Ethnonationalism

Abstract

The term ethnonationalism (or ethno-nationalism) elicits understandings and forms of nationalism that regard ethnicity and ethnic ties as core components of conceptions and experiences of the “nation”. At the intersection of profound cultural, social, and political concerns, the study of ethnonationalism lends itself to a variety of interdisciplinary approaches across the full spectrum of the human and social sciences: from history and geography to international law, from anthropology to political science and international relations, from psychology and sociology to philosophy and ethics. Geographical approaches to ethnonational questions tend to privilege the spatiality of ethnonational identities and the territoriality of ethnic and national groups and political movements. They draw on the work of social and cultural geographers dedicated to issues of ethnicity and other identities as well as on the political and legal geographies of social movements, organizations, and institutions. Since the early 20th century, the study of ethnonationalism (or simply nationalism) has consistently been justified by the momentum of the topic at critical historical junctures. There was, first, the formation and management of large European multiethnic and multinational empires—principally the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, but also the Russian and Ottoman Empires—their role as sources of conflict and their ultimate demise in the wake of World War I. In the interwar period the redrawing of the political map of Europe in part along ethnic and national lines according to a proclaimed “right of peoples” to self-determination, but also the rise of fascism and national-socialism (Nazism), would justify continued interest in the “national question.” During the Cold War the independence of former European colonies in Asia and Africa motivated research in issues of ethnic, tribal, and national identities and allegiances and the political difficulties stemming from their interactions in the context of modern territorial statehood. The governance structure of the Soviet Union and its eventual collapse in the 1980s and 1990s and the resurgence of ethnic and national claims and conflicts in its aftermath and around the world of the post–Cold War era reinvigorated ethnonationalism research and scholarship in the late 20th and well into the 21st centuries. Simultaneously, some sociocultural and political effects of contemporary globalization and increased international migration may have generated newer brands of “ethno-national” movements in the form of reactionary, “nativist” and populist, often xenophobic and racist, always exclusionary identity politics in the more developed world—such as so-called “white nationalism” in the United States.