Nationalism’s Toll on the International Order

Nationalism’s effects don’t stop at reshaping how individual governments make policy – left unchecked, the same sentiment reaches outward and reshapes the entire international order around it, usually for the worse. Political scientists studying its international consequences have generally settled on a fairly consistent list of harms, all of them variations on a single underlying problem: a sentiment built to unite people within a nation tends, once it crosses a border, to divide them from everyone outside it.

A Threat to Shared Civilization

The trouble was never national pride or love of homeland by itself – it starts the moment a nation’s development becomes something it pursues at other nations’ expense rather than alongside them, disregarding the interests of others entirely in the process of advancing its own. That single shift is enough to turn nationalist sentiment into a genuine threat to shared civilization and culture rather than a healthy expression of identity. Left to spread, it corrodes cooperation between nations into mutual suspicion and prejudice, pulling countries away from the kind of open exchange that had once let them share knowledge and resources, and replacing it with the sort of psychological distance that periodically boils over from cold rivalry into open war.

The Seedbed of Imperialism, Old and New

Nationalism, taken to its aggressive extreme, is what actually gave birth to imperialism in the first place: nations infected with an inflated sense of national destiny built policies around seizing weaker nations’ resources and exploiting their populations, treating conquest as a natural extension of national greatness rather than a violation of it. That same instinct also hardened internal divisions along lines of language, religion, and ethnicity into full political fragmentation, pushing groups that might otherwise have coexisted within one state toward separatist claims of their own. And the pattern never fully disappeared with the end of the old empires. Many of the small states that emerged from decolonization remained economically fragile and resource-poor, which left them dependent on assistance from more powerful nations – a dependency that, after the Second World War in particular, quietly reproduced a new form of external domination even after formal independence had technically been achieved.

Prestige Politics and the Cost to Global Peace

At its most exaggerated, nationalism curdles into what amounts to a politics of prestige, where a nation’s sense of its own honor and standing crowds out any real regard for other nations’ dignity or interests. That posture is corrosive to global stability almost by definition: genuine peace depends on nations accepting real cooperation as a working principle rather than treating every interaction as a contest for relative standing, and a world full of nations each convinced of its own primacy has little room left for the kind of balanced, other-regarding outlook lasting peace actually requires. None of this argues that national feeling is inherently destructive – but its record, examined honestly, shows how easily the same sentiment that builds a nation can end up unbuilding the peace between nations.