Nationalism: What It Means and What It’s Made Of

The modern national state didn’t build itself out of institutions alone – it needed a feeling to hold it together, and that feeling has a name: nationalism, or national sentiment. Political scientists have spent as much effort trying to pin down what nationalism actually is as they have studying the states it produced.

What Nationalism Actually Means

At its simplest, nationalism is the emotional state in which an individual places loyalty to their own nation above every other competing loyalty. The political scientist Gilchrist framed it more precisely as a psychological sentiment that develops among a large population sharing a defined territory, a common language, a shared history and tradition, common goals, and a broadly unified political outlook. Lord Bryce offered a related but distinct emphasis, describing nationality as an inner, almost spiritual unity, built from shared traits such as race, language, literature, art, religion, and custom, strong enough that the people who hold it feel bound together and clearly distinct from other populations around them. Stripped down to its essentials, all of these definitions converge on the same basic idea: nationalism is the sentiment that binds a particular group of people together around shared traits, precisely so they can protect their common interests, both at home and abroad, as a single unit.

The Ten Ingredients of National Feeling

No single trait makes a nationalism on its own – it tends to be built from some combination of the following elements, layered on top of one another to different degrees in different places. A common homeland or shared territory, where the group actually lives, provides the physical anchor. A common race or shared sense of ethnic kinship, common language and literature, and a common religion typically follow close behind, since these are the traits people most readily recognize in one another as markers of belonging. A shared culture reinforces all of them. On top of these inherited traits sits something more deliberately cultivated: a genuine national sentiment or consciousness, sometimes coupled with expansionist ambitions once that sentiment finds political expression; a working concept of the national state as the group’s natural political vehicle; a dense, similarly minded population; and, finally, shared political interests, shared political experience, and shared political hopes for the future. Not every nationalism draws equally on all ten ingredients – some lean almost entirely on language and territory, others lean heavily on religion or shared political grievance – but some workable mixture of them is what turns a population into a nation in the emotional, rather than merely administrative, sense of the word.