Few words in the English language have such migratory meanings as nationalism. It has changed again in our time. Today it suggests self-determination of peoples against a growing global hegemon in a range of areas from finance to agriculture to health to the uses of the military and surveillance.
Those who call themselves nationalists affirm the rights of a people in a defined geography to manage their own lives apart from impositions of the neoliberal order, which is deeply weakened as compared with a decade ago.
When I first read it, I was fully prepared to oppose the idea. Having been intellectually shaped in a period of the old consensus, I had presumed that all forms of nationalism have a toxic root as compared with the aspiration of universal human rights and global cultural norms. The experience of pandemic controls, imposed simultaneously the world over, shifted my own views because it was a paradigmatic case of the illiberalism of globalism. No longer did internationalism imply freedom; quite the opposite. This experience forced me to consider what I might have missed.
There were only three nations that resisted compulsory measures such as lockdowns, business closures, population masking, and then vaccine mandates. They were Sweden, Tanzania, and Nicaragua. In each case, the reason came down to some form of: “That is not how we do that here.” Sweden embraced traditional public health principles. Nicaragua said lockdowns would harm their people. Tanzania rejected lockdowns because something seemed sketchy about the whole scheme.
World media howled in fury at these three nations, hoping for failure from them all, as if to punish any country that dared to go a different way. All three ended up with similar or better health outcomes without having destroyed their citizens’ lives or trampling on rights and liberties in law. In practical terms, the COVID-19 response wrecked the association many people (including me) held between globalism and freedom. Globalism today is more likely to be seen as a danger not only to sovereignty but also to the rights of peoples.
The controversy over nationalism began in the late 19th century as multinational empires began to fall apart and new nations were formed out of language groups, ethnicities, and religious groupings in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. To shore up the status of the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire under ecclesiastical control was the whole point of the calling of the first Vatican Council in 1869. The Pope sought affirmation of his own political infallibility in order to retain the Papal states, but that effort failed (the council only affirmed doctrinal infallibility under rare conditions). A century later, a second Vatican Council made the point and affirmed the rights of religious liberty.
The essay was just what was needed at these times, and ended up having great influence following the Great War, which finally ended shattering the Habsburg and Prussia monarchies and codifying democracy as the preferred political system. Russia’s revolution introduced further trauma as that monarchy too collapsed. Looking back, it is a wonder that the UK monarchy served the period at all, but it was only through making every compromise possible with parliamentary control plus the affirmation of religious liberty.
The self-determination of nations became the central slogan of postwar policy, a slogan pushed by the Woodrow Wilson administration as the map of Europe was redrawn in ways that proved unsustainable. Nonetheless, in those years, nationalism was regarded as benign and even necessary for peace, even as elites rallied around new globalist institutions such as the League of Nations as guarantors of the principle of non-aggression. Self-determination generally affirmed the right of a people to govern themselves through plebiscite.
Article 22 of the League of Nations stated: “To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation ...”
The controversies over nationalism were hardly finished, however, as democratic institutions in Germany collapsed following economic crisis and political upheaval. What took its place was the aggressive nationalism of the Nazi Party together with the rise of Imperial Japan, leading to a repeat and intensification of World War I. Out of this experience came the discrediting of the nationalist idea, particularly as it pertained to race and language. The German attempt to cobble together a racial state out of lost territory had plunged the world into the most murderous conflict in the history of humanity.
Following the war, globalism took center stage again with the creation of the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Bank, and the United Nations, while multinational alliances dominated much of the world. Nationalism was discredited yet again, and that’s where we stood for the better part of four decades. The crackup of the Soviet Union and its satellites changed the constellation yet again, as break-off states recaptured their historic names and many peoples in the world found new meaning in national identity.
Since 1990, the struggle between globalism and nationalism has been a defining feature of world politics, but it took time to hit Western industrialized democracies. With the UK decision to withdraw from the European Union, a new nationalism took hold that was resisted strongly by globalist ambitions.
Was the new nationalism liberal? That’s a complicated question. In places yes, and in places no. The drive toward immigration restriction was an inevitable consequence of refugee upheavals all over Europe and the United States. The push to repudiate the World Trade Organization’s ambition for a tariff-free world came after decades of industrial loss. All of this was already taking place when the pandemic controls hit with stunning ferocity, as the World Health Organization imposed experimental methods of virus control—as if governments could somehow conquer the microbial kingdom through force.
The bitter combination of lockdowns, the refugee crisis, and sketchy plans for zero emissions that threaten industrialization itself kicked the nationalist spirit into overdrive, as populist movements have swept the world. The two sides have lined up in predictable ways: those advocating sovereignty and those wanting to preserve what remains of the neoliberal order. That is the essential dynamic of our times.
Where does that leave freedom lovers in their opinions about nationalism? It puts us where we were back in the 1880s with Renan’s outlook: Whether and to what extent freedom is best guaranteed by the national principle depends on time and place. Regardless, based on what we are seeing in politics today, there is no stopping the eventual replacement of the neoliberal order with a world of sovereign nations, some liberal and some not.
