Populism, Nationalism, Fascism, and Nativism
It is difficult to watch the news these days without hearing someone utter the words “white nationalism,” “populism,” or “fascism.” We hear equally about the “radical left,” “cancel culture,” and “replacement theory.” We understand these things are encircling us, but how best to label them is a lot less clear. Is it true that we are on the precipice of fascism? Or is that merely hyped-up rhetoric? And how does this all relate to “cancel culture” and the far left? Scholars are puzzling through a parallel series of questions. There are debates over how and when populism and nationalism overlap, and what the relationship is between nativism, neo-fascism, and fascism. The problem is that although all these concepts clearly relate to one another, they do not wholly coincide.
This book seeks to answer these questions by reorganizing concepts commonly associated with nationalism, nativism, fascism, and populism. Accordingly, what follows is a regrouping of existing taxonomies. The goal is to produce a new approach to nationalism that will better unify these various strains. To that end, this chapter outlines the concepts that will be reworked: nationalism, populism, fascism, and nativism. It presents, in short form, the basic ideas associated with each of these concepts, highlighting how they align and where they diverge. The chapter is divided into four sections, each of which introduces something of the history of each concept, as well as the approaches that scholars have taken to define each.
Nationalism might seem to have always existed, but it hasn’t. At least not in the guise that we know it today. For most of history, “nations” were understood to be communities of shared descent with a common language, customs, and traditions, but they were not fused with a state.1 Indeed, the compound noun “nation-state” is peculiarly modern. In ancient Rome, the root term for nation, natio, was contrasted with the term civitas, which referred to a body of citizens united under law. The schism between a legal-political unit and a nation of shared ancestry remained throughout the Middle Ages and into early modern times. The union of “natio” and “civitas” only came about in the late eighteenth century, when empires were toppled, and the sovereignty of kings was transferred to the people. Ever since states have been equated with the populations they represent, “the nation,” and it is “the people” to which the sovereignty of the state inheres.
France’s expansionism was the central catalyst behind this late eighteenth-century political convulsion. As Napoleon marched his forces across Europe, new leaders emerged rousing people to resist French Imperialism. The early nationalists were “a small number of scholars, publicists, and poets.”2 In Prussia, German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1808/2008) made a series of public addresses urging the Germanic-speaking youth to rise up and fight against the French invasion. Fichte claimed that the Germanic peoples, though physically divided, were naturally a “nation” linked by their superior language and culture. He warned that if the thirty-nine German-speaking states did not unite into one nation-state, their Germanic heritage could be forever lost to French Civilisatrice. A similar process occurred in the areas now considered Italy. When the French invaded the “boot” of Europe, they defeated a medley of principalities and kingdoms. Napoleon imposed a surrogate government upon the region to rationalize the administration of its various states. In response, the Italian journalist Giuseppe Mazzini beseeched the Italian people to form a unified political front and resist the French. In equally stirring speeches, Mazzini called upon the peoples of Italy to overcome their differences and defend the “nation” God had so clearly ordained for them by providing natural boundaries of “great rivers” and “lofty mountains.”3
At the end of the century, French historian and linguist Ernest Renan argued that these definitions of nationalism were misleading and, moreover, were producing dangerous xenophobia. In his famous lecture, “What Is a Nation?” (Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?), Renan showed that nationalism was based neither on language and culture, nor geography, nor was it ancient or God given. He explained that, in point of fact, nationalism was a relatively recent phenomenon in human history, created through historical accident. Modern states had developed over centuries, through conquest and assimilation; their populations and borders shifting over time. Any honest look at history would reveal that there has been no continuity:
France is Celtic, Iberian, Germanic. Germany is Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic. And in no country is ethnography more embarrassed than Italy. Gauls, Etruscans, Pélasgians, Greeks, and any number of other groups have crossed there producing an unquantifiable mixtures. The British Isles, taken together, present a mixture of Celtic and German blood the proportions of which are singularly difficult to define. The truth of the matter is that there are no pure races.4
To Mazzini’s assertions of Italy’s God-given borders, Renan replied that geography could no more determine a nation than race, for though “It is incontestable that mountains separate”5 it is also true that some mountain ranges do not. Hence, nothing conclusive can be derived from fact that a mountain divides the land. The nation’s long-historical continuity is, in truth, nothing more than a chimera built on myths of historical glory and martyred heroes. In fact, what makes nationalism possible is the forgetting of uncomfortable truths, “The act of forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation.”6 Though Renan acknowledges that myths are an essential ingredient of nationalism, he maintains that the core of nationalism is not culture but civic belonging. Therefore, nationalism, Renan proclaimed, was a social contract between the territorial government and its citizens, what he referred to as a “daily plebiscite.”
By the mid-twentieth century, this dichotomous understanding of nationalism as an exclusive ethnic identity determined by blood or nature, versus a historically constructed identity based on legal categories, had become the bedrock of nationalism studies. In recent years, these categories have come under scrutiny. It has been argued that there is no neat dividing line that separates a-cultural, civic nationalism from exclusionary, identity-based, ethnic nationalism. In fact, civic nationalism easily shades into ethnocultural nationalism, which is why it can be difficult to parse out French or Turkish or Russian national identity from the country’s culture, language, and dominant ethnicity. Nonetheless, even today, despite pleas to move beyond ethnic vs. civic nationalism,7 the opposition arguably remains central.
In addition to defining nationalism, there is a body of scholarship dedicated to studying its impacts. In the late 1930s, Hans Kohn (1939) argued that nationalism was a potential force for good. That is because nationalism uniquely engenders an emotional attachment, which “is qualitatively different from the love of family or of home surroundings.”8 Kohn explains that before the “age of nationalism,” “the masses never [felt] their own life, culturally, politically, or economically, dependent upon the fate of the national group.”9 Only after nationalism did people identify “with the life and aspirations of uncounted millions whom we shall never know, with a territory which we shall never visit in its entirety.”10 Hence, nationalism is singular in that it integrates masses of people into a concrete whole. Kohn does recognize that nationalism can create a religiosity of sentiment that can plunge mankind into catastrophe. But he holds onto the possibilities latent in nationalism. Just as religion was once was the source of bitter wars across Europe, “A similar depoliticization of nationality is conceivable. It may lose its connection with political organization, and remain only as an intimate and moving sentiment.”11 In this way, Kohn submits, the emotional affinity that nationalism engenders could one day widen “to include supranational areas of common interest and common sympathy.”12
Unlike Kohn, Hannah Arendt focuses on the ills of nationalism. In her famous treatise On Totalitarianism first published in 1951, Arendt examines how the nation-system system came into being after World War I. It was only then that each state was identified with its own unique national community. However, in the process, millions of people were left in legal limbo. In this new international political order “true freedom, true emancipation, and true popular sovereignty could be attained only with full national emancipation.” The unintended consequence of this was that “people without their own national government were deprived of human rights.”13 Groups who had long resided in former imperial territories, but who were not regarded as members of the cultural “nation,” were no longer considered rightfully part of the state. Denied formal citizenship, they were left vulnerable to any kind of atrocity perpetrated against them.14 Nationalism had, thus, created “the stateless”—a wholly new class of people “forced to live outside the common world . . . thrown back, in the midst of civilization, on their natural givenness, on their mere differentiation.”15Subsequently, liberal scholarship has followed Kohn in focusing on the benefits of affective national ties;16 while others have followed Arendt in concentrating on the danger nationalism poses to “outsider” groups.17
That these two interpretations of nationalism are diametrically opposed to one another reflects the fact that nationalism itself is fundamentally two-faced, meaning that nationalism is both liberating and exclusionary.18 Nationalism is liberating in that it champions the power of the people over oppressive regimes. In the nineteenth century, nationalism was the force through which popular movements deposed kings and emperors. In the twentieth century, the enshrining of the “Right to National Self-Determination” in the United Nations Charter became the legal means through which colonized peoples around the world defeated their European oppressors. Indeed, before nationalism, “the Sovereign” was the king, who was the center of the political order and held to be the embodiment of the state. Luis XIV expressed this directly, famously declaring, L’etat est moi. With nationalism, the king’s sovereignty was transferred to “the people.” Formerly subjugated peoples were turned into “citizens,” and the state became the embodiment of its citizenry. And yet, the very process of turning “subjects” into “citizens” is what makes nationalism exclusionary. For once the state was delimited by its national population, it became imperative to distinguish the “real people”—those who have rights, duties, and privileges as citizens within that territory—from trespassers. Exclusionary citizenship became the hallmark of the international political order.19
Other scholars have examined why nationalism arose in the late eighteenth century. Two of the best-known works in this vein are Ernest Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (2006)20 and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (2006).21 For Gellner, nationalism emerged as a consequence of public education. Up through the late eighteenth century, education was largely private and restricted to the wealthy. Most people learned what they needed to know by working for their family or apprenticing with a tradesman. Uniform basic education was a product of the Industrial Revolution. Industrial societies were unique in that they required a large workforce able to speak the same language, read basic instructions, and understand rudimentary math. In response, the state developed a standardized curriculum for the masses. Through this state-led public education system, a unified sense of identity tied to the nation-state was fashioned. Thus, industry’s need for standardized education “is what nationalism is about, and why we live in an age of nationalism.”22 Along similar lines, Benedict Anderson argues nationalism developed because of print capitalism. Prior to the seventeenth century, books were precious handwritten manuscripts penned in scriptural or ancient languages like Latin, Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic. However, after the printing press made possible the wide dissemination of printed material that could be sold to a mass audience—with the introduction of products such as newspapers, journals, almanacs, and calendars—vernacular languages became standardized. In this way, print capitalism created “unified fields of exchange and communications” across the state. This was especially true with the growth of daily newspapers. By reading quotidian national news, “people gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands of people in their particular language-field—fellow readers [whose] visible invisibility became the embryo of nationally-imagined community.” In this way, “print-languages laid the basis for national consciousness.”23
A final strain in the nationalist literature is economic nationalism. Economic nationalism refers to a set of policies favoring trade restrictions and state intervention to protect the national economy from global market forces. As a field of study, it is related to the general discourse on nationalism, but it is more applied. The central idea behind economic nationalism is that opening one’s economy to the international market will have deleterious effects on domestic industries and trade. It will allow less expensive commodities to flood the domestic market, undermining national manufacturing and agriculture. It will hurt labor by forcing down wages. Finally, it will lead to the extraction of the national resources with little return to the nation. Therefore, to protect one’s economy, one must put barriers to trade in the form of tariffs or regulations and bolster local industries with state funding to ensure they can compete globally. For these reasons, liberal economists commonly invoke “economic nationalism” as a catch-all for harmful, anti-liberal, protectionist policies.24 However, that is a little bit of an oversimplification. On the positive side, economic nationalism has been advocated for as a means for underdeveloped countries to develop their fledgling industries in the face of uneven economic power relations25 and increase their economic sovereignty.26 On the negative side, it has been used by xenophobic jingoists to oppose immigration and international trade.
Unlike nationalism, populism has a very long history. The term “populism” actually stretches back to ancient Rome, when the Populares opposed the aristocratic Optimates. In antiquity, as today, the label “Populare” had a double meaning: it could indicate someone who was “either ‘pleasing the populace’ or [working] ‘in the interests of the populace.’ ”27 The former suggests that populists are self-interested politicians who manipulate the masses to gain power; the latter that they were genuinely concerned to advance the cause of the common man. Over time, several movements have been labeled “populist,” most of which have had this ambiguity at their core, including the America populist parties of the late nineteenth century, fascist movements in Italy and Germany in the early twentieth century, and socialist movements in Latin America in the mid-twentieth century.
Like the scholarship on nationalism, the literature on populism has focused on how best to categorize it, explain why it emerges, and what its effects are. However, the debates have been quite different. Unlike nationalism, twentieth-century scholarship on populism was largely centered on defining what kind of phenomenon it was. There were long debates about whether populism was an ideology, a discursive practice, a political strategy, or a style of politics.28 Most scholars today have adopted what is termed a “minimalist definition” of populism. In this view, populism is identified by the core project of protecting “the people” from the “elite,” but this dichotomy can be mapped onto different ideologies and political movements.29 Laclau has encapsulated this best: “[Populism’s] dominant leitmotiv is to situate the evils of society . . . in the abuse of power by parasitic and speculative groups which have control of political power.”30
As with nationalism, populism has been variably characterized as a liberating force that empowers the masses, or a negative movement that promotes jingoism and xenophobia. In the early 2000s, a hot debate developed over whether populism and nativism were aspects of the same phenomenon or distinct categories. For some, populism was held to be a leftist, liberating movement; nativism a rightist, fascist movement. Over the 2010s, however, scores of content-analytic studies of political speeches, party platforms, social media, and the like conclusively found that both right- and left-wing extremist parties espouse the core populist idea of protecting “the people” from “corrupt elites.” At the same time, the literature has, by and large, shown that right- and left-wing populists have different goals (albeit with some caveats). Right-wing populism is generally understood to be “identity-centered” and strongly connected to xenophobia. It is not, however, associated with any particular economic agenda. Conversely, left-wing populism is primarily “class-based,” in that such movements tend to be concerned with ending unfair wealth distribution and less likely to be identity focused.31
Finally, there is a body of literature dedicated to explaining the genesis of twenty-first-century populism. Here there are two schools of thought. One looks at how populism is generated from below. Referred to as the “demand side” of populism, scholars who adopt this approach study populism as a movement that grows out of widespread popular dissatisfaction with the status quo. The other school of thought takes populism to be a movement that originates from above—as something orchestrated by populist leaders and parties to influence people’s perceptions. This is the “supply side” of populism. In studying contemporary movements, those who look at the “demand side” of populism argue that anti-elitist, anti-establishment fervor developed either as a response to economic insecurity, particularly after the 2008 economic crisis, or as grievances and “racial animus” that has evolved in response to changing social and immigration policies. Researchers who focus on the “supply side” of populism investigate the ways in which politicians, activists, and parties have framed issues to politically mobilize followings and increase their vote share.32
From this cursory review, it is clear that existing theories of nationalism and populism provide little guidance for how the two converge. Both fields of study have developed vaguely similar concepts that are, nonetheless, substantively different. Like reflections in a fun-house mirror, the civic/ethnic dichotomy of nationalism is similar, yet different from the socialist/fascist dichotomy of populism. Even the liberating potential of national self-determination is similar, yet different from populism’s promise of people’s empowerment. I believe, we can overcome this disjuncture by reorganizing our thoughts on nationalism and, in so doing, we can explain modern-day, anti-globalization movements.
Where the two schools of study arguably come closest is in their descriptions of ethnically exclusive forms of populism and nationalism. This is precisely where we encounter nativism and fascism. Therefore, before introducing a new approach to nationalism, it is critical to identify what fascism and nativism are—and are not.
There is a lot of misunderstanding of fascism. In common parlance, fascism is often mistakenly conflated with authoritarianism. Yet, fascism is “historically specific.”33 If nationalism is a recent historical development, fascism is even more recent. Its emergence can be dated to the early twentieth century, with the political assent of Benito Mussolini following World War I. In seeking to associate his rule with the grandeur of the Roman Empire, Mussolini adopted the symbol of the Roman state: sticks roped together (signifying Rome’s unity) around an axe (signifying her power).34 The bundle of rods or sticks was referred to in Latin as fascio, from whence Mussolini coined the term fascismo or “fascism.” Fascism was thus an epithet Mussolini chose for his new regime to convey that Il Duce had reunited the Italian people with the power and glory of the state.
Even with its relatively narrow temporal scope, “great difficulties arise as soon as one sets out to define fascism.”35 Some believe that fascism is best understood as a political ideology.36 Others argue that it is a form of mass political mobilization.37 There are also scholarly debates about its genesis. Early twentieth-century Marxist scholars argued that fascism was a tool used by the capitalist class to control the masses. Alternatively, it was argued that fascism was an organic sociopolitical response to modernization and/or capitalism.38 Along these lines, fascism has been described as a mass psychological condition or simply a historical accident. Today, scholars question whether we are witnessing a resurgence of fascism or some kind of neo-fascism.
How and why fascism emerges may be contested, but there is a general agreement about several of its dimensions. First and foremost, almost every definition of fascism includes some reference to nationalism. It has been described as “populist ultranationalism,” “revolutionary ultra‐nationalism,” “organic nationalism,” “extreme nationalism,” and “radical nationalism.” Thus, Paxton underscores that fascism is always “tied to very specific national movements”;39 Payne identifies fascism as an “extreme nationalism” focused on the unique “institutional, cultural, social, and spiritual differences” of the individual country in question;40 and Sternhell et al. assert that fascism emerged as a “new nationalism,” which was in opposition to the civic nationalism of the French Revolution.41 Even the scholar perhaps most sympathetic to fascism, A. James Gregor, emphasizes that fascism is “developmental in purpose, and regenerative in intent” and therefore closely related to developmental or economic nationalism.42 Indeed, as with nationalism, myths of historical glory are absolutely fundamental to fascism. It has been argued that “faith in the power of myth as a motive force in history” is “key to the Fascist view of the world.”43 Payne describes how fascist leaders seek to “build a system of all-encompassing myths that would incorporate both the fascist elite and their followers and would bind together the nation in a new common faith and loyalty.”44
Yet fascism also has elements that go far beyond the scope of nationalism. To begin with, fascism is argued to be closely associated with hypermasculinity and military virtues. It has been asserted that at the core of fascism lies “the irrational cult of war and the rejection of pacifism”;45 and that it is a form of ultranationalism that “positively values violence as end as well as means and tends to normalize war and/ or the military virtues.”46 In addition to being hypermasculine and militaristic, fascism is anti-individualistic and anti-democratic. Fascists require that individual interests be subordinated to the state and propound the need for a strong totalitarian government that can exercise an extreme form of economic nationalism.47
Finally, many have debated how fascism relates to conservatism and socialism. Indeed, where fascism lies is difficult to parse out. Though Marxists have generally associated fascism with the right, Moussolini’s “national syndicalism” and Hitler’s “National Socialism” reveal that its relationship to right-wing ideology is fuzzier than that would suggest. For these reasons, Paxton argues “fascism always retained that ambiguity. [But] Fascists were clear about one thing . . . they were not in the middle.”48 In truth, fascism uncomfortably coincides with both the right and the left. Fascism overlaps with the far left in so far as it is a revolutionary ideology. Fascists seek to change “class and status relationships in society.” Indeed, most definitions of fascism identify mobilization of the masses as integral to it. And yet, fascism shares many of the same precepts and goals as rightists. Like the radical right, fascists want to preserve the traditional cultural order and believe that this requires a radical form of authoritarianism. However, unlike the radical right, fascists are not committed to defending the privileges of the established elite. In other words, where fascism is revolutionary, the radical right is anti-revolutionary. As Payne puts it, rightist authoritarianism is “simply more rightist—that is, concerned to preserve more of the existing structure of society with as little alteration as possible, except for promoting limited new rightist elites and weakening the organized proletariat.”49
It is in its aspiration to recruit the masses to its revolutionary cause that fascism bridges nationalism and populism. Consequently, a related bone of contention is who should be included in the pantheon of fascist leaders. Allardyce argues that true fascism only came into being in Italy and Germany when the masses were ecstatically mobilized.50 Others count a large number of leaders and movements as fascist that have existed across the globe, even those that did not achieve mass mobilization.51 With all these distinctions in mind, the working definition of fascism adopted here is that fascism is an extreme form of ethnic nationalism that merges myths of an exalted national past with militarism and totalitarianism and involves the popular mobilization of the masses.
Of all the concepts bandied about today, nativism appears to be the most straightforward. Yet, the precise definition of the term is also highly contested. Nativism is generally understood to be related to anti-immigrant prejudice and hostility; “Beyond that, however, there is ‘little consensus’ with respect to what these sentiments entail and what is their scope.”52 Certainly, nativism is unthinkable without nationalism; but it encompasses a much narrower realm of phenomena. To complicate things, nativism also shares important “affinities” with populism but is more specific than populism.53 Scholars have worked to differentiate nativism from racism, nationalism, populism, and xenophobia, as well as to understand how these various concepts interact with it.54 Some have identified nativism as a combination of nationalism and xenophobia and others as a blend of nationalism and populism. Some see nativism as race neutral, while still others argue that it shares a blurred line with racism. There is also debate about whether it is best understood as an ideology or a discursive practice.55
Even though, nativism shares complex affinities with nationalism and populism, the history of nativism is quite different from that of fascism. The term first entered the lexicon in the mid-1840s, with the birth of the Native American Party, more infamously known as the “Know Nothing” party (because their members purportedly answered “I know nothing” to any questions raised about the origins and goals of the political organization). The Native American Party was a single-issue party formed to oppose the large number of Catholics coming to the United States; especially Irish immigrants, who were arriving en masse to American shores to escape the punishing economic conditions caused by the Great Irish Potato Famine. The supporters of the Native American Party described their ideology as “Americanism,” but their detractors labeled them bigoted nativists, from whence the term derives. As Higham explains, “The word is distinctively American, a product of a specific chain of events in eastern American cities in the late 1830’s and early 1840’s.”56 In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, nativism has become largely understood to be coextensive with far-right, or “alt-right” movements and parties, especially those in Europe but increasingly in the United States as well as with anti-immigrant, conservative groups in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
In recent years, the term “nativism” has been variably defined as “the preference for native-born people of a given society”;57 or “an intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign” connections;58 or as “a particular articulation of exclusionary nationalism,” which leads to “a xenophobic and racist process of ‘othering’ against migrants and those who are perceived to not have assimilated into the nation-state.”59 In fact, specific forms of nativism can vary widely. Nonetheless, there are unifying themes that can be discerned. Through “each separate hostility runs the connecting, energizing force of modern nationalism.”60 In other words, it can be said that nativism is an extreme form of protective, xenophobic, exclusionary nationalism.
It is clear that nationalism, populism, fascism, and nativism are all interrelated. These connections are at times quite explicit, and yet, at other times they become very tenuous. Hence, understanding where they intersect and when they depart is critical to understanding the extreme movements developing across the world today. To explain how populism and nationalism intersect in modern-day, anti-globalization movements, the next chapter presents a new typology of nationalism. The hope is that by rethinking nationalism, we will be able to understand what it means to say that nationalism is converging with populism today, as well as how that relates to nativism and fascism.