologies. While nationalist ideolo-
gies might conceptually be less elaborate and even
less sophisticated, they are far from being thin ide-
ological discourses. The unprecedented success
of nationalism in the modern era stems in part
from its ability to permeate everyday life – from
public institutions such as schools, hospitals, post
offices, mass media, cemeteries, to the private
sphere including family life, friendships, and
neighborhoods where nationhood can tap into
the microlevel modes of solidarity. In this way
nationalism is a fully embedded and society-wide
phenomenon precisely because it is an ideology
that is central to how subjectivity is formed and
enacted in the modern world (Gellner, 1983;
Malešević, 2018; 2013). Thus, rather than seeing
nationalism as thin ideological discourse, it is
more fruitful to analyze it as the dominant meta-
ideology of contemporary times. In this context
one can distinguish between the two layers of
ideological discourses that underpin all modern
social orders: the normative and the operative
layers of social reality. The normative layer stands
for the official doctrines of the particular nation-
state and can range from the liberal, socialist,
or theocratic, to the conservative and many
other ideologies. In contrast, on the operative
layer all contemporary nation-states inevitably
espouse strong nationcentric understandings of
social reality. For example, on the normative level
Denmark, Iran, and North Korea all subscribe
to very different and in many ways mutually
incompatible normative ideological principles:
liberalism, Twelver Ja’fari Shia Islam, and the
Juche variant of Marxism-Leninism respectively.
Nevertheless, on the operative level – that is the
 N AT I O N- S TAT E
way ideology works in everyday discourses, from
school textbooks to popular novels and adver-
tising – in all these three societies nationalism
functions as the dominant ideology (Malešević,
2006, 2013). It is the operative realm that is crucial
for the continuous reproduction of nationalism
as well as for the legitimacy of any particular
modern political order. The strength of national-
ism often resides in its public invisibility: Being
well grounded in the institutions of modern states
and being constantly reproduced in the everyday
practices of modern societies makes nationalism
a potent social glue that keeps the contemporary
nation-states and their inhabitants together.
Theories of Nationalism
Though many different typologies of the the-
ories of nationalism have been proposed, the
main paradigms can be grouped in four main
camps: primordialism/perennialism, modernism,
ethnosymbolism, and new approaches.
Primordialism
Primordialism, based on the conviction that
nationality is a natural part of human beings,
is typically used in explaining primordial
attachments to ethnic identity. Sociobiological
approaches emphasize the biological bases of
affinity, finding ethnic identity to be rooted
in biological circumstances and nature, while
nations, ethnic groups, and races are derived
from genetic reproductive drives with the goal
of increasing genetic longevity. Ethnicity and
nationalism are perceived to have deep roots
in human nature, while culture and kinship are
understood to play a defining role in human
evolution from time immemorial (Gat, 2013).
Human sociality is seen as focused around prin-
ciples of kin selection (altruistic), reciprocity
(cooperation for mutual benefit), and coercion
(use of force for one-sided benefit); while humans
do not necessarily have a gene for nepotism,
societies practicing nepotism and ethnocentrism
have a selection advantage because kin selection
is a basic blueprint of animal sociality. Myths
of ethnic groupness, thus, actually have roots in
biology, explaining the tendency of individuals
to treat strangers of the same ethnicity as kin.
Cultural approaches, on the other hand, find
AND N AT I O N A L I S M 5
nations to be formed on the basis of attachments
to the “cultural givens” of social existence, and are
seen by those who share them to have an “over-
powering coerciveness in and of themselves”
(Geertz, 1973: 109). The actual intrinsic nature
of ethnic attachments, and the naturalness and
longevity of nations, however, is less relevant
than the fact that individuals experience them
as givens and consequently attribute power to
them. While praised for accounting for emotions
and the intensity of the affect of ethnic appeals,
primordial theories are criticized for taking the
“cultural givens” as too fixed and essentialist, ren-
dering them unable to account for their variance
across people within the same cultural group, nor
for transformations over time.
Perennialism
Perennialism holds that nations are immemorial,
and stresses the historical antiquity of the nation,
wherein claims of the historical basis of the nation
are empirically supported by historiography
and archaeology. Perennialist approaches have
three main variants: continuous and recurrent
perennialism and neoperennialist approaches.
Continuous perennialism posits that some nations
have continuous histories, and have indeed
existed, in continuity, since antiquity, allowing
us to differentiate between old (continuous)
and new, deliberately created nations. Recurrent
perennialism, while also holding that the nation
is perennial and ubiquitous throughout history,
and nationhood a universal, disembedded phe-
nomenon, allows for changes in nations over
time; recurrence is evident in the maintenance of
the collective identity of the nation (Smith, 2010:
54–55). Neoperennialists point to the “national”
characteristics of premodern nations, includ-
ing a written history, an authoritative center, a
conception of a bounded territory, and cultural
uniformity sustained by religion and legal codes.
These theorists point to the convergence between
ethnicity and statehood in premodern states, see-
ing nationalism as a “particular form of a broader
phenomenon, that of political ethnicity” (Gat,
2013: 3), and point to its existence “in various
forms, among diverse societies, throughout much
of history of the literate civilization” (Roshwald,
2006: 10). Nonetheless, while all these approaches
stress the historical nature of nations, they do
6 N AT I O N- S TAT E
not necessarily regard nations as natural, organic,
or primordial (see Smith, 2010: 54). Perenni-
alist approaches have been criticized on both
methodological and terminological grounds: a
static understanding of national identities and
culture, projecting modern concepts onto earlier
social formations, focusing too much on elite
discourse without unpacking the meanings of
“nation” across time and contexts, and selective
use of historical evidence (Özkirimli, 2017).
Modernism
Modernism emphasizes the recent, invented, and
constructed nature of nations and nationalism,
what Smith calls “structural modernism”: the
inherently national and nationalist nature of
modernity (2010: 52–53). Nations are thus the
product of specifically modern processes, includ-
ing capitalism, industrialization, urbanization,
secularism, and the modern bureaucratic state, a
sociological necessity in the modern era (Özkir-
imli, 2017: 81). Early modernization theorists such
as Karl Deutsch or Daniel Lerner include func-
tionalist accounts of nations and nationalism:
They were seen as a “concomitant of the period
of transition, a balm that soothes weary souls,
alleviating the suffering caused by that process”
(42). Nation-building is set in motion by sociode-
mographic processes like urbanization, mobility,
and literacy (42–43), a process in which the
ability to communicate is critical, as membership
in groups relies on the ability to communicate,
both between lower- and middle-class social
groups as well as between them and the center.
A similar argument can be found in Kedourie’s
historically idealist explanation of nationalism,
which he viewed as a movement of alienated and
dissatisfied youth, a subversive and revolutionary
answer to the “breakdown in the transmission
of political habits and religious beliefs from
one generation to the next” (Kedourie, 1961:
99). Socioeconomic approaches view nations as a
product of social and economic factors including
capitalism, regional inequality, and class con-
flict: National sentiments can be heightened in
periods of economic deprivation and among
newly mobilized masses of the periphery. These
include Tom Nairn’s uneven development and
Michael Hechter’s internal colonialism theses,
AND N AT I O N A L I S M
both of which emphasize the relative depriva-
tion between the core and periphery and the
sociohistorical costs of capitalist market forces.
Economic and rational choice models have been
rejected by many scholars for their economic
reductionism, the presence of counterexamples,
and essentialism – treating some nations as given.
Political approaches see nations as created by
the modern state’s interaction with society, and
as inevitably occurring simultaneously with state
sovereignty, emphasizing the role of politics,
power, and the state. These approaches include
Breuilly’s political theory of nationalism (1993),
which posits that nationalism is an instrument for
political goals, thus exclusively arising in modern
times. Whereas politics in the modern world is
based on the control of the state, nationalism is
an instrument to seize and retain control because
of its ability to offer a platform to elites for the
mobilization, coordination, and legitimation of
their interests (Smith, 2010: 60; Özkirimli, 2017:
92–94). Other political accounts of nationalism
similarly emphasize the role played by regional
administrations in the rise of nations and the
centralized, professionalized, and territorial-
ized nature of the modern state, which invokes
nationalism, generating “the cultural sensibility
of sovereignty.” Some political approaches take
the shape of instrumentalist arguments, focusing
on rationality: inspired by debates in the nature
of ethnicity, these theorists view ethnicity as
optional and symbolic, and by extension, ethnic
or national groups as behaving instrumentally
to maximize their resources and power over the
masses (Brass, 1991). Based on situationalist
models of ethnicity, which argue that members of
a society can choose to emphasize certain cultural
or national traits and boundaries are maintained
by underlying socioeconomic interests of group
members (Olzak, 1993), these theories explain
how stratified systems of social organization that
appear in modern capitalist societies allow or
encourage certain groups to use ethnic or racial
boundaries to assert dominance over others,
demonstrating how competition and conflict can
strengthen preexisting ethnic or racial bound-
aries or even create them (Cornell and Hartmann,
1997). The main criticisms of political approaches
include their overemphasis on the role of elites
while ignoring why or how ethnonationalist
 N AT I O N- S TAT E
appeals work among ordinary people, and their
inability to explain premodern ethnic ties.
Finally, cultural and constructionist approaches
acknowledge the modernity of nations while
emphasizing their cultural components and
their socially constructed nature. In cultural
approaches, nations are expressions of “high
culture” transmitted to masses through two cru-
cial elements contributing to the reproduction
of culture: media and education. The “cultural
stuff” that nationalism uses might be historically
inherited, however, the modern state “uses them
very selectively, and it most often transforms
them radically” (Gellner, 1983: 55). Hroch also
stressed the importance of identification with
the cultural aspects of identity: Modern nations
become fully existent “only when everyone, or
almost everyone, who qualifies as its poten-
tial member, identifies with it” (Hroch, 2015:
34). Constructionists posit that nations and
nationalism are constructed: Anderson (1983)
sees nations as “imagined communities,” which
developed upon the amalgamation of national
consciousness through the emergence of printed
press, filling the void left by decline in religion
and monarchies, while Hobsbawm and Ranger’s
“invented tradition” approach (1983) views
nations as necessarily arising out of modernism:
Modern states needed to “invent traditions” in
order to provide social cohesion among groups
and provide legitimacy to their own institutions.
As with other approaches within the modernist
paradigm, cultural accounts are also criticized for
their inability to explain the passions and affect of
national appeals, for being empirically selective,
overlooking regional and historical variations,
as well as for ignoring the broader geopolitical
context (i.e., external threats).
Ethnosymbolism
Ethnosymbolism emerged in response to the
debates above, conceding that there are some
historical artefacts, like myths, symbols, memo-
ries, traditions, and values, which still affect the
present, and that these “metaphysical” elements
justify collective existence and contribute to the
uniqueness of nations and persistence of nation-
alism (Smith, 2010). Ethnosymbolists see nations
as embedded in particular historical eras, how-
ever, they regard ethnic identities as critical in the
AND N AT I O N A L I S M 7
formation and persistence of nations. Ethnosym-
bolism thus represents a “middle approach”
between modernist and perennial accounts of the
nation, focusing on the reciprocal relationship
between elites and the people: While acknowl-
edging the modern and constructed nature of
nations, ethnosymbolism nonetheless recognizes
the social and cultural patterns that are deeply
embedded and persist in societies, and urges
their examination over la longue durée (Smith,
2010: 3–40). Anthony Smith’s historical approach
stresses the ethnic origins of nations, additionally
emphasizing antiquity – a felt affiliation and
cultural affinity with a remote past in which the
community was formed – as a source of legiti-
macy. Similarly, Hutchinson (2017) emphasizes
the way in which institutions can preserve pre-
modern cultural repertoires of symbols, myths,
and memories. Phenomenological approaches
rely more on perennialist understandings of
the nation, where ethnic identities are “shifting
clusters of perceptions, sentiments, and atti-
tudes,” “myth-symbol complexes” which should
be investigated over the long term (Armstrong,
1982). A recent approach, focused on the moral
psychology of community (Yack, 2012), has
reformulated ethnosymbolism’s main ideas, argu-
ing that nations can only be explained by “social
friendship” – relations of mutual concern and loy-
alty. Groups of individuals – communities – who
imagine themselves to share loyalty, are linked to
nations by “our affirmation of the shared cultural
legacies that we inherit from previous genera-
tions” (2012: 66). Özkirimli (2017) outlines the
main criticisms of the ethnosymbolism approach:
conceptual confusion between the terms “nation,”
“ethnicity,” and “ethnic group”; underestimating
differences between modern nations and earlier
ethnic communities; nonexistence of nations and
nationalism in premodern eras; lack of historical
detail and analytical rigor, using empirical cases
selectively; and, finally, ethnosymbolism’s insis-
tence on the persistence and durability of ethnic
ties, leading to a reification of nations.
Contemporary Approaches to Nationalism
Contemporary approaches to nationalism have
moved away from the question of the origins
of nations and nationalism, challenging the
8 N AT I O N- S TAT E
fundamental assumptions of mainstream schol-
arship: In particular, they reject methodological
nationalism – the tendency to take nationalism
and its appeal for granted – and instead attempt
to explain conditions under which nations and
nationalism have become so pervasive (Özkirimli,
2017: 182). As such, these approaches are neces-
sarily interdisciplinary and include new methods
of analysis: critical discourse analysis, conversa-
tion analysis, rhetorical theory, psychoanalysis,
intersectionality, and new epistemological per-
spectives such as feminism, postcolonialism, and
postmodernism (183). The most well-known
articulations of these criticisms include Rogers
Brubaker’s ethnicity without groups appeal: avoid-
ing ethnic groupism – “the tendency to take
ethnic groups, nations and races as substantial
entities to which interests and agency can be
attributed” – which results in the conflation of
our object of analysis and our analytical tools.
Instead, Brubaker urges us to analyze ethnicity
and nation in “relational, processual, dynamic,
eventful, and disaggregated terms,” as “practical
categories, cultural idioms, cognitive schemas,
discursive frames, organizational routines, insti-
tutional forms, political projects and contingent
events” (2004: 167–168). Michael Billig’s (1995)
banal nationalism urges a focus on the unno-
ticed, banal ideological habits which enable the
reproduction of nations and imagined feelings
of groupness through the use of flags, symbols
on currency, turns of phrase, national songs, and
implied togetherness in other national contexts.
Using Billig’s and Brubaker’s arguments as a
starting point, everyday nationalism approaches
give priority to the role of ordinary people’s beliefs
and practices: Instead of seeing “ordinary people”
and masses as passive consumers of national
ideologies served “from the top,” ordinary people
are seen as creative and proactive consumers and
producers of nationalism (Fox and Miller-Idriss,
2008). Four ways of producing the nation in
everyday life are proposed: “talking the nation”
(the discursive construction of the nation through
routine talk), “choosing the nation” (the way in
which nationhood frames the choices people
make), “performing the nation” (producing
national feelings through the ritual enactment
of symbols), and “consuming the nation” (the
manifestation of identity through everyday
consumption habits): These four mechanisms
AND N AT I O N A L I S M
allow us to appreciate the variable meaning and
salience of nationalism, which would not be pos-
sible through studying only its state-sponsored
construction, modern industrial context, or elite
manipulation (2008: 537–538). In addition to
the everyday nationalism approach, several other
strands of research have rejected the reification
of nations, instead paying attention to discourse:
The “various ways in which a diverse range of
practices, symbols, texts, objects, and utterances
form a wider social discourse that reproduces the
world” (Skey, 2011: 50). Craig Calhoun (1997: 3)
similarly defined nationalism as a discursive
formation, or a “way of speaking that shapes
our consciousness,” identifying ten features of
the rhetoric of the nation. Andreas Wimmer’s
comparative theory on ethnic boundary-making
attempts to explain why ethnicity matters “to dif-
ferent degrees and in different forms in different
societies, situations and periods” (2013: 3). He
proposes three main factors that influence the
dynamics of boundary-making: the institutional
setup, power hierarchies and the distribution of
resources, and preexisting political networks that
can determine the limits of the boundary-making
process (11–12). Wimmer also identifies five
types of strategies that actors can pursue, as well
as the means of boundary-making, providing a
coherent model of boundary-making. Finally,
several additional approaches have examined the
understudied aspects of nationalism, such as fem-
inism and the politics of belonging, focused on
exploring the gendered and sexualized nature of
nationalist projects (Yuval-Davis, 1997), and the
peculiarities of nation-building in postcolonial
societies (Chatterjee, 1993).
SEE ALSO: Capitalism; Citizenship; Democracy;
Empire; Global Politics; Imagined Communities;
Modernity; Nation-State; Nationalism; Post-
nationalism; State
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