International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   Since their emergence in the late eighteenth century, nationalist movements have been one of the world's most powerful forces for social change. As a social movement, nationalism is certainly unrivaled; it has been the principal vehicle both for popular aspiration and for ruling ideology across nearly 300 years. If anything, the spread and intensity of nationalist movements increased in the twentieth century. Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes noted with regret that the century's most powerful social movements had embraced nationalism. From the early challenge posed to the Communist movement by the outbreak of World War I, to the post-1989 “velvet” revolutions, Hobsbawm found nationalism dominant, driven by a “hunger for a secure identity and social order in a disintegrating world” ( Hobsbawm 1994 :567). Nationalist movements have characteristics in common, but they also have particularities. With each historical juncture nationalism is re-made anew, and any account of nationalism as a social movement has to address its consequent plurality ( Löwy 1999 ). Nationalist movements, whether they are “official” movements initiated by ruling elites or whether they are movements “from below” geared to supplanting such elites, are soaked in the ideological conflicts of their period. A typology of nationalist movements may be useful, but it only makes sense when ... log in or subscribe to read full text