The State of Nationalism (SoN): Nationalism and Capitalism

Abstract

While the scholarship on the role capitalism played in the genesis of nationalism is relatively coherent, our understanding of the relationship between those two phenomena once they have emerged is much more disjointed. Are capitalism and nationalism inherently conflictual or is their relationship a symbiotic one? Under what conditions is one of those two patterns more likely? Clues about this dimension of the link between capitalism and nationalism are not readily available in existing accounts of either phenomenon. The goal of this article, therefore, is to cull and systematize various strands of ideas about how these two phenomena might be connected.