Economic Nationalism as a Challenge to Economic Liberalism? Lessons from the 19th Century

Abstract

What kind of challenge does nationalism pose to liberalism in today's global political economy? Conventional wisdom holds that nationalism is an outdated ideology in this age of globalization and liberalization. But this argument rests on understandings of nationalism that are increasingly being called into question by recent scholarship. In this article, I show how the history of nationalism in the 19th century provides strong support for two important but potentially controversial arguments made in recent literature about the nature of nationalism: (1) that this ideology is most properly defined by its nationalist content (rather than as a variant of realism or as an ideology of protectionism), and (2) that it can be associated with a wide range of policy projects, including the endorsement of liberal policies. With these two points established through historical analysis, I conclude that nationalism should be seen still to be a powerful ideology in the current period, but that its relationship to the policy goals of liberals is an ambiguous one, just as it was in the 19th century. With the collapse of the Marxist political project in the ex-Soviet bloc, many observers have concluded that liberalism faces no serious political challenges as a dominant ideology in international policymaking. But when liberals were last such a central global political force during the 19th century, they faced challenges not just from Marxists but from nationalists too. What kind of a challenge does nationalism pose to liberalism in today's global political economy? This question is a difficult one to answer because it presumes a clear understanding of the term economic Although the ideologies of liberalism and Marxism are well understood within the field of international political economy (IPE), nationalism has received much less attention and has been analytically confused within scholarly literature for most of the 20th century. In the past few years, more serious attention has finally been given to the task of sharpening the analytical concept of nationalism. Two important arguments have emerged from this literature. First, a number of scholars have argued that the main fault of traditional definitions of the concept is that they have neglected the nationalist content of the ideology. Second, if this Author's note: I am grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for helping to finance some of the research for this article. For their very helpful comments, I would also like to thank the editors of this journal, three anonymous reviewers, George Crane, James Mayall, and Andreas Pickel.