Abstract
Amid the global resurgence of nationalist governments, what do we know about nationalism? This review takes stock of political science debates on nationalism to critically assess what we already know and what we still need to know. We begin by synthesizing classic debates and tracing the origins of the current consensus that nations are historically contingent and socially constructed. We then highlight three trends in contemporary nationalism scholarship: ( a) comparative historical research that treats nationalism as a macropolitical force and excavates the relationships between nations, states, constitutive stories, and political conflict; ( b) behavioral research that uses survey data and experiments to gauge the causes and effects of attachment to nations; and ( c) ethnographic scholarship that illuminates the everyday processes and practices that perpetuate national belonging. The penultimate section briefly summarizes relevant insights from philosophy, history, and social psychology and identifies knowledge gaps that political scientists are well-positioned to address. A final section calls for more comparative, cross-disciplinary, cross-regional research on nationalism.
Highlights
Nationalism is more relevant to the politics of our time than it has been in half a century
The global reawakening of nationalism has perhaps been most visible in the United States, where former President Trump was elected on a campaign to put “America first” and “make America great again.”
While the majority of political science scholarship on nationalism implicitly normatively favors the predominance of a state-level group identity, social psychologists emphasize “groupness.” Generally speaking, contemporary social psychology builds upon an assumption that social behavior is driven not by individual characteristics but by the contingent nature of social situations and group behavior (Ross & Nisbett 2011)
Summary
Nationalism is more relevant to the politics of our time than it has been in half a century. We identify three trends in contemporary nationalism scholarship: (a) comparative historical scholarship that treats nationalism as a macropolitical force and excavates the relationships between nations, states, constitutive stories, and political conflict; (b) behavioral scholarship that uses survey and experimental research to gauge the causes and effects of attachment to nations; and (c) observational and ethnographic scholarship that describes the everyday processes and practices that perpetuate national belonging.
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