Nationalism can be seen as a complex relationship and, like most such relationships, people have to work hard to balance the tension between self and others. While many nations have succeeded in using nationalism to develop, this same nationalism has also generated forms of exclusivism and competition that make it hard to resolve shared global problems. Economic development is an important—but not the only—goal that nations must pursue.
While some see the rise of nationalism, or you might even say, tribalism , as a sign of the end of the world, there is actually a form of self-interest that has increased growth.
Japan provides a surprising example. By the late s, this exclusive form of nationalism was replaced in both countries by a grass-roots nationalism that demanded more participatory modes of political and economic governance, leading to more balanced growth. Growth was likewise driven in the populous nation-states of China and India, despite their disparity in experiments with socialist forms of development and varied U.
Growth in both nations was enabled by powerful nationalist movements—especially revolutionary nationalism in China—premised on a more equitable contract with the population than the older imperialist order. Development, in other words, was encouraged by the inclusive nationalism that grew out of redistributive justice and the economic and political failures of the older system, and the rise of new classes that demanded change.
In Southeast Asia, the rise of the nation paired with inclusion in a Japan-centered regional economy led to growth during the ss. Interdependence was cemented after the Asian financial crisis of as the region emerged with new ideas for shared economic security through the Association of Southeast Asian Nations ASEAN.
While nationalist competition within ASEAN continues, it is still a major force for integration and growth. The earliest forms of nationalism in Europe were closely linked to imperialism and the twin forces of economic development and exclusion, which continued well into the twentieth century. As Eric Hobsbawm has pointed out, imperial expansion was justified by a nationalism that was more racist than rational.
Hannah Arendt points out that imperialists were able to harness nationalism because they claimed to supersede the reality of internal national divisiveness and represent the glory of the nation. Related Report Intra-African trade: A path to economic diversification and inclusion Vera Songwe Friday, January 11, Future Development How should development organizations work with populist governments? Galston Monday, August 12, How can these impacts be so profoundly different?
Scholars often distinguish between two types of nationalism: an ethnic variety built on race, religion, and language, versus a civic nationalism , in which rights are granted to all citizens, regardless of race, ethnicity, language, religion, or culture.
German nationalism is, for example, often condemned as ethnic and exclusive, whereas Anglo-French nationalism is seen to be civic and inclusive. It is this the civic model that Myrdal had in mind when comparing Europe and South Asia, and it is this model that was dominant during the first few decades after the Second World War, embedded in the protocols of the United Nations and eventually leading to a notion of development that includes the eradication of poverty and higher standards of living for all.
Today, aided by the volatility of the global economy, a narrower ethnic—sometimes even racist—vision of the nation has reasserted itself, which can be seen in the support of elected populist leaders around the globe.
These fluctuations in the tone of a particular form of nationalism are shaped by more than state-influenced macro-economic factors. Most international studies of economic development take the nation- state as a stable basis of their analysis.
While indispensable, these analyses can miss how changes in sociopolitical forces transform development strategies and vice versa. Sociopolitical movements largely determine whether a nation turns inward or outward. Smith The imaginary—and the movements they often give birth to—can be integrative or contentious. While the broad goals of national development may remain, the frontiers of community inclusion, class configuration, and possibilities of nationalism have changed dramatically.
Eric Hobsbawm, a Marxist historian, shares with Gellner the functionalist and materialist angle to nationalism. Just as Gellner, Hobsbawm takes the view that nationalism engenders nations and emphasises that nations are a function of a modern territorial state. Some scholars associate the rise of nationalism with the rise of the modern state and also regard nationalism as a function of the modern state Breuilly ; Giddens Anthony Smith has associated nationalism with the rise of the scientific state , a novel, interventionist state which seeks to homogenise the population within its border for the sake of efficiency.
This, according to Smith, would lead to the crisis of traditional forms of authority based on shared understanding of a certain cosmology, and the intelligentsia of the newly independent states would face the problem of dual legitimation , an answer to which could be ethnic nationalism.
This type of organisation has evolved shaped by the framework provided by the Peace of Westphalia , a particular arrangement about rule, which was articulated at a particular point of time in a particular place. The first nationalist movements were indeed observed in the Americas, a colonial periphery located outside Europe, but they were nonetheless conditioned by factors that were essentially European, including the rise of the modern, administrative state, which pushed many Creole officials to pilgrimage to far-flung corners of their land to give shape to the idea of their shared community.
Likewise, the American founding fathers were firmly embedded in the economic structure and history of thought of the Old Continent, even if they were intent of building a new society. If nationalism is a functional requirement of industrialisation as Gellner has suggested, then when industrialisation reaches somewhere, nationalism will follow.
If nationalism is a function of the modern state as suggested by Smith, John Breuilly and Anthony Giddens, then nationalism will arrive when the Westphalian state is adopted by the non-European part of the world.
It is again Kedourie who has proposed a classical theory of diffusion of nationalism. In examining nationalism in Asia and Africa, he suggests that nationalism in these areas is a reaction against European domination , 1.
An image of neatly packaged artefacts, an abstract object, being transplanted to flourish in different socio-historical contexts emerges from these lines. Still, in so far as nationalism is understood as a form of politics, i. However, this is not the entire story. Chinese culturalism, a hybrid of high culturalism of the literati based on universalistic beliefs in civilising effects of culture found in Confucianism and a sense of ethnically defined community of the Han Chinese, enabled peoples of China to imagine their community as a totalising one using culture as a defining criterion Duara , In other words, representations, narratives and, indeed, imaginations, of a community as being total and unified existed in China before western-born nationalism reached China in the nineteenth century.
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