How Nationalism Reshapes Foreign Policy From the Inside

Restraining nationalism from the outside, through balance-of-power politics, alliances, treaties, and international courts, is only half the story. Nationalism also reshapes politics from the inside, changing how individual states actually make foreign policy decisions – not always for the better.

It Democratized Foreign Policy

The core meaning of the national state is that it answers to its people’s own will and aspirations, and that shift has changed foreign policymaking in a genuinely structural way. Rulers of national states no longer set diplomatic and foreign policy purely by their own private judgment; they build it, at least in principle, around public sentiment and the popular mandate that legitimizes their rule in the first place. That connection between government legitimacy and national feeling runs directly through the democratic and republican movements that followed the French and Dutch revolutions, gained further momentum in the European uprisings of 1848, and eventually pushed even long-standing monarchies, Britain’s included, toward increasingly constitutional and accountable forms of government. Democratic foreign policy and the rise of the national state, in other words, grew up together, each reinforcing the other.

It Became a Tool Politicians Could Wield

That same public sentiment, though, is also something politicians can deliberately mobilize for ends that serve their own position more than any careful calculation of the national interest. Iran’s move to nationalize its oil industry in the early 1950s is a textbook example: public opinion aligned firmly behind removing British and American oil companies from Iranian production, and that popular pressure drove government policy forward regardless of the diplomatic and economic complications it created – complications that eventually reshaped Britain’s own policy toward Iran in response. Nationalist sentiment, once roused, doesn’t stay contained to the issue that roused it.

It Can Push Policy Away From Reality

Public sentiment doesn’t always track practical interest, and when it doesn’t, governments can find themselves locked into foreign policy positions that owe more to symbolism than to strategy. Long-standing American reluctance to recognize the People’s Republic of China through much of the Cold War, and Pakistan’s own extended delay in recognizing Bangladesh after 1971, are both cited as cases where deeply felt national sentiment kept a government committed to a position well past the point where cooler calculation might have counseled a change of course.

It Can Force Governments Into Rushed, Unpopular Choices

Nationalist pressure also has a habit of forcing quick decisions rather than careful ones. Policymakers facing a genuinely popular national mood are often left with little real room to weigh better alternatives, even when those alternatives exist, simply because the political cost of appearing to defy the national mood is too high to absorb. American support for Israel and Pakistan’s approach to Kashmir are both regularly cited as examples of policy positions that, once they gained broad national backing, effectively hardened into fixed national commitments – positions maintained less because ongoing rational assessment continued to endorse them, and more because reversing course had simply become politically unthinkable.