Nationalism and International Relations

Nationalism and International RelationsLegitimacy, Geo-political Space and International Actors

Contemporary NationalismsDefinitionsNationalismNationalism is a political expression of group identity often coupled with a country or a state. It is an intense, subjective feeling reflecting elemental ties of individuals to groups (Hough cited in Mount, 2012: 150).Nationthe dominant means of expressing and defining political culture in modern states and international society (Mount, 2012: 158).Europe in 1815

Europe in 1919

Where did nationalism come from?Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist (Gellner, 1964).

an imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign (Anderson, 1991).

It is through nationalism that societies try to propel themselves forward to certain kinds of goals (industrialisation, prosperity, equality with other peoples, etc.) by a certain sort of regression - by looking inwards, drawing more deeply on their indigenous resources, resurrecting past folk-heroes and myths about themselves and so on (Nairn, 1981).

Nationalism and Sovereignty

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whatever Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it Declaration of Independence, 1776).The nation is essentially the source of all sovereignty (Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 1789)National Unifications, 1815-1918

By the mid-19th century, the political principle of nationalism was being used to rearrange the political map of Europe, notably through the unifications of Germany Italy.Wilsonian Liberalism and International Society

At the end of the First World War, nationalism was also used a principle to redraw the political map of Europe, but its implementation was distorted by stragetic concerns.Fascism, Nationalism and International Society

During the inter-War period (1919-39) Fascist and militarist powers used nationalism as a justification to redraw the map of Europe created by the Paris Peace Treaties and thereby undermined the nascent liberal international order of the League of Nations.

Decolonisation and NationalismAlthough nationalism had gained a bad reputation in the wake of the Second World War, it was a crucial ideology in the diverse independence movements in the colonial world.Nationalism and Separatism in the New World Order

After the Cold War (1947-90) Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the USSR split into their constituent national groups, often violentlyNationalism and Liberalism in the New World Order

the liberal tradition, although suspicious of the dangers of extreme nationalism, depends haevily on the ide that a nation embodies the inalienable right for peoples to be liberated from tyranny (Mount, 2012: 157). but nationalism is not just about unification or separatism, but about legitimising existing states too.ConclusionsNationalism is a political principle that asserts that nation and state should be congruent and one that links individuals to groups and states;It has been used as a political principle for the reordering of geo-political space, principally since the mid-19th century up to the present day;Nationalism is not just about unification and separatism, but about legitimising existing states too.