The Two Faces of Nationalism: From Liberation to Extremism

No empire built on conquest has ever lasted forever, and one by one the great imperial powers of history made way for something else: nations governing themselves. Today the United Nations counts roughly a hundred and fifty-nine member states, most of them owing their existence, directly or indirectly, to the same sentiment – nationalism – that this chapter has been tracing from Machiavelli through the French Revolution. But nationalism’s history is not a single, tidy story of liberation. It has always pulled in two directions at once, and the twentieth century shows exactly how far apart those directions could grow.

Nationalism as Liberation

At its best, nationalism in the modern era ranks among the noblest sentiments available to a people, giving ordinary individuals a genuine sense of freedom and self-worth rather than remaining an abstract political theory. Used properly, it has meant the freedom of nations and the establishment of genuine self-government, and it has repeatedly supplied the emotional force behind revolutionary movements that overturned colonial and imperial hierarchies – including the very racial-superiority justifications that empires like Britain’s had once used to legitimize ruling other peoples. England itself became one of the earliest examples of nationalism working in this liberating direction, building individual freedom and a parliamentary system of government that changed the course of world history. France followed a similar arc: the Revolution of 1789 is properly treated as the true starting point of French nationalism, and French history since then has repeatedly demonstrated the principles of liberty and equality to the rest of the world.

Nationalism as Supremacy

Used badly, the same sentiment curdled into something far more dangerous. German nationalist education in the early twentieth century taught children that the German nation was a chosen people with a civilizing mission over the rest of the world, one that needed shrewd, uncompromising leadership to preserve its moral character. Italian nationalism developed its own version of the same idea, teaching that Rome was destined to rule other nations to the end of days and that modern Italy’s task was to recover the glory of ancient Rome. Both strands shared an unmistakable underlying purpose: preparing one nation psychologically and politically for war against others, built on the premise that conflict between nations was simply natural and inevitable, so that deliberate strategic preparation for it was a matter of clear-eyed realism rather than dangerous escalation. The reasoning went further still in its most extreme form, treating the very idea of lasting peace as a comforting illusion, arguing that the world had never actually managed to go without war and never would, and that conflict itself was a necessary engine of historical progress – a strand of thought that helped ideologically prepare the ground for the century’s worst wars rather than warning against them.

From Self-Determination to a Second World War

The First World War briefly pushed nationalism back toward its liberating register. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, presented at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, formally established national self-determination as an internationally recognized principle, extending political recognition to peoples fighting for independence and democratic self-rule. That momentum didn’t hold everywhere. In Italy and Germany in particular, nationalist politics took an increasingly distorted, supremacist turn during the interwar years, and by the 1930s that distortion had become one of the direct ideological currents feeding into the Second World War – the clearest possible demonstration that the same sentiment capable of freeing colonized peoples could, pointed in the wrong direction, help drag the world into catastrophe.