France's kings had never seen this diversity as a pressing political problem, but the revolutionaries of 1789 believed that they could not create a cohesive democratic community without taking the component peoples of France and, in the words of revolutionary Henri Gregoire, "melting them into the national mass".
At the end of the 18th century, France was a multi-ethnic, multilingual country in which only a minority spoke standard French. To understand how nationalism first came into being, it is worth looking at revolutionary France. Only with democratic revolutions did the idea begin to gain adherents. The idea that millions of people could be shaped into a nation through politics was as yet unthinkable. Nations could be born, grow, wither and die, but they could not be created (or recreated) through systematic political action. Most often, the ultimate aim of a nationalist programme is to unite members of a nation within its historical territory, where they can collectively exercise political sovereignty while identifying with national culture.īefore then, European observers most often defined nation as a group of people united by language, law and/or historical tradition, but they saw nations as organic entities. In some cases, they allege that their nation has been deprived of territories that rightly belong to it in others, that the national community is diluted or polluted by the presence of national minorities in others still, that the citizenry has an imperfect knowledge of, and commitment to, national values and traditions, and the national culture.
Nationalist movements, after all, nearly always claim that their nation remains an unfinished project and suffers from problems that need to be rectified through political action. Furthermore, these doctrines and movements have a clear goal: the construction and/or completion of a nation. What distinguishes nationalism is that it refers not simply to feelings, but to organised political doctrines and movements. Simple feelings of support for, loyalty to or belief in a nation are covered by the terms "national sentiment" and "patriotism". Most readers would probably accept the principal definition in the Oxford English Dictionary : "Advocacy of or support for the interests of one's own nation." Yet scholars cannot agree if nationalism is a simple sentiment or a political programme, a modern occurrence or an ancient one, the product of particular social conditions or a free-floating doctrine.įollowing two notable scholars of the subject, Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, I have found a fairly narrow definition most useful. Nationalism is one of those phenomena that get more confused the closer one looks at them. Nationalism, barely 200 years old, is impossible to avoid, says David Bell.
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