Chapter 4 - National Identity

Summary

Nationalism is a concept customarily treated with caution, if not deep suspicion, in intellectual circles. Eric Hobsbawm's analysis of the violent and destructive tendencies of nationalism over the past two hundred years, with an emphasis on the territorial imperative, and the mistreatment of minorities, leads him to conclude that ‘no serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist’. Since the late 1980s, however, new nationalistic energies have been unleashed – following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, for instance, or the demise of apartheid and the birth of a new South Africa. The status of nations has begun to seem more volatile, and less easy to interpret. Consequently, the received wisdom of viewing nationalism as inherently reactionary has been the focus of a revisionist view, especially in the field of postcolonial studies. Neil Lazarus, for example, questions the portrayal of national feeling as intrinsically undemocratic, suggesting that the nationalism of emergent states might rather be seen as tending towards new forms of social organization, especially where the emerging state can be seen as ‘a relatively open site of political and ideological contestation’. The most persuasive aspect of this claim is that new forms of nationalism might represent a way of resisting the encroachment of economic globalization, specifically where existing nation-states are seen to co-operate too obligingly with the objectives of multinational companies.