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Nationalism
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Nationalism … is the worship of the collective power of a local human community. Unlike the faith in progress through science, nationalism is not a new religion; it is a revival of an old one. This was the religion of the city-states of the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world. It was resuscitated in the West at the Renaissance, and this resuscitation of the Greco-Roman political religion has been far more effective than the resuscitation of the Greco-Roman style of literature, visual art, and architecture. Modern Western nationalism, inspired by Greco-Roman political ideals and institutions, has inherited the dynamism and fanaticism of Christianity. Translated into practice in the American and French Revolutions, it proved to be highly infectious.
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Nationalism is a social movement by a people seeking the maintenance of their group. The key element in nationalism is the nation, a social group of those people who believe that they belong together because of common characteristics and interests. By putting the interests of their social group ahead of all other interests, they are able to ensure its survival. Because they put the interests of their people first, nations are often in conflict with the States in which they reside. This most often results in a desire for political sovereignty by nations. The nationalist model applies to the White movement in North America.
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Nationalism has the strong territorial component, with an inclusive categorization of territory corresponding to the categorization of individuals. For each nation, there is a territory which is uniquely associated with it, the national homeland, and together they account for most habitable land. This is reflected in the geopolitical claims of nationalism, which seeks to order the world as a series of nation-states, each based on the national homeland of its respective nation. Territorial claims characterize the politics of nationalist movements. Established nation-states ... make an implicit territorial claim, to secure their own continued existence: sometimes it is specified in the national constitution. In the nationalist view, each nation has a moral entitlement to a sovereign state: this is usually taken as a given.
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Nationalism had important role in ending the colonial rule. Nationalism spread to colonies and made their people to desire independence. Nationalism ... made the people in metropolitan states (countries that colonized others) to accept more the desire of other people to rule themselves. However nationalists think that the end of colonialization of Africa was not done well. They think that there would not be so many conflicts in Africa if African nations had built in a nationalist way (so that every ethnic group is its own nation). After the imperialists left their African colonies, the new nations were built with borders that were not the same as the ethnic borders.
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Nationalism was still an elite phenomenon for a couple of centuries after the Treaty of Westphalia, but during the 19th century in Europe it spread widely and became popularized. Nationalism has dominated European and even global politics ever since. Much of 19th century European politics can be seen as a struggle between newer nationalist movements and old autocratic regimes. In some cases nationalism took a liberal anti-monarchical face whereas in other cases nationalist movements were co-opted by conservative monarchical regimes. Gradually through that century the old multi-national states such as the Austro-Hungarian Empire began to lose their grip, and various localized states were absorbed into larger national entities, most notably Germany and Italy.
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Nationalism may have been born in Europe with the modern nation-state, but it reached its broadest flowering in the multicultural United States. The American Revolution transformed loyal colonialists into patriotic Americans. It ... changed monarchial identification into love for the first president, George Washington, and charged ritual commemoration of revolutionary events and figures with quasi-religious passion. In 1783, after the peace treaty legitimized the boundaries of the new nation, Americans had the requisite qualities to establish their own ideology. Americans were highly literate and had a burgeoning number of newspapers and book publishers. The desire to commemorate the American Revolution inspired fledgling historians to write chronicles of the conflict and create a hagiography of heroes.
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Nationalism