Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, it tends to promote the interests of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining the nation's sovereignty (self-governance) over its homeland to create a nation-state. It holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference (self-determination), that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity, and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power. It further aims to build and maintain a single national identity, based on a combination of shared social characteristics such as culture, ethnicity, geographic location, language, politics, religion, traditions and belief in a shared singular history, and to promote national unity or solidarity. Nationalism, therefore, seeks to preserve and foster a nation's traditional culture. There are various definitions of a "nation", which leads to different types of nationalism. The two main divergent forms are ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism.
A nation is a large type of social organization where a collective identity has emerged from a combination of shared features across a given population, such as language, history, ethnicity, culture, territory and/or society. What constitutes a nation can vary widely, as some nations are constructed around ethnicity while others are bound by political constitutions. A nation is generally more overtly political than an ethnic group. A nation has also been defined as a cultural-political community that has become conscious of its autonomy, unity and particular interests.
National identity is a person's identity or sense of belonging to one or more states or one or more nations. It is the sense of "a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture, and language". National identity may refer to the subjective feeling one shares with a group of people about a nation, regardless of one's legal citizenship status. National identity is viewed in psychological terms as "an awareness of difference", a "feeling and recognition of 'we' and 'they'". National identity also includes the general population and diaspora of multi-ethnic states and societies that have a shared sense of common identity identical to that of a nation while being made up of several component ethnic groups. Hyphenated ethnicities are an example of the confluence of multiple ethnic and national identities within a single person or entity.
Afrocentricity is an academic theory and approach to scholarship that seeks to center the experiences and peoples of Africa and the African diaspora within their own historical, cultural, and sociological contexts. First developed as a systematized methodology by Molefi Kete Asante in 1980, he drew inspiration from a number of African and African diaspora intellectuals including Cheikh Anta Diop, George James, Harold Cruse, Ida B. Wells, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. Du Bois. The Temple Circle, also known as the Temple School of Thought, Temple Circle of Afrocentricity, or Temple School of Afrocentricity, was an early group of Africologists during the late 1980s and early 1990s that helped to further develop Afrocentricity, which is based on concepts of agency, centeredness, location, and orientation.
Stefan Wolff is a German political scientist. He is a specialist in international security, particularly in the management, settlement and prevention of ethnic conflicts. He is currently Professor of International Security at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Born in 1969, He studied as an undergraduate at the University of Leipzig and holds a Master's degree from Magdalene College, Cambridge, and a PhD from the London School of Economics, where he studied under the supervision of Brendan O'Leary. His doctoral thesis, dated 2000, was titled Managing disputed territories, external minorities and the stability of conflict settlements: A comparative analysis of six cases.
Primordialism is the idea that nations or ethnic identities are fixed, natural, and ancient. Primordialists argue that each individual has a single inborn ethnic identity independent of historical processes. While implicit primordialist assumptions are common in society and much academic research, primordialism is widely rejected by scholars of nationalism and ethnicity, as individuals can have multiple ethnic identities which are changeable and socially constructed.
Anthony David Stephen Smith was a British historical sociologist who, at the time of his death, was Professor Emeritus of Nationalism and Ethnicity at the London School of Economics. He is considered one of the founders of the interdisciplinary field of nationalism studies.
Civic nationalism, also known as democratic nationalism and liberal nationalism, is a form of nationalism that adheres to traditional liberal values of freedom, tolerance, equality, individual rights and is not based on ethnocentrism. Civic nationalists often defend the value of national identity by saying that individuals need it as a partial shared aspect of their identity in order to lead meaningful, autonomous lives and that democratic polities need national identity to function properly.
Ghassan J. Hage is a Lebanese-Australian academic serving as Future Generation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has held a number of visiting professorships including at the American University of Beirut, University of Nanterre – Paris X, the University of Copenhagen and Harvard. He is currently (2022-2023) a visiting professor at the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle (Germany).
Walker F. Connor was Distinguished Visiting Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College. Connor is best known for his work on nationalism, and is considered one of the founders of the interdisciplinary field of nationalism studies.
Among scholars of nationalism, a number of types of nationalism have been presented. Nationalism may manifest itself as part of official state ideology or as a popular non-state movement and may be expressed along civic, ethnic, cultural, language, religious or ideological lines. These self-definitions of the nation are used to classify types of nationalism. However, such categories are not mutually exclusive and many nationalist movements combine some or all of these elements to varying degrees. Nationalist movements can also be classified by other criteria, such as scale and location.
Thomas Spira (1923–2005) was Professor of History at the University of Prince Edward Island and editor of the Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, the first academic journal devoted to the study of nationalism. Born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, Spira moved to the United States just before the outbreak of World War II. He enrolled in the Bachelor of Arts program at the City College of New York in 1964, and later completed his M.A. and Ph.D. in History at McGill University in Montreal. Spira began teaching at the University of Prince Edward Island in 1980, and was named Professor Emeritus by its Board of Governors in 1998.
Criticism of multiculturalism questions the ideal of the maintenance of distinct ethnic cultures within a country. Multiculturalism is a particular subject of debate in certain European nations that are associated with the idea of a nation state. Critics of multiculturalism may argue against cultural integration of different ethnic and cultural groups to the existing laws and values of the country. Alternatively critics may argue for assimilation of different ethnic and cultural groups to a single national identity.
Multiculturalism in Canada was officially adopted by the government during the 1970s and 1980s. The Canadian federal government has been described as the instigator of multiculturalism as an ideology because of its public emphasis on the social importance of immigration. The 1960s Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism is often referred to as the origin of modern political awareness of multiculturalism, resulting in Canada being one of the most multicultural nations in the world. The official state policy of multiculturalism is often cited as one of Canada's significant accomplishments, and a key distinguishing element of Canadian identity and Canadian values.
John Hutchinson is a British academic. He is a reader in nationalism at the London School of Economics (LSE), in the Department of Government.
Umut Özkırımlı is a political scientist known for his work in nationalism studies.
Korean ethnic nationalism, or Korean racial nationalism, is a racist, chauvinist and ethnosupremacist political ideology and a form of ethnic and racial identity that is widely prevalent by the Korean people in Korea, particularly in South Korea. It is based on the belief that Koreans form a nation, a race, and an ethnic group that shares a unified bloodline and a distinct culture. It is centered on the notion of the minjok, a term that had been coined in Imperial Japan ("minzoku") in the early Meiji period. Minjok has been translated as "nation", "people", "ethnic group", "race", and "race-nation".
Ethnosymbolism is a school of thought in the study of nationalism that stresses the importance of symbols, myths, values and traditions in the formation and persistence of the modern nation state.
Ethnicities is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes research in the fields of sociology and politics concerning questions of ethnicity, nationalism and related issues such as identity politics and minority rights. It was established in 2001 and is published bimonthly by SAGE Publications. The editors-in-chief are Stephen May and Tariq Modood.
Étienne Balibar is a French philosopher. He has taught at the University of Paris X-Nanterre, at the University of California Irvine and is currently an Anniversary Chair Professor at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University and a visiting professor at the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.
