European nation vs. globalized nationalism

Introduction

The term nationalism is among those concepts that have increasingly acquired a life of their own, largely detached from the realities they are meant to describe. In this respect, it resembles notions such as communism, humanity, or human rights. Today, nationalism appears as a genuinely global phenomenon: as a term, it circulates worldwide and is applied across vastly different contexts. At the same time, it remains a strikingly vague and ambiguous concept. It is most often employed as a disqualifying label, at times even as a term of abuse; occasionally it serves as a neutral analytical category; and in some linguistic traditions, notably Spanish, it originally carried a positive normative meaning. Consequently, both in terms of its substantive content and its evaluative connotations, the term displays profound and often contradictory divergences. This article seeks to identify several contextual dimensions that must be taken into account if the contemporary confusions surrounding nationalism are to be properly understood and critically assessed.

At the outset, it is essential to recall that the term nationalism is derived from the concept—and the historical reality—of the nation, and that it can only be meaningfully employed in relation to it. Any serious discussion of nationalism therefore requires a preliminary clarification of how the phenomenon of the nation has been understood in the past and how it is conceptualised today. From the outset, it must be emphasised that the nation, in its original sense, is a specifically European phenomenon, not merely at the level of conceptual reflection but also in its historical formation. This fact cannot be grasped without an examination of the processes through which the modern European nation emerged. In this context, particular attention must be paid to a frequently neglected aspect: the term nation does not refer solely to a concrete population or social group, but also denotes an abstraction—a constructed cultural community grounded in shared values.

The dual position of national existence

It is by no means self-evident that any analysis must begin with a clarification of the terms that serve as its analytical instruments. In the present case, however, such a clarification is unavoidable, for the concept of the nation constitutes the foundation of the entire discussion and is, moreover, historically far older than the term nationalism. Although nationalism today tends to function as a catch-all label for phenomena associated with the nation, it is in fact a relatively recent neologism, derived in most European languages from the Latin natio (natus sum). Czech remains one of the few languages in which the term has been fully translated rather than directly adopted. The extensive debates over the definition of the nation, spanning more than a century, need not be rehearsed here. For the purposes of orientation, it suffices to note that these debates have oscillated between two ideal-typical positions. On the one hand stands the view that the nation is determined by objective factors and circumstances independent of individual will; on the other, the position that a nation exists primarily, or even exclusively, insofar as a given group of people regards itself as such. In simplified form, these perspectives are often labelled “primordialist” (or “essentialist”) and “constructivist” respectively. Yet these positions are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Given the absence of a universally accepted definition of the nation, it is therefore incumbent upon any author employing the term to specify the meaning attributed to it. The following analysis proceeds on that basis.

I assume that most of us, without much reflection, invoke the term nation in two distinct senses and move between them as circumstances require—often without noticing the shift, and therefore with ample room for misunderstanding. The more familiar sense treats the nation as the plainly intelligible name for a concrete, objectively existing collectivity: a large social group whose members recognise their membership and typically regard it as a positive feature of their lives. They communicate within the routines of everyday life; they compete and quarrel; or, conversely, they cooperate around particular interests. In this sense, the nation functions as a practical frame mobilised when needed. The ties that bind such a group very often (though not invariably) have deep historical roots—frequently reaching back to the Middle Ages—yet they were consolidated in the course of modernisation, above all during the nineteenth century. No single, stable, universally valid configuration of such ties can be specified (territorial, linguistic, cultural, politico-economic, religious, and so forth): particular elements may be reshaped, attenuated, absent altogether, or substituted by others. Nonetheless, three features have proved indispensable to national existence in this sense:

• Members recognise that they belong together and understand themselves as united by a shared past;
• they communicate more intensively with one another than with surrounding groups (hence the distinctive significance of language);
• they constitute a community of equal citizens, even where social and occupational stratification remains pronounced.

Alongside this, however, there is a second sense that often operates less explicitly. Here, ‚nation‘ denotes an abstract cultural commonality: an idea—or, more precisely, a construction—articulated and promoted chiefly by educated actors (and, not least, by political elites), and invested by them with positive normative meaning. In this register, the nation is envisaged as a whole, bracketed from internal stratification. Even where one acknowledges divergent interests among the nation’s constituent segments, the concept’s harmonising function remains central: its elementary value lies in its very existence. Although the nation as an abstract value crystallised in the formative period of the modern nation, it drew in many European contexts on substantially older cultural and historical resources.

Mass adoption of national identity in the first sense—as membership in a concrete social group—did not, however, entail the conscious endorsement by each member of the second sense: the nation as an abstract community of values. Indeed, in the practical work of nation-building and national movements, national leaders frequently treated the “nation” as a ready-made, bounded construct and a pre-established value, and were largely indifferent to whether those they sought to mobilise already shared their own national self-understanding.

The crucial point, however, is that these two levels—the concretely social and the abstractly cultural—are entangled. During the formation of modern nations, the idea of the nation as a value-laden abstraction was incorporated into the emergent national identity; conversely, the “idea of the nation” itself was continually reworked by members of the national collectivity in ways that reflected differences in education and position within the social structure of national society.

The difficulty with terms: from nation to nationalism

Whether or not one differentiates between these senses, “nation” has become a global category: a world populated by “nations”, from the numerous Indigenous nations of the Americas to tribal and other communities across Africa.

How is one to account for this extraordinary success? A comprehensive answer lies beyond the scope of this discussion; a few connections, however, are difficult to dispute. To be recognised as a nation today—almost everywhere—is a marker of prestige and, more importantly, a claim to rights. Such rights are commonly justified in the name of cultural specificity; yet they are also, and often above all, bound up with political ambition and the pursuit of power: ‘we are finally governing ourselves’. The claim may appear straightforward, but it immediately invites the question, temporarily set aside here: who, in practice, governs—and on whose behalf? In the perspectives of global political actors, and within much political science and sociology, the contemporary world is imagined as a plurality of definable collectivities described as nations. Because English functions as the lingua franca of global politics and scholarship, these collectivities are frequently understood as ‚nations‘ in the sense established in English usage since the seventeenth century—namely, as self-contained political entities: states. Even where institutional titles such as the United Nations retain the vocabulary of “nations”, it is evident that these are not “nations” in the sense historically embedded in the European cultural tradition.

The world of journalism—and, regrettably, much of contemporary scholarship in political science and sociology as well—shows little concern for this terminological confusion. Instead, it subsumes a heterogeneous array of political formations under a single, increasingly pervasive label: “nationalism”. As a product of terminological globalisation, the term is applied with little reflection to processes occurring worldwide, in Europe, or in the Czech context alike, and to both contemporary and historical phenomena. Under this expansive umbrella, figures as disparate as Luther, Masaryk, and Mussolini can be placed side by side. For this reason, I deliberately reserve the English term “nationalism” for the analysis of present-day processes outside Europe, in order to signal that these phenomena differ fundamentally from those denoted by the Czech equivalent when analysing European developments, whether past or present.

Attempts to define “nationalism” only deepen the problem. Even more clearly than in the case of the term “nation”, no consensus definition exists. The once-common assumption—still prevalent only a few decades ago—that nationalism refers to anything in some way related to the nation is no longer tenable. Contemporary Anglo-American literature abounds with compound expressions such as “white nationalism”, “Trumpian nationalism”, “Hong Kong nationalism”, or “Latin American nationalism”. In this context, Ernest Gellner’s well-known assertion that it is nationalism that creates nations appears, in retrospect, as a pointed aphorism rather than an analytical solution. The nation is thus increasingly presented as a kind of virtual reality, existing primarily insofar as the label “nationalism” can be attached to a process, a social phenomenon, or a group defined by a sense of togetherness, a shared interest, or even mere rhetorical affirmation of belonging—largely independent of the empirical reality to which the term is applied.

In multi-ethnic state formations such as Indonesia or India—not to mention most African states—populations are described as “nations” because political, and at times academic, elites articulate an identification with the state entity in question, and this identification is then interpreted as “nationalism”. In such cases, it is often unclear to which of the two analytically distinct understandings of the nation, outlined earlier, the term is meant to refer. I advance here only a tentative hypothesis: that “nationalism” in these contexts primarily denotes a position grounded in social reality—that is, the attitudes and orientations of particular actors who are labelled ‘nationalists’. Only secondarily are attempts made to derive from these attitudes a coherent set of values to which “nationalism” is supposed to subscribe, or which it is said to promote in the name of strengthening the cohesion of the entity designated as a “nation”.

While journalists—and indeed most politicians—remain largely indifferent to such terminological opacity, many political scientists and other social scientists are acutely aware that the conceptual ambiguity of “nationalism” severely undermines its explanatory power. This awareness has prompted repeated efforts, already evident before the mid-twentieth century and increasingly so thereafter, to introduce greater precision through qualifying adjectives: statist, imperial, liberal, humanist, integral, and others. European scholars, in particular, are sensitive to the use of “nationalism” to denote identification with a nation defined, among other criteria, by a distinct language—an experience common to most European nations but comparatively rare elsewhere. In pursuit of further differentiation, some authors employ the term “ethnonationalism”, typically with pejorative intent. Within the contemporary European mainstream, which no longer treats the nation as a positive European value, ‘ethnos’ is often opposed to the civic principle and deployed as a marker of what is deemed incompatible with proper European norms. I regard this position as not merely erroneous, but potentially dangerous.

This leads to another long-standing dispute surrounding nationalism: the question of its normative evaluation. To describe a stance or a political actor as nationalist is, in most cases, to issue a criticism. In the Czech linguistic tradition, this evaluative bias has been present from the outset, as the term has generally been used to denote phenomena and attitudes perceived negatively. The German tradition followed a similar trajectory until roughly the middle of the twentieth century. Thereafter, attempts were made to neutralise the concept, notably by the American historian Carlton J. Hayes in the 1930s, who proposed the use of adjectival modifiers to distinguish between positive and negative forms. In Central Europe, the German historian Eugen Lemberg, a native of Liberec /Reichenberg, was among the first to pursue a similar strategy. His effort, however, failed to gain lasting acceptance. To this day, some German authors continue to favour a predominantly negative reading of nationalism, while others characterise it as normatively ambivalent—capable of assuming either positive or negative forms depending on context. Yet even among the latter, nationalism is typically regarded as something ultimately undesirable.

Although English-language—and especially American—authors often insist that “nationalism” functions for them as a neutral terminus technicus, closer inspection suggests a degree of inconsistency. In American scholarship in particular, the term is rarely applied to the United States itself. Instead, it tends to be reserved for the description of non-American realities, or for the critical examination of selected aspects of American society. When positive identification with the nation is at issue, authors almost invariably prefer the term “American patriotism”. Many Anglo-American writers are, in fact, acutely aware of the limited analytical and expressive value of “nationalism” and therefore seek alternative concepts, most commonly “patriotism”. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, for example, speaks of “unquestioning loyalty”. Lemberg’s contribution is especially instructive in this regard: by explicitly detaching nationalism from the nation in the narrow sense, he defines it in value-neutral terms as “unconditional loyalty to a super-personal whole”.

In both European and American mainstream discourse, “nationalism” has come to function as an umbrella label for virtually all attitudes and activities that relate to what is broadly understood as a nation. It therefore operates largely as a critical—or at least distancing—designation for forms of attachment to a group or community that, in the view of its critics, is artificially constituted or, in the most extreme interpretation, manipulatively constructed by “nationalists” in pursuit of power or other self-interested objectives. Such an interpretation may be applicable to certain processes of “nation” formation beyond Europe, particularly in former colonial settings. In the European context, however, it stands in clear contradiction to the empirical evidence available not only for Europe as a whole but also for its individual nations. Above all, it must be emphasised that the term ‘nationalism’ is ill-suited to the analysis of European nation-building and its historical roots, and cannot be transposed uncritically onto the history of the continent that gave rise to the modern nation.

Before turning to the next substantive component of the argument—the historical analysis of nation formation—it is therefore necessary to summarise the terminological considerations associated with national existence in Europe. The present analysis operates with three concepts that originated in Europe to describe processes and attitudes that first emerged there: nation, patriotism, and nationalism. These terms were subsequently extended to analogous, though not identical, non-European processes and then returned—largely unnoticed—to Europe as analytical tools for interpreting the very phenomena from which they had originally arisen. Through successive waves of globalisation, however, these concepts have been transformed to such an extent that they no longer signify what they once did.

This is not merely a critique of the term ‘nationalism’ as such—after all, one could simply avoid using it—but, more fundamentally, a reflection on Europe itself and on its position in the world. Such a reflection, however, can only be grounded historically.

The nation was formed in Europe as a cultural value

One of the central claims advanced and substantiated in this essay is the specifically European anchoring of the nation. The modern nation—and identification with it—was formed and shaped under the conditions of European modernisation, drawing upon historical and cultural traditions distinctive to Europe. It is thus a concept denoting a formation that is specifically European, which was subsequently exported beyond Europe to societies characterised by markedly different cultural, religious, and socio-economic structures.

Any historical interpretation of this process must therefore attend to the interplay between changing social realities and the conceptual vocabularies through which these transformations were articulated. The relevant context here is nineteenth-century Europe, where the collectivity denoted by the term nation was widely perceived as a natural community and a value in its own right, and where attachment to it—referred to in Czech as patriotism—was understood as a moral and civic commitment. Nationalism, by contrast, designated a particular type of attitude towards the nation and, as noted earlier, emerged as a term only at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at a point when most European nations were already fully constituted. It was therefore a derivative of the term “nation”, unlike the much older concept of “natio”, whose roots extend back to the Middle Ages. As already indicated, neither the nation nor patriotism features prominently in contemporary catalogues of officially proclaimed European values.

We are thus confronted with a fundamental question: how did this process begin? Where did its foundations lie—and, indeed, the foundations of what? The nation as an “idea”, or the nation as a social group? Addressing this question requires a return to the distinction between the two levels of national existence outlined in the introductory section. In practice, these levels are rarely kept analytically distinct: the nation is often invoked without clarification as to whether it denotes an abstract concept or a concrete social formation. Rather, differences tend to lie in emphasis. Some approaches prioritise the idea of the nation and implicitly subsume the social collectivity under it, while others—my own included—focus on the social group itself, which, insofar as it embraced the idea of national community, proved decisive for the successful formation of the modern nation.

The search for origins must therefore begin with the abstract concept of the nation, its idea, since the term itself has always been inseparably bound up with it. The medieval Latin term “natio” acquired new meanings in the vernacular languages of Europe (nation, Nation, etc.), and its semantic content evolved accordingly. Initially, it referred to a particular group or estate, rather than to an entire population inhabiting a defined territory. The well-known example of university “nations”, designating students from specific regions or states, illustrates this usage, as do analogous classifications employed in ecclesiastical councils. The Hungarian “Natio Hungarica” was socially exclusive, encompassing only the nobility; similarly, the “Natio Polonica” referred to the noble estate of the Polish Rzeczpospolita. The sixteenth-century German “Deutsche Nation” was likewise restricted in social scope. By contrast, in sixteenth-century England the term “nation” encompassed the towns alongside the nobility. For the seventeenth-century Czech humanist Comenius, the nation (Latin “gens”) comprised the entire community of people sharing a common language and inhabiting a common territory—a conception that closely paralleled contemporary English understandings of the nation.

It should be added that within humanism, and later the Enlightenment, the term nation carried in all its linguistic variants a predominantly positive, or at least neutral, connotation. It was perhaps for this reason that, during the final third of the eighteenth century and at the threshold of the nineteenth, the concept could so readily be endowed with new content: the nation came to be understood as a value in itself, as a contribution to the cultural plurality of humanity. It acquired a renewed significance as the natural and self-evident home of all its members—citizens—serving both as a refuge and, as in the case of the French Jacobins, as a framework of obligation that demanded solidarity and usefulness of the individual to the whole. All of this operated, of course, at the level of an ideal, closely linked to the notion of a civilising or cultivating mission attributed to the nation. Paradoxical as it may seem, when the nation is viewed in this abstract, value-oriented sense, a clear convergence emerges between Herderian thought, revolutionary Jacobinism, and later Romantic conceptions of the nation, despite the fact that these traditions are often presented as fundamentally opposed.

The positive valuation of the nation did not arise ex nihilo. Its deeper roots can be traced, above all, to the Old Testament idea of a “chosen nation”, whose members are bound by mutual obligation. It is likely that this conception also informed the Reformation ethos of the fundamental equality of members within a community. Secular roots may be found in Enlightenment regional patriotism, which imposed upon educated individuals a moral responsibility for the welfare of the common people of their country or region. Closely associated with the nation as an idea was the notion of the nation as an enduring commonwealth. Such a “nation in itself” does not depend on the number of individuals who consciously identify with it; what matters is that it exists as an idea, as a “nation of the heart”.

The Enlightenment made the concept of the nation one of its standard analytical tools for addressing social and political problems. Reflections on national pride and national character proliferated, as did praise of national languages. The adoption of the nation as a positively charged concept went hand in hand with the Enlightenment’s regional patriotism of the educated strata—distinct from the landed patriotism of the nobility, which was primarily concerned with the preservation of inherited privileges. This form of patriotism functioned as an ethical imperative, obliging the educated to labour for the improvement of their country and the uplift of its inhabitants. Closely linked to Enlightenment patriotism was the conviction that the state—as a secular institution embodied in its ruler and elites—should provide all individuals with basic education and civic formation. In the Netherlands, during the second half of the eighteenth century, the term patriots denoted participants in an explicitly political and civic movement. Regardless of context, the term nation at this time consistently denoted a value and carried a distinctly positive normative charge.

In contrast to this predominantly secular patriotism, Johann Gottfried Herder advanced a conception of the nation—defined by a shared language and culture—as a creation of God and as the fundamental instrument of humanity, a guide and pioneer on the path toward its moral and cultural ennoblement. In Herder’s thought one can discern the origins of a certain “dualism” in the understanding of the nation. On the one hand, the nation appears as a divine creation, an abstraction endowed with intrinsic moral and cultural value—an aspect that predominates in Herder’s work. On the other hand, there is the notion of the nation as a large social group, a community of concrete individuals who must be persuaded that they have belonged to this value abstraction since time immemorial.

These intellectual developments predate the French Revolution by several decades, despite the persistent stereotype that associates the glorification of the nation as an abstract construct primarily with revolutionary France and its subsequent diffusion across Europe. In reality, the Revolution largely institutionalised and exalted an abstract ideal of the nation that had already emerged from Enlightenment patriotism and Herderian pre-Romanticism. The genuinely revolutionary innovation lay elsewhere: in the attribution of a new social content to the nation. The Revolution proclaimed the nation as a community of citizens acting in equality and solidarity, irrespective of wealth, noble origin, or level of education. All citizens—not merely the enlightened elites—were called upon to serve the country, understood as labouring for progress and freedom. This constituted a crucial foundation for the principle of citizenship. At the same time, citizens as members of the nation were expected to adopt the written form of their mother tongue, thereby gaining access to the historically accumulated, and often forgotten, values of national culture. This extended intellectual prelude—the historical grounding that established the nation as a positive value—has no real parallel outside Europe.

The nation as social reality and civil society

Only against the background of this intellectual prelude can we fully grasp the formation of the nation on its second level: the nation as a concrete community or social group. Understood in this sense, the nation emerged as a community of equal citizens who shared not only a sense of belonging invested with value, but also patterns of communication and a certain degree of organisation. This form of national community arose out of a profound crisis of identities triggered by the gradual disintegration of the values and bonds characteristic of feudal society.

It is of secondary importance whether the social order in crisis is described as feudal or pre-modern, just as it is not decisive whether the succeeding order is labelled modern, capitalist, or industrial. What matters is that the crisis and the transformations it set in motion unfolded unevenly: slowly and incrementally in some regions and spheres of life, rapidly and even revolutionarily in others. There is insufficient space here to reconstruct this process in detail, which undermined serfdom, challenged ecclesiastical and secular authority, and introduced—at least formally—the principle of legal equality. For the purposes of clarity, it suffices to outline several of its most significant manifestations.

Traditional social ties and dependencies grounded in privilege and feudal land tenure, whether in the form of serfdom or estate-based obligations, were progressively questioned and dismantled.

The closed world of patrimonial and seigneurial structures began to loosen. Status boundaries became more permeable, allowing for greater circulation of information and mobility of people within an increasingly assertive and modernising state.

A growing, though still limited, proportion of the population crossed the boundaries of estate and domain. For some, this meant leaving permanently the restricted social world in which generations of their ancestors had lived, whether in search of subsistence or in pursuit of education.

Urban craft production, organised in guilds, increasingly came into competition with large-scale production—initially in the form of manufactories and later factories—forcing many artisans to seek new strategies of economic survival.

Religious tolerance and secularisation gradually gained ground, accompanied by a retreat of ecclesiastical control over intellectual and cultural life. For an expanding segment of the population, religion ceased to function as the primary axis of identification.

The religious legitimation of inherited inequality and the authority structures of feudalism was increasingly challenged, together with the traditional value systems that sustained them.

Gradually, the idea of equality before the law—and thus before state institutions—took hold, first among educated strata and subsequently more broadly, leading to the conviction that all individuals possessed equal worth regardless of noble, bourgeois, or peasant origin.

These transformations, among many others, occurred unevenly across Europe, at different tempos, in varying constellations, and over differing time spans. Everywhere, however, they generated—above all among the educated—a sense of unease and an identity crisis, prompting the search for new bonds and new forms of collective belonging. At a certain level of education, an additional prerequisite for such a new commonality emerged: the capacity for imagination—the ability to conceive of belonging to a community composed of people one does not know, will never meet, and who inhabit a territory one may never visit, yet which is nonetheless designated as one’s homeland.

As new ties, channels of communication, and forms of collective life took shape, a suitable term for naming this emergent entity was already available, inherited from the past and adapted to new conditions in parts of Europe. That term was nation. Whether this process was state-driven or not was of secondary importance; what proved decisive was shared language, history, and culture. With the rise of civil society, Europe thus witnessed the emergence of new large-scale communities, which were designated by the inherited term nation, even though the term had not originally referred to a civil society.

In broad terms, European nation formation followed two principal paths, resulting in two basic types of nation that persist to this day, albeit with some transitional cases. These types may be distinguished according to the initial conditions under which nation formation began.

In the first case, the starting point was an existing state with institutional continuity from the Middle Ages, an advanced “national” culture articulated in its own language, and elites—nobility and bourgeoisie—who shared and cultivated that culture. From a certain moment of crisis onwards, such states underwent an internal transformation: a statist society of unequal estates was reshaped into a civil society that defined itself as a nation of equal citizens. This state-nation offered its citizens protection and, at times, international prestige, while simultaneously demanding solidarity with the nation understood as an abstract commonwealth. France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, England, and Spain—constituting a minority of contemporary European nations—exemplify this pattern. For the sake of clarity, these may be described as “state nations”.

The second path originated in a more complex situation: that of an ethnic community inhabiting the territory of a multi-ethnic empire. Such communities typically possessed an incomplete social structure, lacking their own economic and academic elites, a sovereign state, and often continuity of high culture or a standardised literary language. Nation formation here took the form of a deliberate project pursued by group leaders—patriots—who sought to acquire the full range of attributes associated with national existence. This process, commonly referred to as a national movement, began among members of the ethnic group who had attained higher education and consciously chose to define themselves as a nation. As in the first path, the initial stimulus lay in the crisis of traditional society and the erosion of established legitimacies and value systems. Ideas of human equality, expanding market relations, and social emancipation—most notably the abolition of peasant dependency—played a crucial role. Social emancipation was typically followed or accompanied by political emancipation, opening avenues for political participation.

European national movements unfolded asynchronously, and their programmes and objectives varied considerably. Nevertheless, demands for cultural, linguistic, social, and political emancipation were invariably present, albeit with differing emphases and temporal sequencing. Their development followed a broadly similar trajectory. An initial phase, which may be designated Phase A, was characterised by predominantly scholarly interest in the language, culture, history, and customs of an ethnic group increasingly referred to as a nation. On this foundation, the conviction gradually emerged that members of the ethnic community ought to recognise their national belonging as a value and a commitment. This marked the onset of an agitation phase, Phase B, which in many cases—but not invariably—secured support among broad segments of the population, enabling the transition to a mass phase, Phase C. It was typically only at this stage that not only scholars but also sections of the middle classes and economic elites began to identify with the nation, allowing one to speak of a fully formed nation, irrespective of whether it achieved statehood.

Like it or not, the overwhelming majority of European national movements ultimately succeeded and culminated in the creation of nation-states. These states, however, differed fundamentally from those that emerged through the earlier modernisation of existing state-nations. Their populations shared distinct stereotypes and value orientations, shaped by different historical experiences. For this reason, I refer to them as “small nations”, using the adjective not in a quantitative but in a typological sense. Thus, I would not classify the Danes as a small nation, but rather the Ukrainians, despite their far larger population. Characteristic features of small nations include stereotypical notions of the selflessness of national existence, a pervasive sense of external threat, a drive to prove the legitimacy of national recognition, and recurrent doubts about the meaningfulness of national self-existence. Objective circumstances also play a role, one of which deserves particular mention: small nations did not participate in European colonial expansion, and their populations therefore tend to display different attitudes towards racial issues and towards peoples of other continents—a distinction that became particularly visible during the recent migrant crisis.

These two principal paths of nation formation are reflected in a corresponding semantic dualism. Put simply, this takes the form of a contrast between the English and Central European conceptions of the nation. In English usage, “nation” is closely aligned with the state and typically presupposes the existence of a nation-state, or at least a claim to one. In Czech and German usage, by contrast, the nation is defined primarily by shared culture, language, and often history, and may therefore exist independently of statehood.

For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that alongside these two basic types of European nation formation, a third, intermediate pattern can be identified, exemplified by the Germans, Italians, and Poles. In these cases, communities possessing a full social structure and a developed national culture, but lacking their own unified state, constituted the starting point of nation building in the nineteenth century. Here, too, the process took the form of a national movement, whose primary objective, however, was political unification. These are therefore often described as unification movements.

During the formative period of modern nations, the relationship between the individual and the nation was typically described by the term patriotism, with equivalents in different languages. Only later, at the threshold of the twentieth century, did the term nationalism begin to be used with increasing frequency to denote identification with the nation.

Nation and nationalism in the whirlwind of globalisation

The concepts of nation and nationalism, which originated historically in Europe, became export commodities in the course of the twentieth century, after the formation of modern European nations had largely been completed. The specific pathways of this export need not be retraced here; what matters is its outcome. The once ubiquitous understanding of the “nation” as a state–national entity has increasingly been overshadowed by the far more frequent—and even more nebulous—use of the term “nationalism”. This export, however, was never directed towards a uniform or homogeneous environment. On the contrary, both between and within continents, societies differed profoundly in their levels of development, historical trajectories, and cultural traditions. These differences were effectively glossed over through the uncritical importation of the European terms “nation” and, even more so, “nationalism”. The success of this conceptual overlay does not alter the fact that it often bore little resemblance to social and historical reality. In many parts of the world, the entities that describe themselves as “nations” share little with the European modern nations that emerged primarily in the nineteenth century, beyond the designation itself and the accompanying claim that all inhabitants of the state identify with it.

It is therefore useful briefly to recall the types of political and social formations that existed prior to this externally induced “nationalisation”. These included, first, large state formations—centralised monarchies characterised by a dominant culture and language, albeit often encompassing ethnic minorities—such as China, Japan, Persia, or the Ottoman Empire. In these cases, certain parallels with the European trajectory of state-nation formation can indeed be identified. A second category comprises those colonies that were compelled, wholly or in part, to adopt the language and culture of their colonial rulers, but whose elites successfully pursued political emancipation from the ‘mother country’. This category includes, on the one hand, the Latin American states and, on the other, multi-ethnic India. Other colonies, such as Indonesia or Vietnam, retained a strong sense of cultural and linguistic distinctiveness. In much of Africa, independent states—self-described as nations—emerged from the process of decolonisation within territorially defined units that were often ethnically highly heterogeneous. In such contexts, emancipated educated elites frequently retained the colonial language, while internal movements arose advocating ethnic identity and linguistic particularism. Similar movements are also found in parts of Asia and are, typologically, the closest analogues to European national movements (for example among Tamils, Ibo, Taiwanese, or Kurds). Finally, mention must be made of non-European peoples whose national identity, and in some cases culture, was shaped by national policies during the pre-Stalinist period of the multi-ethnic USSR, and who, following its collapse, became independent states seeking to construct a state-national identity anchored in cultural distinctiveness. In these cases, the idea of an ethnically defined nation was imposed “from above”, yet subsequently took root.

Despite their differences, these cases share one fundamental characteristic—at least outside the American continent: the absence of the European pre-modern national tradition and of those broader elements that historically shaped Europe as Europe, including classical antiquity, Christianity, the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. In other words, the moral and humanist heritage that constituted the substance of the European nation was largely missing. The actors driving nation-building processes in Asia and Africa appropriated a European term endowed with positive connotations—often with substantial input from Western European theorists—without possessing the layered historical experience accumulated over generations from which the European nation had emerged. This appropriation was consequently accompanied by the construction of a consciousness, or if one prefers a myth, of a common past or common origin.

Whether these new “nations” were forged in struggles against colonial domination or against the rule of despotic monarchs, they were primarily the outcome of power struggles in which local political and military elites played a decisive role, defining themselves above all in opposition to an external enemy. Admittedly, the European formation of nations through national movements also involved struggles for power once a certain degree of mobilisation had been achieved. The crucial difference lies in the object of that struggle. In Europe, power struggles were conducted in the name of the rights or interests—real or imagined—of an already existing nation understood as a cultural value community, or at least in the name of a national movement that had entered its agitation phase. In non-European contexts, by contrast, the struggle for political power and for the creation of a political entity designated as a “nation” took precedence. In this struggle—conveniently subsumed under the simplifying label “nationalism”—the dominant idea was that the state being seized or constructed should simultaneously present itself as a “nation”.

The differences between the European nation and the “nation” outside Europe, when considered from the perspective of their genesis, may be summarised as follows:

• The Herderian–Romantic conception of the nation as a value in itself;
• An ethical humanist postulate intrinsic to national existence, whereby identification with the nation entails a commitment to work for it;
• A related postulate: service to humanity through service to the nation, drawing at times on Christian traditions, at others on Enlightenment patriotism;
• Cultural qualities and specificities as foundational elements of national existence, coupled with the belief that cultivating national culture contributes to the cultural development of humanity as a whole;
• A residual limitation of the state-power component of national existence, particularly in the Central European terminological tradition, which allows for the conception of a nation without a state, but not without a distinctive culture or shared destiny;
• A pronounced historical dimension and historicist understanding of national identity;
• The emergence of the European nation—albeit with few exceptions—within the broader process of modernisation, encompassing struggles for equality and political freedoms alongside rationalisation, industrialisation, and urbanisation, a conjunction reflected in the self-image of the nation as progressive.

This summary might serve as a satisfactory conclusion, were it not inherently partial, as it rests on a historical analysis of nation formation and characterises the classical model of the European nation in the twentieth century. It remains open to question whether this model retains its validity today. Globalisation, together with the advent of the digital age, has transformed not only the circulation and standardisation of goods, but also the diffusion and simplification of ideas and stereotypes. Through this intensified circulation, the globally distorted concepts of “nation” and “nationalism” have returned to Europe—their place of origin—in an impoverished and devalued form. Leaving aside the problems this poses for the analysis of specifically European historical processes, which may be addressed by others, the focus here lies on the impact of this ‘return’ on the European idea of the nation itself and on the meaning of national existence today. What remains of the ties and values associated with the nineteenth-century European nation?

• The humanist imperative of service to the national community has become largely alien to societies shaped by neoliberal individualism;
• The notion of the national interest has been reduced to a political slogan mobilised by competing groups in pursuit of particularistic aims;
• The association between the nation and the idea of progress has been profoundly undermined by the catastrophic violence of the world wars;
• Traditional historicism, understood as a consciousness of shared destiny, has been eroded—albeit unevenly, remaining strong in countries such as Poland or France, but markedly weak in the Czech case;
• In most countries, language has lost its status as a value to be cultivated and has ceased to function as a central symbol of national identity.

It is a striking paradox that at a time when almost all European nations are fully formed, possess complete social structures, and when nationality is largely taken for granted by their members, the level at which the nation functions as an abstract community of values—as an “idea”—is receding into the background. Increasingly, the nation is perceived primarily, if not exclusively, as a large social group that resembles a network more than a structured community.

All of this is not to suggest that identification with the nation has been irreversibly eroded. Rather, it has retreated into the background and assumed new forms—shaped not only by globalisation, but also by the indirect effects of the transition to the digital age. Its latent force has become visible in moments of heightened tension, such as the reunification of Germany or the disintegration of Yugoslavia; it has resurfaced as a reaction to economic crises in various countries; it has appeared in debates over the regulation of imports and the protection of domestic markets; and, perhaps most vividly, it has found expression in the emotionally charged world of sport fandom.

What unites most of these contemporary manifestations of national identification, however, is a shared expectation among their bearers: they are inclined to welcome and celebrate national achievements primarily when these yield tangible or symbolic benefits that they experience as their own. The nation is expected to serve them—but to what extent are they prepared to serve the nation in return? The available evidence suggests that, compared with earlier generations, individuals today are willing to contribute or sacrifice far less in the name of national belonging. In this respect, the historically grounded distinction between European and non-European forms of national identity may already be weakening, or may be in the process of giving way to a qualitatively new configuration.