Irish Nationalists
Let’s Talk
Nationalism
The Dangers of Nationalism
Nationalism is central to our understanding of some of the most important political developments in the modern world. It is often criticised as an irrational doctrine and pathological phenomenon associated with the emergence of violent extreme right-wing movements.
Pundits and commentators often refer to nationalism to describe events such as the spread of social and political polarisation, ‘red wall’ politics, the rise of populism, ethnic violence and mass protests. While sometimes nationalism is used as a synonym to political instability, irredentism, division and aggression, other times, it is understood as a democratising force facilitated by successful mass mobilisation.
Despite the significant consequences, however, that nationalism has for political stability and democracy, academic research has yet to systematise these consequences, both theoretically and empirically.
While most established works in the field focus on the origins of nationalism, or in other words how and when it arises, we know less about how and why nationalism matters in contemporary politics.
The aim of this Exchange is to start a new dialogue between different strands of scholarship around what we know, what we do not know and what we should know about the consequences of nationalism.
To reflect on these issues, the contributors have been asked to address four related questions: (1) What is nationalism?
(2) How can we measure nationalism?
(3) What are the consequences of nationalism?
(4) What are new research frontiers? Each contributor addresses these questions from a different sub-disciplinary perspective: Wimmer takes a macro-comparative approach;
Helbling focuses specifically on immigration policies; Vom Hau centres on economic and social development; and finally, Tudor adopts a democratisation approach. Our goal is to illustrate the multi-dimensionality of nationalism and discuss its wide-ranging consequences for scholars of a variety of sub-disciplines.
The first question asks contributors to explain how they understand nationalism. It speaks to debates about the malleability of nationalism, its origins and its ‘sticky’, ‘thin’ or ‘chameleon-like’ nature (Freeden, 1998; Hall, 2011). All contributors commence from the premise that nationalism is political.
Wimmer defines it as a political ideology, governed by two principles of political legitimacy: States should be governed by members of the nation, and rulers should care about the interests of the national majority. While polysemantic and flexible, nationalism is effectively poorly elaborated, and as such able to attach itself to most contemporary political ideologies.
Helbling concurs with Wimmer's emphasis on the political nature of nationalism, defining it, in line with Gellner (1983), as a modern, politicised version of ethnicity which seeks the congruence of the political and national units.
He also focuses on the question of inclusion and exclusion in his definition, suggesting that one direct implication of the key principle of nationalism is that it ties institutions of inclusion such as citizenship, democracy and welfare to national forms of exclusion.
An understanding of how these boundaries are set and how they change—for example, the ethnic/civic distinction in the study of nationalism—can help us distinguish between different immigration policies.
Vom Hau also draws on Gellner (1983) to define nationalism as a political principle which holds that the world is divided into nations, which should be self-governed. He proceeds to distinguish between three distinct perspectives that may help us understand the ontology of nationalism
Republicans v Democrats
This conceptualisation suggests that nationalism has important, structural and far-reaching consequences and has in many ways shaped the economic, social and political make-up of states in the modern world.
To understand them more systematically, we need broad perspectives that allow us to study nationalism from both demand and supply-side approaches across different disciplines.
Helbling adopts one such perspective, focusing specifically on the consequences of nationalism for citizenship policies. His argument is that different understandings of nationhood affect naturalisation criteria.
For example, republican and assimilationist models have had different consequences, resulting in different citizenship models in countries such as France and Germany. Indeed, we have some understanding of the ways in which nationalist governments implement more restrictive immigration policies. But the presence of, often puzzling, cross-national variations suggests that is much scope for future research on the topic.
Vom Hau's contribution focuses on the consequences of nationalism for economic and social development, which he suggests remain surprisingly undertheorised. Like Wimmer, Vom Hau argues that the understanding of the nation as a community of equals facilitated the emergence of free labour markets and new social stratification systems.
Nationalism, therefore, is a potential explanatory factor for variations in social development as well as public service provision social policy and welfare outcomes. Although many, if not most, social security, public education and health care systems are organised at the national level and sustained through cross-class solidarity, we know little—and should know more—about the motivational forces behind sustained economic growth.
Tudor concludes by addressing the varied consequences of nationalism for democracy. She notes that while there is much scholarship on individual case studies, the field lacks systematic comparative research examining the modalities of the relationship between nationalism and democracy. This is an important gap as the impact of nationalism on democracy is significant:
Already the few existing comparative studies which have engaged in explicitly comparative examinations of the ways in which nationalism affects democracy reveal significant variation.
The effective harnessing of strong ethnic nationalism may serve as a crucial driver of democracy in some circumstances; post-Soviet eastern Europe is an illustrative example. Similarly, the Indian nationalist movement's ability to engage in mass mobilisation was key to India's success in establishing democracy and India's civic rather than ethnic nature mattered for India's post-independence establishment of democracy.
Elsewhere, however, nationalism did not result in democratic rule. While nationalism's mobilising potential renders it an important force for democracy, much more research is needed on the specific mechanisms that underpin this relationship.
The final question is forward-looking. A renewed, systematic focus on the consequences of nationalism calls for new research frontiers that will advance methodological rigour and theoretical innovation. All contributors agree that the consequences of nationalism are far-reaching and point to avenues for future research that will move the field forward in these respects.
Wimmer's suggestions are threefold: We need to make methodological advancements, for example, through the employment of controlled comparisons, event history models and quasi-experiments,
in order to address issues of endogeneity in the study of nationalism; we need to develop new typologies that allow for heterogeneity within elite and citizen groups to reflect the changing nature of nationalism overtime; and finally, we need to develop more dynamic
theories and modelling techniques in order to identify the conditions under which actor coalitions holding on to certain types of nationalist ideologies gain power over others.
Helbling identifies avenues for future research specifically in the field of nationalism and immigration. His focus is also on empirical and methodological advancements. He argues that we need more systematic ways of empirically observing and measuring nationalism in order to move the debate forward in this area.
We also need to move on from the current Eurocentricism in the study of nationalism: The development of appropriate and comparable measures of nationalist discourses across a larger number of countries will allow for the establishment of broad patterns covering countries outside the Western world.
Vom Hau recommends using the distinction between behavioural, affective and cognitive approaches as a starting point for studying the effects of nationalism for economic and social development
He also emphasises the need for more accurate operationalisation and measurement tools to further develop and test plausible explanatory propositions and causal mechanisms.
Dafne Halikiopoulou
(1) the behavioural approach which treats nationalism as a particular form of collective action;
(2) the affective approach which refers to nationalism as a collective sentiment;
(3) the cognitive approach which treats nationalism as a discursive formation. Each approach offers important nuance, by allowing us to capture theoretically meaningful aspects of nationalism.
Finally, Tudor, who also defines nationalism as a political ideology, focuses on the parallels between nationalism and democracy: both invoke ‘the people’, a concept of ‘acrimonious contestation’. As Wimmer also argues, nationalism offers a solution to democracy's ‘boundary problem’, which suggests the two are often conceptually and empirically linked.
The second question asks contributors to reflect on issues of measurement and operationalisation. This is an important question given not only the interdisciplinary nature of nationalism but also the difficulties involved in operationalising and empirically quantifying the concept.
To address research questions pertaining to the relevance and consequences of nationalism, scholars face difficult classification and operationalisation decisions. Can we, and if so how, empirically distinguish between nationalist and non-nationalist actors and attitudes, or ethnic and civic nations?
Here, the different contributors focus on the ways in which we can measure nationalism from their different sub-disciplinary perspectives. They all agree, however, about the difficult methodological challenges that scholars of nationalism face and that more systematic measurement would advance the field, especially empirical research, significantly.
Wimmer opens the discussion by distinguishing between three levels of analysis, that is, the state, the aggregate and the individual, which may be measured with the use of different types of data. Helbling turns to the distinction between the ideational and policy models.
The former focus on measuring the dominant understanding of nationhood and/or rely on quantitative expert interviews to measure how scholars see the elite's view. The latter tend to be investigated by means of qualitative case studies and, only more recently, comparisons of a larger number of countries.
Vom Hau elaborates further on the distinction between the behavioural, affective and cognitive approaches to nationalism, and the different dimensions each approach might allow us to measure.
He argues that while the behavioural and affective approaches are useful tools for analysing the intensity of nationalism, the cognitive approach is better suited for identifying differences in the content of nationalism. Research explaining variations in the intensity of nationalism tends to use individual-level survey data, for example, using questions about national identifications and pride, or focuses on specific state policies to capture variations of nation-building.
Research on cognition, on the other hand, traces the ways in which nationalism is articulated in rhetoric and political claims, expressed in public culture and enacted in private conversations, and thus helps to differentiate nationalism as a frame of reference and pattern of discourse from political behaviour.
Tudor centres the question of measurement on the relationship between nationalism and democracy. Given that both concepts invoke ‘the people’, it is surprising that their empirical relationship has not been more systematically interrogated in existing literature.
The study of nationalism often suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity, given the breadth of the concept and its ‘sticky’ or ‘thin’ nature (Freeden, 1998; Hall, 2011). Existing scholarship has primarily conceptualised and measured nationalism along five dimensions,
Tudor notes, all of which are difficult to measure empirically. The first two, that is, elite fragmentation and popular fragmentation, examine the cohesiveness of national narratives, which are tricky to operationalise; the third, that is, ascriptiveness, relates to the ethnic-civic distinction which scholars tend to agree is blurry and difficult to establish empirically.
The fourth dimension refers to the ‘thickness’ of nations, or in other words the extent to which symbols, narratives and policies positively define the nation. Thickness has rarely been empirically assessed by systematic comparisons.
Finally, the fifth dimension, salience, or the extent to which individuals consider national identities to be important relative to other identities is usually measured with cross-country and cross-temporal levels, but questions of operationalisation of ‘national identity’ remain unaddressed.
In sum, all contributions point to the significance but also challenges in developing accurate measurement tools that will allow for robust and generalisable conclusions across cases and across time.
The third question prompts contributors to delve into the consequences of nationalism and, in doing so, highlight gaps in existing nationalism research with regard to these consequences.
The aim is to start a dialogue about the ways in which we may theorise and empirically substantiate more systematic accounts of the consequences of nationalism. Wimmer sets the ground for this from his macro-political perspective. He presents the big picture by identifying eight distinct, but interconnected, consequences:
(1) the delegitimisation of ethnic and racial hierarchies;
(2) the revolutionisation of state power;
(3) the attempt to offer a solution to the boundary problem of democracy by formalising the stipulation that only members of the nation should be allowed to vote;
(4) the consolidation of the idea of equality before the law by stipulating that all members of the ‘national family’ are equal;
(5) the provision of an ideological basis for a massive increase in taxation;
(6) the ideological underpinning of universal military conscription;
(7) the development of welfare systems by popularising the idea of mutual solidarity between all members of the nation; and (8) shaping the ethnic composition of the population.
Finishes
(2) uses comparative, time-series survey data to identify the ways in which the different dimensions of nationalism may change around key historical events; and
(3) employs field experiments to identify when, whether and how the use of nationalist symbols matters for individual attitudes and behaviours.
While all contributions acknowledge the challenges involved in developing new approaches, for example, data limitations, they stress that these challenges constitute opportunities rather than constraints because they open up exciting opportunities for future research. This, as Wimmer argues, is ultimately good news for the study of nationalism.
Finally, Tudor encourages the development of new research that
(1) engages in comparative historical research around moments when new nations emerged to establish how nationalism had impacted on democracy;
