Nationalism’s Dark Legacy: Neo-Colonialism and the Case for Restraint

If the interwar years showed how far nationalism could be twisted toward supremacy and conquest, the aftermath of the Second World War forced the world to reckon with that lesson directly – and, in the process, to discover that simply denouncing extreme nationalism didn’t make the underlying problem disappear.

The UN and the Attempt to Tame Nationalism

Nearly every nation to survive the Second World War emerged with a sharpened awareness of where unchecked, exclusivist nationalism had led, and a genuine sense that the old, racially charged, zero-sum habits of national rivalry needed to be abandoned in favor of new rules for coexistence. That recognition is what gave the drive toward international cooperation real urgency, culminating in the founding of the United Nations on October 24, 1945, an organization built specifically to give nations a structured, peaceful way to settle their differences rather than defaulting to war. It worked, to a real degree – but it didn’t dissolve nationalism as a force in world affairs, and the decades since have kept generating new versions of the same underlying problem.

Too Many Small Nations, Too Much National Pride

Part of that problem is simply arithmetic. The world today counts roughly a hundred independent nations, many of them quite small in population, and a clear-eyed look at their politics suggests that national sentiment in a number of these smaller states has curdled into something closer to national vanity than to healthy self-respect – a pattern visible in several small European states as much as in larger developing nations. The sheer fragmentation of the world into so many separate political units has bred its own friction, generating persistent inequality and rivalry between nations that keeps surfacing in economic and political tension, and keeps the underlying risk of nationalism-driven conflict from ever fully receding. Some of the resulting dynamics have taken on a distinctly modern shape: critics have pointed to patterns of powerful nations exerting coercive influence over weaker, smaller ones – Afghanistan’s experience of foreign domination being a widely cited example – as evidence of what has come to be called neo-colonialism, imperial behavior dressed in newly acceptable, post-colonial language.

Nationalism’s Many Disguises

Nationalism has, in fact, taken on destructive forms in almost every ideological wrapper available to it – colonial expansionism, unrestrained capitalism, doctrinaire socialism, Nazism, and various movements built on racial or ethnic exclusion have all, at different points, dressed themselves in the language of national interest while pursuing something closer to domination. That record has made nationalism a genuinely divisive subject among serious thinkers. The Bengali poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore was among its sharpest critics, arguing that nationalism amounted to little more than organized collective self-interest dressed up as virtue. The historian Carlton Hayes made a related point more bluntly, describing nationalism as, at bottom, a form of vanity – nations flattering themselves while trading in mutual accusation and blame.

The Case for Restraining It

None of this argues for abandoning national feeling altogether, but it does argue for restraining its most destructive tendencies, in much the same way earlier centuries eventually found ways to restrain feudal power once that power had outlived its usefulness. What healthier international relations require is nationalism stripped of the ambition to expand at other nations’ expense – and a genuinely impartial international framework strong enough to treat the underlying diseases of war, inequity, and prejudice rather than merely managing their symptoms after the fact. Until nationalist sentiment is checked in some durable way, the argument runs, hope for lasting peace will keep receding just out of reach, even as humanity’s genuine, and entirely legitimate, desire for freedom and self-determination keeps pushing new nations to seek exactly the kind of independence that got the whole cycle started in the first place.