One Simple Trick for Understanding Nationalism

Thoughts on Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism, by Azar Gat

Nationalism is notoriously tricky to define. Although politicians, from President Trump to pundits like Ramesh Ponnuru, praise nationalism and claim that its time has come, they rarely offer a definition. Even worse, political theorists have filled volumes with gobbledygook definitions that are difficult to summarize. The vagueness of nationalism directly contrasts with the simplicity of Marxian socialism, the totalitarian ideology of the political left.

In American political parlance, nationalism means “pursuing policies that are best for your own country,” as opposed to all the other ideologies that want to pursue policies that are bad for one’s own country. I asked ChatGPT for a two-sentence definition of nationalism, and it produced a variant of my above half-sentence:

Nationalism is an ideology and movement characterized by the promotion of the interests, culture, and identity of a particular nation, especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining the nation's sovereignty over its homeland. It seeks to unify a group of people by fostering a sense of shared identity and purpose based on cultural, linguistic, or historical commonalities.

ChatGPT's answer isn't satisfying. Nationalism must be more than just formalized jingoism . . . right?

Fortunately, recent scholars have put forward new definitions of nationalism. Yoram Hazony tries to define nationalism in his book The Virtue of Nationalism, but he produces a confused mishmash that boils down to (1) nationalism is a natural and ancient human ideology and (2) real nationalists are not responsible for anything bad like genocide, war, or racism. Hazony's definition isn't serious. Annoyingly, his book is also fiercely ahistorical.

I’ve expressed my confusion over nationalism on Twitter, which resulted in many recommendations to read Azar Gat’s Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. (This was the single best recommendation I’ve ever received over Twitter. My sincere thanks to all those who recommended Gat’s marvelous book.)

Gat makes two central claims and defends them ably. The first is that nationalism is an old “ideology” present throughout human history. People have always been members of tribes and larger groups, they have identified themselves as members of those groups, outsiders view them that way, they resent being ruled by outside groups, and those groups are called nations. Gat's view is called primordialism, which contrasts with the other main theory of nationalism, modernism, which posits that nationalism is a recent ideological invention.

The most well-known proponent of modernism is Benedict Anderson. His book Imagined Communities argues that nations are imagined by people who perceive themselves as part of a group. Anderson argues that the rise of printing and capitalism enabled the creation and spread of national identity by fostering a common language and culture and forming a shared historical narrative, often fanciful, among a population. Before reading Gat, I assumed that Anderson was correct. How ignorant I was – Gat convincingly shows that nationalism is primordial with historical writings as old as writing itself from every corner of the world.

Gat’s second claim is a definition of nationalism that is easy to understand and makes immediate sense: political ethnicity. In other words, nationalism is just identity politics taken to the logical extreme of ethnicity dominating a state. His definition distinguishes nationalism from patriotism, is consistent with my observation of nationalist political movements that seem to rely on support from narrow homogeneous demographic groups, and seeks to define who is a “real” member of the nation. Political ethnicity is the definition Ilya Somin and I use in our recent critique of nationalism in National Affairs.

Furthermore, Gat should get an award for making Hazony’s book comprehensible. Although Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism is unconvincing for reasons that I detail here, one can understand it as the normative version of Gat's book with one significant change: Hazony goes to great lengths to obscure, ignore, and evade Gat's claim that nationalism is political ethnicity. Hazony specifically denounces racism and ethnic chauvinism and focuses on culture as the defining mark of membership in a nation rather than Gat's claim that ethnicity is the mark of membership in a nation. Hazony twists words and makes many confusing statements that don't add up – probably for the sake of a Western or American audience that is repelled by Gat’s description of nationalism . . . for good reason.

I recommend this simple trick to understand nationalism in Hazony's book and elsewhere: cross out the word “culture” wherever it appears and replace it with “ethnicity.” Voila.

Civic nationalism, which Gat also writes about in his book, is the idea that membership in a nation can be formed by civic attachment to certain ideas like the Constitution. Gat tries to show that every civic nation is actually based on real or imagined ethnicity supported by a strong ethnic core, but he's less convincing when analyzing the United States. He points to immigrant intermarriage and linguistic assimilation, all markers of cultural and genetic assimilation. However, the persistence of hyphenated Americanism that separates ethnic identity from national identity seems at odds with his explanation. Perhaps Gat is correct, and my American patriotism is blinding me to reality, but Americans tend to make much more of broad racial identities than more narrow ethnic identities that are the stuff of nations. Or maybe that's a different way of saying the same thing.

The 2014 General Social Survey (GSS) asks, “How proud are you of being American?” Focusing on American citizens, 68.9 percent of whites and 69.3 percent of blacks responded “very proud.” Similarly, 28.9 percent of whites and 27.5 percent of blacks said, “somewhat proud.” American citizens who racially identified as “Other,” which includes Asian Americans, Native Americans, and some Hispanics, responded with 75.3 percent “very proud” and 23.6 percent “somewhat proud.” Other GSS questions that attempt to gauge patriotic sentiment find the same thing. Also, immigrant patriotism is about the same as native-born patriotism or even slightly greater. In other words, immigrants and the most politically salient racial groups in the United States are all about as patriotic as each other – at least in 2014. Maybe GSS surveys aren’t flawed, or perhaps sentiments among different racial or national groups have diverged in the last decade, but surveys like these are all we've got. They're not consistent with an ethno-centric theory of American nationalism. All we’ve got is patriotism. 

All readers will find something to dislike in Gat's book, but disliking a conclusion is not the same as disagreeing with it. His primordialism is convincing, and I dislike it very much. Still, I must accept it as he convincingly provides mountains of evidence for his point in every example except for the United States. Perhaps that’s my American myopia, but I don’t think so. However, his definition of nationalism as political ethnicity will infuriate many American nationalists who go to great lengths to exclude race-obsessed weirdos from their midst even though they fail miserably. I recommend Gat’s book to anybody interested in nationalism.

This substack is an expanded version of my earlier blog post at Cato-at-Liberty.