Whenever I teach a course on Nationalism, I begin with a show of slides that present a series of contradictory notions of what nationalism is. On the Internet, one can find all sorts of quotes about nationalism. Some state that nationalism is love of one’s people, or of one’s homeland. Others say that nationalism is about bigotry, tribalism, idolatry, and self-deception. Some argue that it is the same thing as patriotism, others that they are opposites. Still others describe nationalism as the incubator of liberty, or a pretext for war, or a tool used by politicians to dupe the masses.
In teaching undergraduates, it is fun to begin with these kinds of discussions. But for most academics, the project of understanding nationalism is less emotionally charged and more complex. It is about analyzing how history, changing economies, social breakdowns, and the like produce movements in which this uniquely modern identity motivates people to action. Yet, even taking nationalism out of these heated emotional debates and looking at it as an object of study, it is still very difficult to zero in on what exactly it is that we are examining. There are so many approaches to studying it, so many theoretical and empirical analyses that stretch in different directions, that it is difficult to get a hold of. In short, there is nothing straightforward about nationalism.
This chapter will introduce a new way to organize the confusing potpourri of scholarly work included under the study of nationalism. The schema developed is an attempt to partially tame its octopoid nature, by subsuming its multiple offshoots under new groupings. The goal is not to offer novel interpretations of the causes or conditions associated with nationalism, nor to generate new ideas about its nature and organization. Instead, the purpose is to construct a new way of bounding the topic that can be used to analyze sociopolitical patterns across time and space.
What follows is a shuffling of concepts commonly associated with nationalism, populism, fascism, and nativism, into a new typology. Attributes long associated with nationalism are reorganized into three new distinctive categories: creative (state-creating), consolidating (state-consolidating), and defensive (state-defending) nationalism.1 Creative nationalism is the study of how nations come into being. Consolidating nationalism is the everyday practices through which the collective sense of belonging is reinforced. Finally, defensive nationalism is the drive to preserve and protect an existing nation-state from global forces. By reordering the complex field of nationalism into this tri-part analytic schema, the aim is to eliminate some of the confusion associated with it as a category, and to present a more coherent way to relate the vast array of case studies developed under its domain. The broader purpose of introducing this typology is to find a means of explaining how our present age came to be stamped by anti-globalizing populism, as well as how today’s movements relate to earlier manifestations of nationalism.
The next section outlines more explicitly what is encompassed in each category and suggests what scholarly literature would be associated with each. The following discussion should not be taken to be an exhaustive list of all the ways in which these forms of nationalism can be studied, but as an attempt to provide an outline of what these sub-topics cover and how they differ.
Since the writings of Ernest Renan in the 1880s, scholars have argued that nations are not natural—they are created. In other words, nations do not simply exist, they are forged through political processes over time and in response to specific historic, social, and economic events. Creative nationalism is the study of how nations come into being and what those processes are.
Indeed, there have been innumerable theoretical and empirical studies of how nations have been constructed. Creative nationalism covers any study that examines the genesis of a national movement. Another way to say this is that creative nationalism has as its object of study any movement that claims that there is a “nation” and seeks to define it and rally people to its cause. More often than not, the goal is to be granted statehood but there are “nations” that do not seek statehood, such as the “Nation of Islam” or Indigenous nations that have sovereignty without full statehood. Studies included under the umbrella of creative nationalism are separatist movements, independence movements, and irredentist movements. There are many examples of separatist movements, including those that have been mounted in recent years in Catalonia, Quebec, Puerto Rico, and Scotland. This can also encompass the quest of stateless peoples to attain sovereignty, such as the struggles of the Palestinians or the Kurds. Studies of creative nationalism also cover analyses of independence movements, whether the Hattian rebellion against the French that began in 1791; or the movements that swept through Latin America between 1750 and 1914 demanding independence from Spain and Portugal; or the Serbian, Bosnian, and Irish nationalist movements of the early 1900s; or the several anti-colonial movements that shook the world in the mid-twentieth century. Finally, the process of creating a nation can be one in which it is claimed that territories separated through conquest or political processes should be unified, referred to as “irredentist” movements. Examples of irredentist movements are Argentina’s claim to the Falkland archipelago, Russia’s claim to Ukraine and the republic of South Ossetia in Georgia, as well as the long-standing feud between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. In a nutshell, creative nationalism encapsulates any movement directed at establishing the sovereignty of a unique national collective; independence, separatist, and irredentist movements are all examples of creative nationalism.
In studying the ways in which nations are constructed, scholars have identified several patterns that are characteristic of creative nationalist movements. The core of creative nationalism is delimiting who belongs to the national community and what makes it a cohesive unit. This begins with claims about what constitutes the national territory, the national people, and the national language. In general, such movements are inaugurated by a cluster of educated elites who rile up the masses to join in a revolutionary rebellion, persuading them of the absolute necessity of attaining territorial and/or political recognition for their “nation.” Often it involves a reimagining of the past, as well as of the present—a mythic, symbolic, aspirational vision of what the nation is. It is a depiction of the nation’s core that stirs deep feelings of emotional attachment to it: the distilling of the essence of the unique collective that is mirrored in the national anthem. A central component of this process is the construction of the nation’s unique history, typically focused on communal suffering, hardship, war, and national heroes. Also integral to the creative nationalist struggle is the veneration of the unique national culture, in which everything from the national food and dress to the nation’s literature, religion, and art are celebrated, and with which the virtues of the national people or the national “character” are exalted.
An era of creative nationalism develops when a wave of such nationalist movements occurs in short succession. In fact, there have arguably been three great waves of creative nationalism. The first was in the nineteenth century, when empires and kingdoms across Europe were teetering after Napoleon’s serial invasions. This led to the re-fashioning of Europe into today’s modern states, including Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Finland, Estonia, and Latvia. The second wave of creative nationalism was in the mid-twentieth century after World War II had severely weakened Europe’s colonial powers. Across the colonized world, independence movements gained momentum. Between 1940 and 1970, subjugated territories in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia heroically won national sovereignty. The final wave of creative nationalism came with the 1990s collapse of the Soviet Union. Out of its ashes a host of states were born or re-established from the Czech Republic and Slovenia to Croatia and Bosnia to the Caucus and Near-Eastern states.2
As a whole, it can be said that an era of creative nationalism develops in response to the weakening or collapse of a larger state entity. The downfall of a large imperial state, such as the former Soviet Union, frequently produces violent ethnic conflicts. That is because no territory is wholly inhabited by one single ethnic/cultural/religious/racial group. Though there may be a dominant group, every region has a complex history of settlement. Therefore, during these periods of dramatic change, peoples who have long-lived together cheek to jowl—often with a history of intermarrying—will be stirred up to fight against one another as disputes heat up over who the true citizens of the new nation are and what its genuine boundaries should be. This was infamously true in Bosnia and Serbia, but equally true of Buddhists and Hindus in Sri Lanka after the British ended its control over “British Ceylon,” as well as the Shia and Sunni in Iraq once Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime had been toppled. For these reasons, studies of creative nationalism frequently overlap with studies of ethnic conflict.
As an object of study, creative nationalism has two primary foci. First, scholars examine the rhetorical and strategic approaches emerging nationalist leaders use to galvanize nationalist/separatist/irredentist movements. This could include the study of political speeches and writings, such as those of Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian nationalist and first leader of an independence movement in sub-Saharan Africa; or of treatises, such as “Three Principles of the People” written by Chinese Nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen when launching the 1911 Republican Revolution that ended Qing rule of China; or an examination of the formation of a nationalist party, like John Connelly’s founding of the Irish Socialist Republican Party in Dublin in 1896. Second, research on creative nationalism examines the structural conditions that produce and shape nationalist movements, which can be quite broad in scope. Examples would be a study of the relationship between the rise of nationalism and industrialization or print capitalism, such as the canonical works of Gellner (1983) and Anderson (1983).3 Also included would be Howard’s (1979) examination of how war shapes nationalism,4 and Brubaker’s (1992) analysis of how different processes of territorial integration in Germany and France shaped different conceptions of national belonging (citizenship).5 Alternatively, structural analyses of creative nationalism can zero in on particular nationalist struggles, such as Janet Klein’s (2007) study of Kurdish nationalist movements in the late Ottoman period,6 and Prabhat Datta’s (1992) study of successionist movements in Northeast India.7
As the national community expands, the nation-state must continually rearticulate who the national people are; what the national character is; and what its culture, language, and history are. Consolidating nationalism comprises all the means through which the national community is stitched together, and the collective sense of belonging is reinforced; the process through which the nation-state is continually reproduced, reimagined, and reintegrated. A whole range of formal and informal practices are involved in consolidating the national identity. Informally, consolidating nationalism is essentially what we do unconsciously every time we have a barbeque on a national holiday, sing the national anthem at a ball game, or hoist the national flag in remembrance of fallen heroes. Formally, it can incorporate state actions, like changes to citizenship laws, the launching of public works, or the restructuring of national curricula. Another way to express it is consolidating nationalism is the forging of what Billig refers to as “banal nationalism”: “the collection of ideological habits (including habits of practice and belief) which reproduce established nations as nations.”8
Consolidating nationalism differs from both creative and defensive nationalism in that it is an ongoing process. It can be regarded as analogous to what evolutionary biologists describe as “static equilibrium”—the extended period after an organism is formed during which small adaptations are made, but no radical change occurs. Thus, consolidating nationalism is an adaptive but equally static process in which the “organism” of the nation-state makes adjustments over an extended period of time to sustain itself in the face of incremental change. In contrast, both creative and defensive nationalism evolve quickly in response to external events; they are upheavals or reactions to what can be considered shocks to the established order from outside forces. They are, therefore, closer to what evolutionary biologists identify as “punctuated equilibrium”: an interval when change happens more suddenly over a shorter period of time.9 Consequently, creative and defensive nationalisms can manifest across many nation-states concurrently in what can be characterized as an era of nationalism because many states can be hit simultaneously by radical changes in the international order. Consolidating nationalism, by contrast, is always a process internal to a given nation-state; in other words, there cannot be an “era” of consolidating nationalism.
The study of consolidating nationalism covers topics similar to those studied under the rubric of creative nationalism, such as the development of official language policy, or national educational curriculum, or the codification of national holidays and national sports. The difference is that the study of consolidating nationalism is focused on how nationalism is solidified within an established nation-state. Hence, the purpose is not to uncover how a new state is advocated for and effectively comes into being, but rather how an existing national state is bolstered. One of the best-known studies in this vein is Eugene Weber’s (1976) classic study, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914. The book presents an analysis of how France established “French” as the national identity.10 Weber explains that in the late nineteenth century, peasants living outside of Paris had little sense of “patriotism” and little knowledge of French culture or history—even of the French Revolution. In each region, whether Bretton or Alsace-Lorraine or the Pyrenees, peasants spoke different dialects, followed different customs, wore different styles of dress, and cooked different cuisines. Many were not even aware of what Napoleon’s exploits had been. Weber traces how the French state turned regional “peasants” into “Frenchmen” by introducing a standardized system of modern education, enforcing military service, and instituting a national legal system across its territory.
Another such work is David Waldstreicher’s In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820.11 Waldstreicher examines how changes in popular culture, between the revolutionary period and the mid-nineteenth century, helped solidify an American national identity. By combing through late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century almanacs, calendars, newspaper articles, printed songs, and the like, Waldstreicher pieces together the slow process through which our national holidays and festivals were established, and our national heroes were sanctified. For example, Waldstreicher finds that even after the revolution several British holidays, like Guy Fawkes Day, continued to be celebrated. Nor was there any similitude in the way in which National Independence was commemorated across the territory. Over time, however, there was a codification of national holidays. His study thus traces the processes through which a shared understanding of what it meant to be “an American” was forged.
Finally, defensive nationalism is the endeavor to preserve and protect an existing nation-state. It is a sociopolitical reaction to external challenges to the sovereignty of the nation-state, whether presented by imperial powers or globalizing forces. Defensive nationalism is best understood as a particular kind of national populism, which is to say that defensive nationalism is a people’s movement focused on reasserting national sovereignty and shielding the nation from external threats. Defensive nationalism is a form of populism not only because it involves the mobilization of the masses, but also because a key component is that the threats from outside are believed to be supported by the corrupt domestic establishment, who benefit from the theft from “the people” and “the nation.” In this way, nationalism and populism converge. Thus, with defensive nationalism the vertical dichotomy between “the people” and “the elite” (so central to populism) is mapped onto the horizontal dichotomy of nationalism (which distinguishes between “us” and “them”), to produce an opposition between “the nation” and “the globalizing enemy” that is simultaneously vertical and horizontal. In short, defensive nationalism is a movement that re-prioritizes the nation-state and presumes international forces are hostile to it.
Like creative nationalism, defensive nationalism arises from external disturbances, or exogenous shocks created by changes to the global order. It can, therefore, spread virally across countries. Defensive nationalism can be regarded as a “demand” movement to the extent that people who feel threatened by global or neo-imperial forces become aggrieved and are thus ripe for populist mobilization. Yet, such fears are not sufficient to launch a broad defensive nationalist movement. Discontent provides the opportunity structure, but it requires a “political entrepreneur,” what is referred to in common parlance as a demagogue, to mobilize that growing discontent into a national-populist movement.12 The concept of the “political entrepreneur” comes from the literature on ethnic conflict, where scholars have explored how politicians foment conflict by manipulating and radicalizing identities for political gain.13 As Blagojevic describes, “Rhetoric of fear, blame, and hate are used by political entrepreneurs as a tool of division and control.”14 In a parallel manner, with defensive nationalism political entrepreneurs kindle political passions over (real or manufactured) threats to the “nation” posed by malicious external forces, operating within and/or without the “nation,” and with which the national elite is complicit.
Using the term “defensive nationalism” has the disadvantage of being easily conflated with nativism but that is not the intent. Although right-wing defensive nationalism is indeed a specific form of nativism, defensive nationalism (like populism) has both right-wing and left-wing expressions. What both rightist and leftist forms share is the drive to prevent international forces from undermining “the nation”; the thread that connects the two is the desire to re-establish national sovereignty, particularly over the economy. Indeed, defensive nationalism comes closest to what has historically been studied as economic nationalism, but it encompasses more than economic concerns. Fear of foreign influences can be expressed in terms of fears of international finance, but equally in terms of the loss of sovereign control to international or intergovernmental agencies, such as the United Nations (UN), World Trade Organization (WTO), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), or the European Union (EU). Foreign danger can also be understood to be posed by strangers living within the nation, in the form of minority groups, migrants, or expatriate communities.
Although the two poles of defensive nationalism converge in their desire for national sovereignty, they are not the same. Both leftist and rightest forms of defensive nationalism are premised on the need to protect the “nation-state” from the corrupting effects of the “globalizing other.” However, who constitutes the nation and what comprises the malignant international power are conceived of differently. Thus, distinguishing between the two begins with an examination of how the antagonism central to national populism is developed in each, that is, how each constructs the “national people” and the “globalizing enemy.”
To differentiate the two forms of defensive nationalism, the next section presents an ideal-typical representation of each. Defensive nationalism is analyzed along four dimensions: (1) construction of the national people, (2) construction of the global enemy, (3) organizing principles, and (4) policy objectives. From these dimensions, the differences between left- and right-wing versions are identified (See Table 2.1). These ideal-typical representations are neither meant to be normatively prescriptive, nor exhaustive accounts of these phenomena. Similar to a grading rubric, they are used as a methodological device to provide precise parameters through which related phenomena can be studied. As Max Weber explained, the great sociologist who first conceived of this methodology, the ideal type “is not a description of reality but it aims to give unambiguous means of expression to such a description.”15
Table 2.1 Ideological Forms of Defensive Nationalism
| Dimensions | Attributes | Left | Right |
| The People | Basis of Unity | Civically based shared history, tradition, and civic values |
Identity based shared ethnicity, religion, language, and cultural values |
| National Belonging | Legally based determined by law and territorial boundaries | Identity based determined by naturally, distinct genus of “peoples” | |
| Rhetorical Orientation | Pro-urban directed toward workers and educated leftists | Pro-periphery directed toward “periphery” | |
| Global Enemy | Defining Feature | Class based capitalists and international corporate interests | Ethno-Racially based particular (outsider) ethnic groups and rival nations |
| Organizing Principles | Political Direction | Progressive seeks to expand social, economic, and political rights to historically excluded categories | Retrogressive the goal is to reassert the nation’s “traditional culture” and “traditional values” |
| Rhetorical Appeal | Rights based primary end is justice, fairness, equal rights, and equal access | Fear-based primary end is group survival | |
| Orientation | Universalist inherent equality of all people; equal entitlement to protections and rights | Anti-enlightenment rationality and universality threaten religion, tradition, and the national culture | |
| Policy Objectives | Trade | Economic Nationalism ending unfair trade practices | Economic Nationalism ending unfair trade practices |
| Jobs | Protectionism protection of national jobs and industries | Protectionism protection of national jobs and industries | |
| Overarching Goal | Reducing Power of the Wealthy creating checks on wealth accumulation by reducing corporate/oligarchic power and redistributing wealth | National Greatness restoring “national greatness” and “national strength” by increasing military prowess, stopping unchecked migration, and protecting national culture |
The first distinction between the two forms of defensive nationalism is whom it is directed towards, that is, how “the people” are constructed.
For left-wing defensive nationalists, “the people” are understood to be coextensive with the “citizenry” defined in legal and territorial terms.16 Left-wing defensive nationalism is thus close to Ernest Renan’s “civic nationalism.” As with civic nationalism, “the people” are less explicitly defined in cultural or racial terms and, therefore, national belonging is more inclusive. Hence, citizens are understood to be people born within the given territory or those who go through a process of legal naturalization. In contrast, right-wing defensive nationalism is closer to what has been described as ethnic nationalism and is best understood as a form of nativism. For the nativist, national belonging is neither a legal, nor a political construct; it is a matter of nature. People naturally belong to, and are constituted by, their “mother” or “fatherland.”17 This is generally expressed in what can be described as a myth of the volk.18 The volk are the people of the “heartland,” the “original” citizens, who make up the “genuine” national community. As with ethnic nationalism, the volk are identifiable by clear markers such as phenotype, dress, language, and/or religion. In this way, right-wing defensive nationalism is more exclusionary.
Rhetorically, left-wing defensive nationalism tends to be directed toward disenfranchised workers, minorities, and those struggling to gain equal rights within the nation-state. For these reasons, it is typically better received in urban centers that have greater diversity. In contrast, right-wing defensive nationalism seeks to protect and defend the volk against the moneyed, urban, educated elite, whose interests and policies are believed to be exploitative of the national heartland. Urban areas are distrusted and associated with international finance, multiculturalism, immigration, and the globalizing liberal forces that endanger the existing order. Thus, although right-wing defensive nationalism can appeal to people of all classes and quite varied backgrounds, it is rhetorically peripherally based, meaning the movement’s messaging is focused on the “heartland.” Therefore, it tends to resonate most forcefully in areas left behind by economic transition and threatened by rapid social change.
The second distinction between the two forms of defensive nationalism is what it is directed against, that is, how the “global enemy” is constructed. Both left-wing and right-wing defensive nationalism intensely distrust globalization; however, the global enemy is defined quite differently.
For the left-wing defensive nationalist, the “enemy” is thought of largely in class terms. Globalizing free trade is seen to promote corporate interests and global finance at the cost of the nation. Hence, the “enemy” is identified primarily with the monopolists and bankers who rig the game—either with individuals, like Rockefeller or Koch, or with corporations like Shell Oil, Amazon, and Citigroup, as well as with the national politicians who aid and abet them for personal gain. As their left-wing counterparts, right-wing defensive nationalists see free trade and globalization as a smokescreen for international finance. However, these forces are understood in identity terms: the enemy is ethnized. On one end of the spectrum, the volk are threatened by miscegenation and immigration. On the other end, they are under attack from ethno-national groups dominant in finance and banking and/or from opposing nations. The common feature is that those held responsible for economic hardships are not wealthy individuals, nor even the political-economic system that created unfair advantage, but a whole class of people who, by virtue of their cultural characteristics, are regarded as avaricious and self-interested, or poor, lazy, and living off the welfare of the state.
Third, the two forms of defensive nationalism differ in the principles around which each is organized.
Left-wing defensive nationalism espouses universal rights and stresses the shared humanity of the nation’s underclasses. The focus is on achieving equal access of opportunity for all citizens. It can, therefore, be characterized as “progressive,” in that it seeks to expand rights and equalities for citizens. Right-wing defensive nationalists disavow the universalizing, rationalist assumptions of the Enlightenment; they renounce the equal rights of all men. Instead, they valorize the exceptionalism of the national culture and its people, celebrating the nation’s individual greatness and superior historical achievements. Accordingly, where it can be said that left-wing defensive nationalism is progressive, right-wing defensive nationalism is retrogressive. The quest is to restore what has been lost from the past.
Finally, the two are distinguishable by the political goals and economic goals each espouses.
For left-wing defensive nationalists, the primary political goal is to empower “the people.” This is to be achieved by reducing corporate/oligarchic power and redistributing wealth. It tends to appeal to both the educated leftist elite as well as disenfranchised groups. For right-wing defensive nationalists, the primary political end is to restore national glory. Right-wing nationalists fear the national culture and purity of the national “race” are in danger of being extinguished. Their desire is to ensure group survival by championing the national people’s exceptionalism. Hence, right-wing nationalists are often bellicose, seeking to flaunt the nation’s military might.19 In these goals, the appeal of right-wing defensive nationalism can be far-ranging, incorporating people from different class backgrounds.
The one area where the two forms of defensive nationalism align is in their economic goals. They both champion economic nationalism, that is, protecting the economy from external forces. Both left- and right-wing defensive nationalists are concerned about international actors’ control over the domestic economy as well as the loss of national jobs to overseas competition. However, even with respect to this there are distinctions. Whereas left-wing defensive nationalism is generally opposed to (neo)liberal economic policies, right-wing nationalism is not necessarily so. And though both can oppose unchecked migration, the reasoning is markedly different.
For left-wing defensive nationalists, labor migrations negatively impact both national workers and migrants. Thus, Nagle in her 2018 opinion piece argues, “open borders radicalism ultimately benefits the elites within the most powerful countries in the world, further disempowers organized labor, robs the developing world of desperately needed professionals, and turns workers against workers.”20 For the nativist, the fear of immigration goes much deeper and is much more urgent; it is nothing short of the danger of total annihilation. Nativists fear that with unchecked migration the volk will not only be out-voted, but out-populated and culturally eradicated by “outsider” groups.
Therefore, whereas left-wing defensive nationalists champion protectionist and isolationist policies in terms of unequal opportunity structures, right-wing defensive nationalists associate economic nationalism with group survival. And, whereas, left-wing defensive nationalists are not uniformly opposed to immigration, hostility to immigration is inseparable from nativism. Of course, there are many examples of groups and leaders who embody a combination of these positions. To wit, there are leftist populists who espouse racist ideas, and right-wing leaders who support rationalism and science. These ideal types represent highly abstracted concepts. Seldom, if ever, does a real-world instance correspond exactly to one of these “pure” constructions. As with all ideal types, be it “free-markets” or “democracy,” the utility comes from assessing where on the spectrum a particular politician, party, or movement falls.
Spelling out the various ideal-typical permutations of defensive nationalism allows for greater clearity of what is meant by the term. For though the term has been used on occasion, its definition has remained slippery. Generally, defensive nationalism has been associated with rightist or nativist interpretations of the nation. For example, writing about Australian nationalism, Johanson and Glow (2009) distinguish between “critical” and “defensive” nationalism. In their dichotomy, defensive nationalism is explained to be the desire to protect the “true nation” and characterized by “the struggles and courage of the settler period as a means of masking Australia’s racist past.”21 This is contrasted with critical nationalism, which “calls for continuous efforts on the part of citizens to identify strengths and weaknesses in national culture and to address them.”22 Hence, Johanson and Glow’s term differs from the concept developed here in that it is only associated with right-wing nativism.
There are, however, those who associate defensive nationalism more broadly with a form of anti-globalization. Thus, Önis (2007), in describing Turkish nationalism, defines defensive nationalists as “inward-oriented” because they have “a negative view of globalization [and their] politics is based on fear, in the sense that they see globalization as a process leading to the erosion of national sovereignty.”23 In a similar vein, Osterhammel (2013) uses the term “defensive nationalism” to describe resistance against global capitalism, immigration, and universal liberal values.
The critical difference between these various uses of the label and the term as it is defined here is that the concept in this study is part of a clear taxonomy that fits into a broader theory of nationalism. It is thus more completely fleshed out and can therefore be used more systematically than it has been to date.24 Indeed, with its distinctive core, defensive nationalism can be analytically differentiated from other left- and right-wing populist movements.
For example, both anarchism and communism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were leftist populist movements that swept across Europe and the United States. But, for both, nationalism was an essential part of the problem. Nationalist ideologies were argued to be tools “of imperialism and exploitation,” used to distract “the working class from struggling against the capitalist class by spreading hatred against migrant workers and the colonies.”25 Along similar lines, the anti-globalization movements of the 1990s were leftist populist movements that were largely international in character. Whether the expanding environmental movement or anti-WTO demonstrations, the common theme was uniting people across the globe to fight global capital. The term coined was “glocal”—shorthand for “think globally, act locally”—an expression that underscored the fact that local fights were related to global struggles.
In contrast, left-wing defensive nationalists never question the givenness of “the nation”; quite the reverse, the nation is prioritized. The goal is not uniting workers internationally to fight international capitalism, but to restore economic and political sovereignty. Hence, the populist leftist struggles that emerged in Europe in the 2000s developed in opposition to the European Union and globalization. These so-called Eurosceptic movements do not seek to unite the left across countries to fight global capital. To the contrary, they are deeply nationalist movements. Left-wing Eurosceptic parties are committed to protecting the nation from international globalization because of the harm it presents to the social-welfare system. The Latin American socialist movements of the mid-twentieth century can also be regarded as a species of defensive nationalism. Populist leaders of these mid-century movements “from Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina to Alan García in Peru, were staunchly nationalistic [and] opposed foreign investors and, in many cases, nationalized multinational firms.” However, even these movements were different from today’s anti-globalization movements, for they did not “decry globalization in broad terms.”26
The same distinctions hold for right-wing defensive nationalism. Although right-wing defensive nationalists espouse ethnocentric, racialized rhetoric similar to the idioms used in other kinds of conservative and nativist movements, there are differences. For example, the Ku Klux Klan is a nativist movement that emerged in the United States during the Reconstruction era in response to the defeat of the South and the freeing of African and African American slaves. Yet, it was not directed against global capital, or even immigration but was driven by the loss of white power and white privilege. What comes closer to right-wing defensive nationalism is the brief “Know Nothing” movement that developed in the 1840s, when Irish and German immigration to the United States was surging. But even this nativist movement was focused on Catholic migrations, not globalization. In a like manner, during the mid-twentieth century political leaders as diverse as Nixon, Thatcher, Reagan, and Berlusconi were each able to generate a conservative populist movement, in part by building on fears of immigrants and minority groups. However, expansive globalization was not at the heart of their populist appeals, nor did they seek to withdraw from international alliances or vilify international trade. It was only at the end of both centuries that fears of immigration, international trade, and international finance came together to spark the formation of right-wing defensive nationalist parties. In conclusion, right-wing defensive nationalism is indeed a species of nativism, but one that is tied specifically to fears of globalization.
In summary, left-wing defensive nationalism fuses socialist goals with economic nationalism. It seeks to protect the “nation” from international interests by increasing the underclasses’ access to rights and wealth and shielding them from the power and corruption of the capitalist elite. By contrast, right-wing defensive nationalism is a proto-fascist movement that combines protectionism, xenophobia, anti-urbanism, and anti-enlightenment ideology with jingoism, traditionalism, and militarism. Indeed, right-wing defensive nationalism can easily morph into full-blown fascism. What makes defensive nationalism a proto-fascist rather than a fascist movement is the degree to which authoritarianism is embraced. Fascism is an expressly authoritarian form of ultra, ethnic nationalism, which sets itself up in opposition to democratic, civic nationalism. Right-wing defensive nationalism shares with fascism its nostalgia for a glorified mythic past, its xenophobia, and even much of its militarism and sexism. However, it is not necessarily embracing of authoritarianism. It is, nonetheless, a movement or ideology that is decisively on the road toward fascism. Indeed, some segments of today’s right-wing defensive nationalist movements have crossed over to become full-blown fascist movements.
The argument developed in the rest of this work is that ours is an era of defensive nationalism. The aim is to investigate how left- and right-wing defensive nationalism came to suffuse Europe and the United States in the twenty-first century. Combining the theories of Karl Polanyi and Joseph Schumpeter, the case will be made that today’s epoch of defensive nationalism is Polanyi’s “double movement,” and that this “double movement” was set off by the shock of rapid international integration and changes to production that developed with technological change. Furthermore, it will be argued that, to date, there have been two great waves of this form of defensive nationalism: the Second Industrial Revolution at the turn-of-the-nineteenth century, and the Digital Revolution at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. Both were periods of unparalleled modernization, when nation-states were assaulted on multiple fronts: expansive immigration, globalized finance, transnational liberalism, and transnational terrorism.
No theory or analysis is born from thin air. There are always ideas that precede a scholarly work. This work is no different. There does exist a robust body of scholarship that examines how Polanyi’s theory relates to nationalism, populism, and globalization. For example, the prominent Polanyian scholar, Gareth Dale, has worked to untangle the complicated ways in which Polanyi’s thoughts about global capitalism relate to nationalism and protectionism.27 His work focuses on reconciling the difficult disconnections in Polanyian theory. Several other studies have applied Polanyi to explain the relationship between neoliberalism, globalization, and fascism;28 or how fascism relates to internationalism, regionalism, or statism.29 In the vast majority of this work, Polanyian concepts have been used to understand the rise of right-wing populism;30 alternatively, when focused on left-wing politics, the object of study is generally to discover “the unfulfilled aspects” of Polanyi’s thought so as to build “emancipatory or progressive visions of a fundamental reform of capitalism.”31
This book takes a different approach. The aim here is to find a way to “operationalize” Polanyi’s compelling notion of “double movement”; in other words, the goal is to provide an empirically robust way of understanding what the “double movement” is, so that it can be analytically applied to contemporary movements.32 The concept of “defensive nationalism” is used as the means to do this. Nor is this study focused on the right or the left, but on how globalization drives the rise of both. In this, Polanyi’s analysis is uniquely helpful. As Sandbrook argues, in the “Polanyian scheme, the market system wrought widespread and diverse harms. It is not only workers who are harmed, but diverse classes and groups suffering from the commodification of land and money—and today, we would want to add knowledge.” Therefore, “Polanyi’s refusal to reduce class or politics purely to economic interests” allows us to go beyond these confining dichotomies.33
There are, however, two works that do come very close to the analysis presented here, though in different ways. Andreas Novy, writing about the lessons we can take from Polanyi’s The Great Transformation, examines today’s movements in terms of the antagonism between “globalization” and what he refers to as “national capitalism.” He uses the term “nationalistic capitalism” to refer to “[hostility] to supranational economic institutions like the WTO and trade and investment treaties, as well as EU bureaucracy” [that] manifests as an “anti-systemic countermovement [and] wages a cultural war against “foreign” and new modes of living.”34 “National capitalism” thus has strong parallels with defensive nationalism as defined here. Yet, as close as Novy comes to the concept of defensive nationalism, there are important distinctions. That is because for Novy anti-liberal, anti-global populism is conceived of exclusively as a right-wing phenomenon. In fact, what Novy describes as “national capitalism” is almost identical to the definition of right-wing defensive nationalism developed in this work. However, Novy does not touch upon left-wing defensive nationalism, nor does he examine how these contemporary nationalistic movements relate to other forms of nationalism. Rather, his goal is to provide the space to think about possible alternative forms of de-globalization and possible changes to “territorialized” mass politics. For these reasons, Novy’s ideas complement those presented here, particularly by identifying similar tropes that align with right-wing defensive nationalism, such as anti-enlightenment, militarism, etc., without diminishing the contribution made here.
Another neo-Polanyian scholar with whom this work closely aligns is Richard Sandbrook. Sandbrook (2018) observes that technological change is a critical catalyst for today’s movements. More specifically, and in a parallel fashion to the argument made in this book, Sandbrook underscores the importance of transportation and communications: “Technological change has played a key role in speeding up the pace and scope of social dislocation. Without the revolutions in transport, communications and information-processing, the complex, instantaneous world of neoliberal globalisation could not exist.”35 Indeed, it has been quite broadly accepted that globalization drives populism.36 This study builds upon such observations in two ways: by further elaborating a theory for how this comes about, as well as by providing in-depth historical analyses to support the theory.
Ultimately, all these studies bear witness to similar phenomena. They therefore touch upon similar elements. It is in the unique synthesis of these differing elements that this book makes its contribution. The next two chapters build the theoretical model that will be used to analyze the two periods under study. The model developed is a synthesis of Polanyi’s and Schumpeter’s theories. In Chapter 4, Polanyi’s work is discussed in greater detail. The chapter then considers several of the ambiguities that make it difficult to apply his ideas. In Chapter 5, Schumpeter’s idea of innovation as the driver of social change is outlined. Finally, the chapter will account for how Schumpeter’s theory can be combined with Polanyi’s to create a workable model that can help us account for our period of contagious defensive nationalism.