Nationalism
The Nation Was Invented — And We Know Roughly When
The feeling that you would die for your country is one of the most powerful forces in modern history, and it is also, by historical standards, extremely new.
The Idea
Nationalism feels primordial — like something that has always existed, woven into human nature alongside hunger and love. But most serious political philosophers and historians locate its birth with some precision: late 18th century Europe, accelerating hard through the 19th. Before that, loyalty was owed to a dynasty, a religion, a city, a lord. The idea that the world should be organised into discrete nations — each with a shared language, culture, and destiny, each deserving its own sovereign state — was a radical, even revolutionary proposition. The philosopher Benedict Anderson gave us one of the sharpest tools for thinking about this. He called nations 'imagined communities': not fake, but genuinely imagined, because most members of any nation will never meet each other and yet feel a deep horizontal bond. What made this imagining possible at scale, Anderson argued, was print capitalism — newspapers and novels, printed in vernacular languages, that created shared reference points among strangers. A peasant in Lyon and a merchant in Bordeaux, reading the same newspaper, started to feel they inhabited the same world. What's underappreciated about this account is its implication: if nations are constructed, they are also contingent. The borders of feeling could have been drawn differently. In many places they were contested, revised, and redrawn — sometimes violently. Nationalism isn't a discovery of something that was always there. It is an invention that then remade the world in its own image.
In the World
Consider the case of Italy — or rather, the case of Italians before Italy existed. When the diplomat Massimo d'Azeglio reportedly said, shortly after Italian unification in 1861, 'We have made Italy; now we must make Italians,' he was being entirely literal. The peninsula had been a patchwork of kingdoms, city-states, and papal territories for centuries. The population spoke mutually unintelligible dialects. A farmer in Sicily and a silk merchant in Milan shared geography on a map drawn in foreign capitals, but almost nothing else — not language, not law, not any felt sense of common fate. The project of making Italians was therefore a deliberate cultural and political programme. Compulsory schooling in standard Italian, a unified legal code, military conscription that mixed young men from different regions, national holidays, monuments to shared heroes — all of it designed to manufacture, in living people, a loyalty that had not previously existed. Within two or three generations it largely worked. By the time of the First World War, men from Calabria were dying alongside men from Piedmont under the same flag, for the same imagined community. The Italian case is not unusual — it is the template. Germany underwent almost exactly the same process in the same decades. So did many nations constructed from colonial borders after independence movements in the 20th century. In each case, the nation did not precede the nationalism; the nationalism preceded, and then built, the nation.
Why It Matters
Understanding that nations are constructed rather than discovered changes how you read the world — especially when nationalism surges back into political life, as it does periodically and is doing now in many places. When a political movement insists it is recovering something ancient and authentic — a true national identity, a historic homeland, a pure cultural inheritance — the constructivist view invites a different question: constructed by whom, and when, and in whose interest? This is not the same as dismissing national feeling as false or unimportant. The feelings are real. The bonds of solidarity that nations can generate are real, and sometimes admirable. But treating the nation as eternal rather than invented makes it harder to think clearly about what we actually want from political community — and who gets excluded when the boundaries are drawn. The question nationalism ultimately forces on us is not 'which nation do you belong to?' but 'why should that be the primary unit of belonging at all?' That is a question worth carrying around, especially when the answer seems obvious.
A Question to Ponder
If the national identity you feel most strongly is something that was actively constructed within the last two or three centuries, what — if anything — does that change about how much weight you give it?
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