Nationalism: A Political Plague
- ayouthviewpoint
- Mar 24
- 14 min read
By Carlos Alfonso Chaves
What was once the cry of revolution is now synonymous with militaristic and extreme right-wing politics. An ideology that, after the Second World War, was thought to have been banished to the political fringe, has now seen a major resurgence.
Nationalism as a concept is a force that has roots in the very first civilizations of mankind. Of course, early civilizations weren’t ever the modern definition of “nationalistic,” but many centered around one common set of cities under one common identity. The Romans were never nationalistic, but they made many an attempt to “romanize” provinces they conquered. These are many of the origins that can be directly related to nationalism. Progressing to the Middle Ages, the feudal era, politics, and cultures were much more defined by their rulers. It’s erroneous to look at the medieval era as a time of nations and nation-states, as it would be much more apt to see it as conflicts between hundreds of families vying for control over land. For example, the Kingdom of France wasn’t the united sociocultural entity that we imagine when we think of France; instead, the Kingdom of France is just a title signifying a King’s authority over a certain geographic region. The most important advent that comes from this period is the importance of legal claims on land. Sons of kings would war over who should be the heir of a kingdom, and, should one lose territory in a war, you had every right to fight and take it back. This concept of militarily regaining lost territory is one that didn’t die with modern understandings and rationalities; instead, it grew and metastasized.
Nationalism wouldn’t surge until after the French Revolution and wouldn’t fully implant itself in Europe until after the Revolutions of 1848. The idea of nations was truly forming at this point in time. Even still, nationalism was initially treated as a liberal movement to be quashed, as European royals attempted in vain to keep the old status quo. In the 19th century, the advent of nationalism had created the nations of Germany and Italy, with these nations justifying their existence with “We’re all X, and we must be one under the King/Emperor.” These sentiments of nationalism mixed in with 19th-century monarchist imperialism would lead itself into the Great War.
World War One is a war of grand proportions, but it’s also the last war of Kings and Emperors. Of the 5 emperors that fought in the war, only one would keep its monarchy, ironically being the United Kingdom, which was the only power seemingly unaffected by the revolutions of 1848 and other extreme political developments. With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Ottoman, and German empires came 15 new countries across Europe and the Middle East. Many of these new nations had little to no historic precedent, citing their existence and justification for their existence as being the ultimate nationalist representation of the ethnicity which it represents. Those who were once oppressed were now the masters of their ultimate fate, able to chart their own path. On paper, nations consisting of their ethnic peoples seems like something good, right?
Pictured above are two maps of what happened to one of the biggest victims of nationalism: Austria-Hungary. It was a massively diverse empire, but it valued Germans (Austrians) and Hungarians above all the other races in the empire. The first map is a census taken in 1910 of the multitude of ethnicities under the Austrian and Hungarian yoke. Upon the fall of Austria-Hungary came the expansion of Italy and Romania alongside the creation of Poland, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. As the colored map shows, ethnicities aren’t situated neatly along predetermined domestic borders. In fact, several different peoples live in the same regions. On its own, this wouldn’t be a major source of contention, but due to the justification of these newfound states’ existence being the ultimate representation of those ethnicities, any peoples caught outside their borders were immediately a cause for conflict. Under most circumstances, border disputes might have the ability to be resolved by diplomatic measures. But this request of diplomacy ignores how these new nations were formed; they were created in the fires of the Great War, and their borders were drawn with the blood of their former oppressors. And since their new nation was created with war, they were more than willing to use it to unite their peoples. Now if these high tensions were spurred on with the collapse of just Austria-Hungary, imagine but applied to 4 other massive empires collapsing. 16 total nations were forged. All born with similar militaristic backgrounds and all envied each other’s land.
The glorification of the army and other flattering imagery of the armed forces is not something new to the concept of nationalism or new in general. After all, the first actualization of nationalism came during the Napoleonic Wars. But even then, it was just seen as a revolution of cultural understanding, violent, but still a liberal philosophy basing itself on the freeing of ethnicities from large multi-ethnic empires. But with these nationalist sympathies being used as a tool of German, Italian, Japanese, and Serbian expansion, the nationalist movements of these nations and others became increasingly militarized. As with all militarization, these movements became more jingoist and chauvinist in nature. This makes a downward spiral wherein the army feeds into nationalistic and expansionist thought, and the nation’s people and political parties (usually conservative, such as the radical party in Serbia. But nations like the UK and Germany were led by either liberal-heavy coalitions or the main party under a monarch was a liberal party) glorify the army, leading it to have larger implications on domestic politics and more closely coincide itself with nationalist thought. With such militarized and expansionist doctrine and beliefs, nationalism eventually warped from loving your country to placing an inherent national supremacy on that nation at the expense of the people in other countries and the minorities within them.
Any discussion on the ultimate culmination of nationalism after World War One, it is imperative to discuss how minorities are treated within nationalist nations of old. The irony of oppressed minorities becoming their own free nation just to go and oppress their own minorities in their new nations serves as a cruel reality of nationalism and the retrograde nature of the ideas of national supremacy. “One People, One Nation” might seem harmless at first glance, but faces major obstacles upon the shocking revelation that more than one ethnicity can live in a single region. Furthermore, minorities aren’t limited to just race. Religion also is a major shaper of culture, with many national holidays worldwide having origins in religious practices. For example, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia struggled with ethnic tensions between Croats and Serbs, which was only inflamed by the clashing of the dominant Orthodox Church in Serbia against the Catholics in Croatia. Religion can also be the very foundation of a culture and national movement, as seen with modern Zionism, which practically created the modern state of Israel and its conflicts. Very clearly, in a nation that bases itself on being the ultimate representation of a people, doesn’t leave much room for peoples outside the ethnic scope, thus leading to oppression and muzzling of minorities.
The ultimate culmination of nationalist tensions in Europe came in World War II. Nazi Germany is the ultimate end result of the ideas of national supremacy, militarism, and a total takeover of jingoist thought bolstered further by their humiliating defeat and revanchist desires against the Entente and the “Judeo-Bolshevik” world. Germany’s alliance, the Axis, was formed and based itself upon its constituent nations’ “inherent national supremacy” over its neighbors. German Aryans were deemed the supreme race, while peoples like Jews, Romani, and Slavs as inhuman creatures whose total extermination was seen as an act of security for the dominant race.
But nationalism isn’t a one-way street, and can bolster national resolve in the face of a crisis. During the German invasion of Russia, the USSR sent mass propaganda about rallying for a greater cause, to defend the Slavic peoples as a whole. Adding a national element that helped the USSR defeat Germany. But to say that the USSR was a wholly innocent party during the timeframe of 1930-1945 is a complete falsehood. The Soviet Union propagated several offensive wars in the years prior to the German Invasion of the USSR, having previously invaded the Baltics, Poland, and Finland under the guise of “Reclaiming Rightfully Russian Land.” Although these nations had previously been a part of Russia, they had totally distinct identities and had minuscule to non-existent Russian populations within them, but because they were once united at some. Russia sought to re-establish its total cultural hegemony through other Russification means. Though not as plainly targeted at specific races like the German Holocaust, Soviet Russia made substantive efforts in attempting to homogenize the USSR to be more Russian, such as sending prominent minority writers, such as the Ukrainian Serhii Yefremov to brutal work camps. They picked up on Russification efforts from the Russian Empire and added an ideological element, creating a new branch of Russification known as “Sovietification” as they enforced ideological purity on the minority populace while suppressing minority cultures and faiths under the pretext of “Aligning fully with Stalinist/Marxist Ideals.”
"The war against Russia will be such that it cannot be conducted in a knightly fashion. This struggle is one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be conducted with unprecedented, unmerciful, and unrelenting harshness"
- Adolf Hitler
The quote above is emblematic of the totality and brutality of the Eastern Front of World War 2. The ultimate and final showdown of German supremacist fascism against Soviet nationalism, resulted in 40 Million deaths just on the Eastern front alone.
After sacrificing 27 Million in a desperate defense against the Germans, the Soviets staked their claim as a true superpower, regaining the lands previously lost were now regained, and the entirety of Europe east of Berlin was under complete Russian control, fulfilling Pan-Slavic and expansionist dreams that Russian autocrats had held since the foundation of the Russian Tsardom. But now Russia and the world at large had to rebuild and create a new world from the ashes of imperialism and bury the 80 Million that nationalist ambitions had killed.
It was up to the new UN and domestic politicians to re-evaluate the role of nationalism in the new world. This re-evaluation even came into the very usage of the word.
“Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first."
- Charles De Gaulle
As De Gaulle’s quote states above, there is a clear difference between being patriotic and being nationalistic. Thanks to the mass decolonization of French and British colonies between 1946-1983, 83 countries across Asia and Africa were made independent from the colonial empires of France and the UK. Just like their European counterparts, many of these nations have shaky historical foundations and loose cultural ties. In cases like Pakistan, they have absolutely no historic basis for their national existence, and the only thing binding Pakistan to their ethnically diverse lands was that they were all Muslim. With little precedent for many of these nations’ existence, a rinse and repeat what was explored in Europe and amplify the scale of nationalism across the 2 most populated and ethnically diverse continents on the globe.
In the modern day, the collapse of the USSR, newfound religious zealotry in the Middle East, new globalized economics, and nuclear proliferation define diplomacy and international politics. And with the bloody advent of World War 2, modern nation-states would be a lot more cautious in the event that a militaristic state begins to push territorial claims. And for the most part, global leaders were doing their part in curbing nationalism and maintaining global peace. But recent economic and developmental stagnation leads people to search for fringe solutions. Trends across the seven continents show a new wave of nationalism, manifesting itself across several different forms, each with damning consequences for the domestic policies of nations and their neighbors.
Few regimes worldwide use nationalism to sustain themselves. They might usually use a common language, cultural values, and, in more unusual cases, religion. Under very select circumstances can a foreign regime sustain itself on the wish for one’s own nation to expand at the expense of others.
Venezuela has been in the gutter for the better part of 30 years. Rigged elections, disastrous socialist economic policies, and total alienation not just in the region, but the South American continent at large. Recently, Maduro’s regime finds itself in boiling hot waters due to very credible allegations of election rigging compounded by the dictatorship’s total
Venezuela has claimed that colonial borders dictated that the highlighted region belong in their entirety to Venezuela. ⅔ of Guyana would fall to Venezuela. This claim is preposterous because, since the very founding of the colony of British Guyana in 1831, the borders of Guyana have remained rigidly unchanged. Furthermore, there is no "ethnic claim" to Essequibo, as most of the people living in this region have Anglo-Native origins. Guyana speaks English and has more in common culturally with the small nation to its west and the island nations to its north than to Venezuela. The only thing that this claim serves to do is export Venezuelan instability to the rest of the region. The worst part is that these aren’t empty threats, as Guyana reports that a Venezuelan warship has entered its exclusive maritime zone, inflaming scorching-hot tensions, likely leading to some kind of military resolution in the near future. But just because a government is nationalist doesn’t mean that the people are too. Most of the Venezuelan population believes that Nicolás Maduro wrongly robbed Edmundo González of his rightful electoral victory. This crisis only harms the people of Venezuela and adds the largest diplomatic crisis Venezuela has seen, further damning a nation in the depths. A war against Guyana is something that Venezuela is in no shape to sustain, and only serves as national suicide.
Modern Expansionist Nationalism still exists in two major forms, salient and silent expansion. Salient expansion is very plainly seen, is unabashedly expansionist, and is already at war with someone, as is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war is justified as the "freeing of the ethnic Russians in the Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson" from "Ukrainian Nazis," circling back to the "my people are in foreign land, thus I have a claim to it" school of thought that led to the nationalist struggles of the 1930s. This overt expansion also adds a twinge of national supremacy, redoubling suppression efforts in the Ukrainian regions that Russia currently occupies by discouraging the use of the Ukrainian language. Now, contrary to Venezuela, the reason the Russian people are still supporting the war is that Putin has been extremely popular in Russia ever since the 2000s when he saved the Russian economy and reasserted Russia as a global superpower. He also controls the media and is able to spew pro-Russian propaganda constantly at the people without them knowing what’s really happening. But this form of modern expansionism is risky, as it will inevitably bring a whole host of different sanctions and almost completely bar an expanding nation from interacting in a major chunk of the international marketplace. These risks and inevitable alienation from the wider international community lead nationalist regimes to pursue alternate methods of expansion.
Enter Turkey, a nation that was born in a war of independence and survived being torn apart into various colonies by the Entente. Once the center of the Ottoman Empire, Turkey based its existence as being the ultimate representation of ethnic Turks. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was the founding father of modern Turkey and built it as a secular nation that was united by language and culture. Even still, in the early onsets of Turkish history, the Turkish nation became a leader in the Middle East, but even still, ethnic Turks sat outside the borders of Turkey. In 1974, Greece, Turkey’s neighbor and rival, was led by a shaky military junta and made a gambit to unite Greece and Cyprus by sponsoring a coup d'état in Cyprus. Cyprus isn’t entirely Greek; a fifth of Cyprus is Turkish. Furthermore, the Greeks were sponsoring the EOKA-B, a Cypriot terrorist group dedicated to harassing Turks in Cyprus. Once the coup went into effect, Turkey sent about 60,000 men to secure the northern half of the island. Now on a moral level, stopping a coup in a country to defend your people might be morally justifiable, considering it was a coup that threatened peoples of their nation, especially because it was a foreign nation messing with the domestic politics of another. Alas, there are two major pitfalls to this "morality" argument: the first is that the Turkish army was found guilty of several crimes against humanity by the European High Commission of Human Rights due to the clearance of a third of the island’s Greek population during the invasion. A very disgusting and blatant example of ethnic cleansing. The second major pitfall is that they still occupy North Cyprus, establishing a puppet regime and keeping their armed forces there, 51 years after the Cypriot coup.
The second is a lot simpler and a lot more recent, that being the consistent occupations of the Syrian border. During the Syrian Civil War, Turkey mobilized and began to occupy the northern regions to ensure that the civil war wouldn’t spread into Turkey and could double as a refugee sector. Again, this military action seems morally justified, but if you look under the surface, this occupation has much more sinister motives. The first of these major problems is the treatment of Kurds. The Kurds are a minority without a nation and have been clamoring for their own nation and have had tensions in Syria, Turkey, and Iraq. In the Syrian Civil War, the Kurds have armed themselves to be able to dictate their rights in the new Syrian state that is to come. With labeling Kurdish militias as terrorist groups and bombing them, not only do they weaken Kurdish defenses, they weaken what little influence Kurds had not just in the civil war but in the future Syria at the end of the war. The second humanitarian crisis is the occupation of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. This lets Turkey leverage the basic ability to drink water against Syria, which, though not racial, is imposing Turkey’s power over Syria in the midst of a crisis. As plainly shown, through deceit, secrecy, and a pinch of ethnic cleansing, Turkey has been able to fully exert its power and expand its borders with little to no pushback from the rest of the world.
There are many other forms with which nationalism may take place, be it economic, social, or militaristic. One result is always the same: the world at large loses. As De Gaulle has stated, there is a clear difference between patriotism and nationalism. Nations are all well within their rights to act in what they believe to be the best course of action for the country. But under no circumstance has nationalism proven to be a benefit for a country. By actively antagonizing and claiming neighbors' land, the people of both the aggressor and the attacked suffer. The good thing is that several countries around the world are already trying to curb nationalist movements within their own borders. In Europe, the French National Rally and German AfD have both been actively targeted by their domestic political scenes for their extremist views on Islamic identity in Europe, and both lost their elections and have little say in politics. In Asia, Chinese expansion is readily called out, while Pakistan’s aggression has led it to become a pariah amongst most of the world. But to say that nationalism is completely checked worldwide is a lie. Namely, the US has elected extreme corporatist politicians in the wake of Trump’s victory, and his erratic policymaking affects all aspects of American life. In his attempts to try to prove the superiority of American industry, he is levying and will levy tariffs, which so far have only served to increase prices. Diplomatically, the tariffs and threats to Canada, Greenland, and Panama have just proven to traditional American allies that the new government is erratic and untrustworthy. Clearly, if the world is to move on with more peaceful initiatives in mind, it must once more cast the nationalist ideas that brought ruin and death to millions back into the fringes of democratic politics.
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