Nationalism in the Global Era: A Complex Tapestry

Nationalism is one of the most powerful and persistent forces in modern political life. In an era defined by global supply chains, social media, and mass migration, you might expect national identity to fade into the background. Instead, it has done the opposite. From Brexit to the rise of Hindu nationalism in India, from “America First” to separatist movements across Europe, nationalism has surged back into the spotlight – louder, more complex, and more contested than ever. Understanding why requires a look at what nationalism actually is, how thinkers have tried to explain it, and why it refuses to disappear despite – or perhaps because of – globalization.

What is nationalism? 🔗

At its core, nationalism is the political principle that the nation and the state should be aligned – that the people sharing a common culture, language, or history should govern themselves as a unified political entity. Political scientists like Anthony Smith and sociologists like Ernest Gellner have long highlighted nationalism’s dual nature: it can be a powerful unifying force, binding diverse individuals into a collective sense of “we,” while simultaneously becoming a source of division when it draws sharp lines between insiders and outsiders. The concept is not static. It has evolved from its 19th-century roots in European nation-building to a thoroughly global phenomenon that now takes on radically different forms depending on the historical and political context.

Civic vs. ethnic nationalism 🔗

One of the most important distinctions in nationalism studies is between civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism. Civic nationalism defines belonging through shared political rights, legal status, and allegiance to democratic procedures – the nation is open to anyone who commits to its political values, regardless of ancestry. Ethnic nationalism, by contrast, defines the nation through shared descent, language, culture, or religion, making membership a matter of birth rather than choice. According to the principles of civic nationalism, the nation is a political entity whose core identity is not ethnicity, while ethnic nationalism ties belonging to primordial characteristics. In practice, most nationalist movements blend both elements, drawing on civic ideals while also invoking cultural or ethnic distinctiveness.

How did nationalism develop? The key theories 🔗

Several foundational thinkers have shaped how we understand nationalism’s origins and persistence, and their frameworks remain indispensable today.

Gellner: nationalism as a product of industrialization 🔗

Ernest Gellner, one of the most influential theorists in the field, argued that nationalism is not a primordial or natural sentiment but a distinctly modern phenomenon tied to industrialization. As societies industrialized, they required a standardized, literate workforce. For Gellner, modern nationalism is a clear result of western industrialization in the 19th century, because industrial production demanded a shared cultural idiom – a common language, shared schooling, and homogenous culture – to function efficiently. In this view, nations are not natural communities; they are products of nationalism rather than the other way around. For Gellner, since the industrialization era, individuals have been loyal not to a monarch or a religion but rather to a national culture, and the state is only legitimate when it represents and protects this culture.

Anderson: nations as imagined communities 🔗

Benedict Anderson offered a complementary but distinct view in his landmark 1983 work Imagined Communities. Anderson argued that a nation is a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group, made possible through shared symbols, narratives, and media. Despite the fact that members of a nation will never meet most of their fellow citizens, they feel a profound sense of solidarity and common belonging. Anderson credited the rise of print capitalism – newspapers, books, and vernacular publishing – with making this shared imagining possible on a mass scale. The combination of capitalism and print media created imagined geographical networks, so that people on the same routes would meet, read the same newspapers, and know the same political stories, creating an “imagined” community. Anderson’s insight is that national identity, though constructed, is no less emotionally real or politically consequential for that.

Smith: the ethnic roots of nations 🔗

Political scientist Anthony Smith pushed back against both Gellner and Anderson, arguing that they underestimate the pre-modern ethnic foundations of nationalism. In Smith’s ethno-symbolist approach, nationalism often draws on the unifying myths, symbols, and memories of pre-modern ethnicities. For Smith, what makes each nation distinctive is not just its legal institutions or economy but its particular ethnic core – the historical memories, cultural symbols, and myths of origin that give a people their unique sense of identity. This explains why nationalist movements so frequently invoke ancient history, heritage, and ancestral territory even in the thoroughly modern world.

Nationalism and globalization: a complicated relationship 🔗

For decades, many social theorists predicted that globalization would erode national identity. The logic seemed straightforward: as capital, people, and culture flowed freely across borders, and as supranational institutions like the European Union expanded, the nation-state would lose its grip on collective identity. Much of the early writing on globalization assumed that it would have a corrosive effect on national identity and nationalism. This emphatically proved not to be the case, with nationalism intensifying as global connections became denser and more extensive.

Rather than dissolving national identity, globalization has often sharpened it. Responses to the processes of globalization have simultaneously “flattened” aspects of identity and heightened nationalistic tendencies. As global cultural flows standardize consumer habits and media landscapes, many communities respond by reasserting what makes them distinct – their language, their traditions, their sovereignty. This is not simply a reaction of ignorance or backwardness; it reflects a deep human need for belonging and cultural continuity in a rapidly changing world.

Economic anxiety and the nationalist turn 🔗

Globalization’s economic effects have played a major role in fueling nationalist politics. The promise that open markets and free trade would benefit everyone has not been fulfilled equally. Some say nationalism is an inevitable bite-back, not due to failed globalism but to a globalism that didn’t achieve its promise and potential for all. When jobs move offshore, wages stagnate, and local industries collapse, the political backlash often takes a nationalist form. According to Harvard political theorist Yascha Mounk, economic stagnation among lower- and middle-class populations is a main driver for nationalism’s rise around the globe. People who feel economically left behind by globalization are more likely to support politicians who promise to restore national greatness and protect them from foreign competition.

Cultural anxiety and identity politics 🔗

But economic grievance alone does not explain the nationalist surge. Cultural anxiety matters just as much, if not more. Research from Harvard sociology shows that placing the emphasis solely on economic motivations ignores the central importance of ethnoracial identity politics in nationalist populism. When rapid demographic change, immigration, and shifting social norms make people feel that their cultural identity is under threat, nationalism provides a compelling framework for resistance – a story about who “the people” are, and who does not belong. Studies show an ambivalent relationship between globalization and national identity, with waves of national populism and counter-movements emerging as each country grapples with its own internal debates and trajectories.

The global surge of nationalist movements 🔗

The 21st century has witnessed a remarkable revival of nationalism across every continent. From Putin’s macho revivalism, to Trump’s electoral victory and Xi Jinping’s strongman regionalism, today’s nationalist movements engage with the economic context of their time and address issues born of globalization. These are not simply replicas of older nationalisms; they are distinctly modern phenomena shaped by social media, digital communication, and a global flow of political ideas and tactics.

Brexit and the politics of “taking back control” 🔗

The United Kingdom’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union stands as a defining example of contemporary nationalism in action. The campaign for Brexit was dominated by populist rhetoric about taking back sovereignty from Brussels and controlling national borders, focusing on curtailing migration and reasserting domestic decision-making. Supporters drew on a powerful sense that British sovereignty had been surrendered to distant, unaccountable European institutions, and that a distinct British – or more precisely, English – identity was under threat. Brexit has been widely described as a milestone of neo-nationalism, with supporters motivated by a yearning to control immigration, reverse globalization, and restore national greatness by disengaging from the wider world.

Populist nationalism in the US and beyond 🔗

Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda gave similar sentiments a political vehicle in the United States. Both Trump and the Brexit leadership rearticulated dominant debates from ones originally of economic sovereignty into a polarizing antagonism centered on race, culture, and nationality – romanticizing a nostalgic vision of national greatness while demonizing “the other.” The pattern extended well beyond the Anglo-American world. Several neo-nationalist politicians came to power or ran strongly during the 2010s and 2020s, including Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. In Asia, Hindu nationalism has grown in India with the rise of the BJP under Narendra Modi, while nationalist influences in Japan’s government have developed over the course of the early 21st century.

Nationalism and international cooperation 🔗

The real-world consequences of this wave have extended beyond elections. Some nationalist politicians have translated their demands into actual policy, implementing substantial reversals of international commitments – examples include the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement under Trump, the Philippines’ withdrawal from the International Criminal Court under Duterte, and the UK’s withdrawal from the EU. These actions signal a broader tension between the logic of global cooperation and the logic of national sovereignty that will define international politics for decades to come.

Is national identity becoming more complex? 🔗

Despite the political noise, the actual lived experience of national identity in the global era is rarely simple. Research on globalization and national identity highlights two different pathways that can simultaneously strengthen national identity: the strong role of family and community in transmitting cultural traditions, and educational and digital opportunities that, through cross-cultural contact, can actually deepen a sense of national distinctiveness. In other words, going global doesn’t necessarily mean losing your sense of national belonging – sometimes it reinforces it.

Scholars also note that national identity increasingly coexists with, rather than displacing, other forms of belonging. Transnational identities, dual citizenship, and diasporic communities challenge the assumption that belonging must be exclusive. The emergence of transnational identities, dual citizenship, and the debate over global citizenship reflect a fundamental shift in how individuals perceive their belonging and responsibilities. People can hold a strong national identity while also identifying with a region, a diaspora, a religion, or a global cause. The boundaries of “us” and “them” are not dissolving – but they are becoming more layered and negotiable than any single nationalist narrative can capture.

The enduring significance of nationalism 🔗

Nationalism endures because it addresses something fundamental: the human need for collective identity, shared meaning, and political self-determination. How individual-level national identity attitudes relate to societal-level variables – including migrant influx and economic competition – remains one of the most actively studied questions in contemporary sociology. What is clear is that nationalism is not a relic of a pre-global past. It is a dynamic force that continues to shape elections, foreign policy, migration debates, and cultural politics worldwide. The challenge for democratic societies is to distinguish between forms of nationalism that affirm collective identity and self-governance, and those that slide into exclusion, scapegoating, and the denial of rights to those defined as outsiders.

As sociologist Ernest Gellner observed, nationalism is primarily a political principle holding that the political and the national unit should be congruent – but in a world of migration, diaspora, and layered identities, defining what “congruence” means has never been more contested, or more consequential.

What do you think? In an increasingly interconnected world, can a strong sense of national identity coexist with genuine openness to cultural diversity – or do the two inevitably come into tension? And when nationalist movements claim to speak “for the people,” who exactly gets to be counted as part of that people?

References

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