Nationalism is the most powerful political force of the modern era. It built almost every state currently in existence. It produced the wave of liberation from colonial empire that defined the second half of the 20th century. It also drove most of the largest mass-violence episodes of the same period, including the two World Wars, the Holocaust, the Yugoslav and Rwandan genocides, the partition of India, and a long list of smaller conflicts. Any honest account of the tradition has to hold both sides without using one to silence the other.

The word covers more ground than its everyday use suggests. There are at least four distinct strands sharing the name, and the strands behave very differently in practice. This piece is a short primer. The minimum definition. The main strands. What nationalism gets right that the cosmopolitan-liberal critique often understates. Where it slides into the political pathologies it is most often associated with. The Irish situation specifically, which is in active flux as the unification question moves from the background to the foreground of public conversation.

I would recommend reading the Republicanism piece in this series before this one, because the Irish republican and Irish nationalist traditions overlap substantially without being identical, and keeping the distinction available helps with what follows.

A definition that survives most strands

Nationalism is the political tradition built around the proposition that humanity is naturally organised into nations, that nations have the right to political self-determination, and that the nation is the appropriate unit around which political community, sovereignty, and democratic accountability should be organised.

The proposition has three components, each of which is contested.

The first is the empirical claim that humanity is in fact organised into nations. This is heavily disputed by modernist scholars (Gellner, Hobsbawm, Anderson) who argue that nations are a historically recent construction, largely a product of the late 18th and 19th centuries, and that pre-modern populations did not generally identify themselves in national terms. The ethnosymbolist counter-position (Anthony Smith, John Hutchinson) argues that pre-modern ethnic communities provided the raw material out of which modern nations were built, and that nations have deeper historical roots than the modernist account allows. The argument is genuinely contested and the answer probably varies by case.

The second is the normative claim that nations have a right to self-determination. This is the most widely accepted of the three components. It underwrote the post-1918 redrawing of European borders, the post-1945 decolonisation, and the post-1989 reshaping of Eastern Europe. It is currently working itself through in cases ranging from Kurdish self-determination to Kashmiri identity to, on the table at home, the Northern Ireland question.

The third is the claim that the nation is the appropriate scale for political community. This is the least obviously correct of the three components, particularly in a 21st century where the largest political and economic forces (climate, capital flows, AI, global supply chains) operate at scales far above the nation. The retention of the nation as the primary political unit, in conditions where it can no longer effectively address the largest problems, is one of the open questions of contemporary political theory.

Where the tradition came from

Nationalism in its modern political form is, on most reasonable accounts, a product of the late 18th and 19th centuries. It emerged in the same intellectual and political moment as liberalism and republicanism, with which it has had a complicated relationship ever since.

The Enlightenment commitment to popular sovereignty implied, by extension, the question of what population the sovereignty was attached to. The American and French Revolutions both answered the question implicitly with reference to a national people, although neither used the modern vocabulary of nationalism. The early 19th century saw the explicit articulation of the national-political principle in the work of figures like Johann Gottfried Herder (who argued that each nation has its own distinct cultural genius, expressed through language and folk tradition), Giuseppe Mazzini (who articulated the most influential form of liberal-nationalist programme through the Young Italy movement), and a long sequence of cultural-nationalist writers across Europe.

The mid-19th century saw nationalism become the dominant political force in Europe through the unification of Germany, the unification of Italy, the various national movements in the Habsburg Empire, and the parallel movements in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. The 1848 revolutions were largely nationalist in content. The post-1860 settlement of Europe was a substantial victory for the nationalist principle.

The First World War was, in significant part, a nationalist war. The post-1918 settlement at Versailles attempted to reorganise Europe along national lines, with the principle of national self-determination explicitly invoked. The principle was applied unevenly and the resulting borders left substantial minorities inside states they did not identify with, which contributed to the instability of the inter-war period.

The mid-20th century saw the relationship between nationalism and democracy become acute. Liberal-democratic nationalism (the form Mazzini had articulated) coexisted uneasily with integral and fascist nationalism (the form Charles Maurras and the inter-war Fascist movements developed), and the line between them was not always easy to draw in advance. The rise of Nazism in Germany was, on most readings, a particular pathological development of integral nationalism, although the question of whether Nazism is best understood as a form of nationalism, a form of fascism, a form of racial-eugenic ideology, or some combination is itself contested.

The post-1945 period saw two distinct developments. In Western Europe, the experience of nationalism's catastrophic 20th-century record produced a deliberate political project of supranational integration (the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Communities, eventually the EU) that was, at least in part, a conscious attempt to constrain the nationalist principle. In the global South, anti-colonial nationalism produced the wave of decolonisation that established most of the world's currently-existing states. The two trajectories had different relationships to the nationalist principle, and the contemporary tension between them shapes much current global politics.

The post-1989 period has seen further developments. The collapse of the Soviet Union produced a substantial new wave of national-self-determination movements, many of which (the Yugoslav wars, the Caucasian conflicts) produced significant violence. The European Union project has continued to deepen, generating a counter-current of national-conservative resistance across multiple member states. The post-2015 migration crisis and the 2016 Brexit vote brought nationalism back to the centre of European political conversation in ways it had not been since the 1940s. The current period is one of substantial nationalist resurgence across much of the developed world, with implications still being worked out.

The main strands

Worth distinguishing because the differences are large and the conflations are damaging.

Civic nationalism is the strand built around political-membership criteria. The nation is defined by shared citizenship, shared political institutions, and willingness to participate in the political community, rather than by descent or ethnicity. Joining the nation is in principle open to anyone who accepts the political commitments. This is the form of nationalism most compatible with liberal democracy and with multi-ethnic political communities. The American case is the textbook example, although the actual American historical record on inclusion is mixed. The French case is closely related, with its own particular features. Wolfe Tone's vision for Ireland was civic-nationalist in this sense.

Ethnic nationalism is the strand built around descent-based criteria. The nation is defined by shared ancestry, shared language, shared culture, often shared religion. Joining the nation is in principle difficult for outsiders because membership is inherited rather than chosen. This is the form of nationalism most prone to producing exclusionary and violent politics, although ethnic-national communities have also coexisted reasonably with liberal-democratic institutions in many cases. The German case is often cited as the textbook example, although the actual German historical record is more complicated than the textbook version.

Cultural nationalism is the strand built around shared culture without necessarily entailing shared descent. The nation is defined by shared language, literature, music, custom, and historical memory, and political-membership criteria are subordinated to cultural ones. This strand is often a precursor to either civic or ethnic nationalism rather than a stable position in its own right. The 19th-century Irish Gaelic Revival, in figures like Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory, and Yeats, was substantially cultural-nationalist in this sense.

Liberal nationalism is the position that the nation is the appropriate scale for self-governing democratic community, and that nationalist commitments are compatible with and indeed required by genuine democratic practice. Mazzini articulated the founding statement. Yael Tamir's Liberal Nationalism (1993) is the standard contemporary academic statement. The argument is that abstract universalism does not provide the actual solidarity democratic institutions need to function, and that the nation provides the necessary thicker basis for citizens to recognise each other as political equals.

Integral nationalism is the explicitly anti-liberal strand, articulated most clearly by Charles Maurras and the Action Française tradition in early 20th-century France. The nation is treated as an organic whole, with shared destiny, shared identity, and shared enemies. Internal pluralism is treated as a weakness to be overcome. This strand fed directly into European fascism and continues to surface in contemporary national-conservative movements.

Post-colonial liberation nationalism is the strand developed by the 20th-century anti-imperial movements. Figures like Jawaharlal Nehru, Frantz Fanon, Julius Nyerere, Léopold Senghor, and Amílcar Cabral worked out theoretical positions that combined nationalist mobilisation against colonial rule with various forms of socialist or social-democratic economic programme. The track record of post-colonial nationalist regimes has been mixed but the tradition has produced some of the more substantive theoretical work in the broader nationalist family.

Banal nationalism, identified by Michael Billig in his 1995 book of that name, is the everyday low-key flagging of national identity through flags, currencies, weather forecasts framed as national, sports, and the unmarked use of "we" to mean "the national community". Billig's argument is that this banal nationalism is what makes hot nationalism possible when conditions trigger it, and that the cosmopolitan-liberal claim to be free of nationalism usually rests on not noticing the banal version that surrounds it.

What nationalism gets right

Worth being explicit about, because the dominant cosmopolitan-liberal framing in current educated discourse makes this hard to acknowledge.

The nation-state is, at present, the largest scale at which sustained democratic accountability has actually been achieved. Supranational institutions like the European Union have substantial democratic deficits that no comparable national-level institution has. The argument that nationalism is the obstacle to a better cosmopolitan future has to contend with the empirical fact that the better cosmopolitan future has not been built and that the existing supranational institutions have, on the actual record, often failed at the democratic-accountability tasks that nation-states have managed.

Shared identity is a real phenomenon and political communities require some basis for solidarity. The cosmopolitan argument that abstract human rights and universal moral commitments can do this work alone has substantial empirical difficulties. People reliably show up for their political community when something is asked of them, in proportions that universalist solidarity has never matched. The nation provides a thicker basis for solidarity than abstract universalism, and the resulting solidarity is what democratic institutions actually run on.

Anti-colonial nationalism produced real liberation. The post-1945 decolonisation was a genuine moral achievement, and it was carried by nationalist movements drawing on nationalist commitments. A purely cosmopolitan-liberal politics could not have produced the same outcome and largely did not try. The 20th-century moral case for nationalism is built on this record more than on anything else.

National attachment provides meaning, continuity, and cultural inheritance that abstract universalism does not. The disenchanted-individualist condition of late-modern Western culture, discussed elsewhere in this series in the McGilchrist piece, is partly a consequence of the slow erosion of national-cultural anchoring without an adequate replacement. The cosmopolitan-liberal answer, that individuals should be free to construct their own meaning from a global pool of cultural materials, has not delivered the conditions for actual flourishing it promised.

These are not small concessions. A serious account of contemporary politics that does not engage with them is incomplete.

Where nationalism is vulnerable

Equally worth being honest about.

The slide from civic to ethnic nationalism is a recurring historical pattern. Communities that begin with civic-membership criteria often drift, over time and under pressure, into descent-based criteria, with the consequences nationalism's critics rightly point at. The Irish case across the 19th and 20th centuries, discussed in the Republicanism piece, is a representative example. Civic nationalism is a real position but it is also an unstable one, and the work of keeping a national community on the civic rather than ethnic track requires sustained political effort rather than passive maintenance.

Ethnic nationalism produces exclusion. The historical record is consistent across multiple cases. Communities organised around descent-based national identity have, over time and under pressure, generated systematic exclusion and often persecution of internal minorities and external out-groups. The 20th century's worst episodes of mass violence are largely traceable to ethnic-national mobilisation, sometimes in fascist forms and sometimes in supposedly more benign forms. This is not an accident. It is a structural tendency that ethnic nationalism has not adequately solved.

Integral nationalism is genuinely dangerous. The Maurras-to-fascism lineage is not a slur invented by the nationalist tradition's critics. It is a real historical pattern with substantial documentation. Modern national-conservative movements that draw, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, on integral-nationalist intellectual sources should be assessed on what their content actually is, with awareness of the lineage they are drawing from.

The mismatch between national scale and the scale of contemporary problems is a real difficulty. Climate change, capital mobility, AI development, cyber security, biosecurity, and pandemic response all operate at scales that nation-states alone cannot effectively address. The nationalist commitment to the nation as the primary unit of political community is, in these areas, increasingly in tension with the conditions that make effective political action possible. Whether nationalism can incorporate the supranational scale-shift, or whether the supranational scale will eventually displace national institutions, is one of the largest open questions of the next century.

What it is commonly mistaken for

Three persistent confusions.

First, nationalism is often confused with patriotism. The two are related but distinct. Patriotism is attachment to one's country as the place where one lives, with its institutions, neighbours, and shared history, with no necessary commitment to the priority of the nation as a political principle. Nationalism is the political principle that nations should be the basis of political community, with the corresponding commitment to defending and advancing the national interest. Most people are patriots in some sense. Far fewer are nationalists in the strict sense. Conflating the two is rhetorically useful for both sides of various arguments and intellectually muddying.

Second, nationalism is often used as a synonym for racism or xenophobia. The relationship is real but not identical. Some forms of nationalism (particularly ethnic-nationalist forms) overlap substantially with racism. Other forms (particularly civic-nationalist forms) do not. Liberal-nationalist, post-colonial-nationalist, and various left-nationalist positions can be held without any racial commitment at all. The conflation is rhetorically useful but obscures the actual political analysis.

Third, "nationalism" is sometimes used to mean simply "wanting independence". The Irish case has historically conflated nationalism with the project of national independence in a way that obscures the question of what kind of nationalism is being practised after independence is achieved. A community can want independence without committing to any particular ongoing nationalist principle, and a community can be deeply nationalist without seeking independence. The two questions are separate.

Where you find nationalism in Irish politics

The Irish nationalist tradition has been substantially covered in the Republicanism piece, but several specifically nationalist points are worth drawing out here.

The Irish nationalist tradition is broader than the Irish republican tradition. Constitutional nationalism, in the line running from Daniel O'Connell through Charles Stewart Parnell to John Redmond, is a substantial nationalist tradition that did not commit to the republican principle of separation from Britain. The Irish Parliamentary Party, which dominated Irish parliamentary representation from the 1880s to 1918, was constitutional-nationalist rather than republican-nationalist. The constitutional-nationalist tradition was largely displaced by the republican tradition after 1916, but its earlier strength is worth remembering, and its descendants in the modern SDLP in Northern Ireland and the broader nationalist mainstream in the South remain politically significant.

Cultural nationalism, in the Gaelic Revival tradition, was a substantial precursor to the political mobilisation of the 1916-1923 period. Conradh na Gaeilge (the Gaelic League), the GAA, the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival, and the broader cultural-nationalist movement of the 1880s-1910s shaped the political imagination of the generation that produced 1916. The cultural-nationalist tradition continues today through bodies like the GAA, Conradh na Gaeilge, TG4, and the broader Irish-language and traditional-music infrastructure. The political relationship of these institutions to the wider nationalist project is mostly assumed rather than explicitly articulated.

Ulster Unionism is itself a form of nationalism, specifically of British nationalism with a particular Ulster inflection. This is sometimes overlooked by Irish nationalist commentary, which has tended to treat unionism as the absence of nationalism rather than as a different nationalism. The recognition that the conflict in Northern Ireland was, in significant part, a conflict between two nationalisms rather than between nationalism and its opposite, is a useful analytical correction.

The current Irish immigration debate is, on most reasonable readings, a late nationalism debate. The question of who counts as Irish, what cultural commitments full membership requires, and how the state should manage the integration of new arrivals, is being conducted in a vocabulary that mostly avoids the nationalist frame while operating inside it. The political parties that have engaged with the debate most explicitly (Aontú, Independent Ireland, the various smaller anti-immigration formations) have done so in nationalist terms, often without using the word. The mainstream parties have mostly tried to handle the issue through procedural and administrative framings that have not adequately addressed the underlying public concern. Whether the Irish political system produces a serious civic-nationalist response to the immigration question, or drifts towards the ethnic-nationalist alternative, is one of the more important political-cultural questions of the next decade.

The unification question is the largest live nationalist question in current Irish politics. As discussed in the Republicanism piece, the constitutional debate about a possible 32-county Republic is moving from the background to the foreground of public conversation. The kind of nationalism that animates the project will substantially shape what the resulting state, if achieved, would look like. A civic-nationalist unification project would look very different from an ethnic-nationalist one. The political-intellectual work of clarifying this distinction has not been adequately done.

Aontú is the most explicitly nationalist Dáil party in self-description, combining the unification commitment with social-conservative cultural-nationalist commitments. Independent Ireland and the smaller rural-populist groupings draw on nationalist sentiment without the same explicit framing. Sinn Féin is the largest republican-nationalist Dáil party but has, as discussed in the Republicanism piece, mostly avoided ethnic-nationalist framings even where its base sometimes pushes that direction. Fianna Fáil retains nationalist self-description in its title (the party name translates roughly as "Soldiers of Destiny") but has operationally drifted from active nationalist commitments. Fine Gael, Social Democrats, Labour, and the Greens are all, on most readings, post-nationalist or weakly-nationalist in current operational terms, although the Social Democrats and Labour both have strong constitutional-nationalist roots they have not entirely abandoned.

The European context is increasingly relevant. The rise of national-conservative movements across multiple EU member states (Hungary's Fidesz, Poland's PiS, Italy's Brothers of Italy, France's Rassemblement National, the German AfD) is producing a transnational nationalist current that has mostly not yet had a major Irish expression but is plausibly approaching one. The shape that such an expression would take, and the parties that would carry it, is one of the open questions in current Irish politics.

Why this matters for the citizen

A citizen trying to think clearly about the various political conversations conducted in nationalist terms (the unification question, the immigration question, the cultural-identity question, the relationship to the European Union) needs to be able to distinguish the different strands of the tradition.

The single most important distinction in contemporary Irish nationalism conversation is between civic and ethnic forms. Civic nationalism is a defensible political tradition with substantial democratic and inclusive resources. Ethnic nationalism is the strand most prone to producing the historical pathologies the tradition is rightly criticised for. The slide from civic to ethnic forms is a recurring pattern, and resisting it requires sustained political work. Most of what currently passes for "Irish nationalism" in casual public conversation conflates the two. Doing the work of keeping them separate, in one's own thinking and in one's political contributions, is one of the more useful disciplines available to current Irish citizens.

The cosmopolitan-liberal alternative to nationalism, as currently articulated in much educated Irish discourse, has substantial weaknesses that its defenders tend to underestimate. A serious assessment of nationalism has to engage with its actual historical achievements alongside its actual historical failures. The current educated-progressive instinct to treat nationalism as simply a problem to be transcended is, on the empirical record, both intellectually weak and politically inadequate. A serious response to the resurgence of nationalist politics in Europe and elsewhere requires engaging with what nationalism actually delivers that the cosmopolitan alternative has not, and articulating a form of political community that incorporates those goods without falling into the failure modes.

Further reading

If you have an evening: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983, revised 1991, 2006). The most influential single book on modern nationalism. Anderson's argument that nations are imagined political communities, made possible by print-capitalism and a particular set of cultural conditions, is the standard starting point for contemporary nationalism studies.

If you have a week: Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (1983). The canonical modernist account, arguing that nationalism is a product of the conditions of industrial society. Demanding but rewarding.

For the contemporary defence: Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (1993). The standard academic statement of the case that nationalism and liberal democracy are compatible and indeed mutually supporting. Tamir is an Israeli political theorist whose work is in some respects clarified by the difficulty of her own national context.

For the post-colonial tradition: Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The canonical statement of anti-colonial revolutionary nationalism. Demanding, often angry, and intellectually substantive.

For the critical tradition: Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (1990). Hobsbawm's account is more sceptical than Anderson's or Gellner's, with the eye of a Marxist historian looking at the political work nationalism actually does.

For the ethnosymbolist alternative: Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (1986). The major scholarly argument that nations have deeper pre-modern roots than the modernist account allows.

For the Irish-specific story: Tom Garvin, Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland 1858-1928 (1987). The standard scholarly treatment of the period in which the modern Irish nationalist tradition consolidated. Then Roy Foster's Modern Ireland and Vivid Faces, already cited in the Republicanism piece.

For the contemporary Irish situation: the writings of Fintan O'Toole, particularly his recent essays on the unification question, are the most accessible engagement with the current state of Irish nationalist conversation. They are also opinionated and should be read with that in mind.

The thing nationalism asks, that the cosmopolitan alternative has not yet adequately answered, is what the basis of political community in modern democracies actually is. The strongest argument for the tradition is the empirical record of what it has achieved and what its absence has not been able to replace. The strongest argument against it is the equally empirical record of what its worst forms have done. Holding both honestly, and working out which forms of political community can deliver the goods without the costs, is most of the political work of the current period.

Related in the Political Literacy series

Plus the framing piece, What Do Ireland's Parties Actually Stand For?, and the full Political Literacy archive.