Thread by @pashulman

There remains a persistent inability for many Americans to reckon with what “nationalism” is & *why* countries with strong nationalist movements proved so succeptible to fascism post-WWI. Nationalism isn’t just “I super ❤️ my country.” It’s a story of who belongs & who doesn’t.

https://twitter.com/douthatnyt/status/1056904014628040705

A "nation" is a group of people-as Benedict Anderson famously described, an "imagined community." Nationalism is not an ancient form of political & social identity; instead it arose after the French Revolution.

Since the breakup of the western Roman empire, Europe had always been divided into ever-changing polities--kingdoms, city-states, empires, principalities--governed by ever-changing rulers.

Boundaries changed often. Territories passed from the control of one ruler to another, half-a-continent away. The King likely didn't speak the same language as much of his subjects.

By the 19th century, the big empires of Europe--Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman--had populations from dozens of different ethnic groups, all speaking different languages, with different religions and customs, clothing and foodways. That was normal.

The ideology of nationalism sought to do away with this polyglot system. If a nation--a group of people who identified with each other--were to have legitimacy on the world stage, they needed territory that was exclusively theirs to rule. Borders & rulers had to fit the citizenry

Of course, the problem was always that there was enormous overlap between where different people lived and who claimed land as their own. And in claiming land as a nation's birthright, it intrinsically made anyone else living there subordinate.

The nobility of Hungarian nationalists seeking independence from their German-speaking Austrian rulers (very popular in the United States!) was tempered with the fact that despite how hard many tried, Jews and other ethnic and religious minorities could never fully be *Hungarian*

Likewise, German, or Polish, or Russian.

These nationalist movements helped tie together people who really did have little in common, like Italians, who by the 1860s hadn't lived under a politically united peninsula since the 6th century. A citizen of Milan likely couldn't even understand a peasant from Sicily.

Nationalism forged new unities of identity-of language, religion, of ethnic solidarity. But they necessarily excluded as well. Jews may have suffered the most widely, but European Muslims in the Balkans did as well, as did any ethnic or national group in the minority somewhere.

After WWI caused such physical and psychic devastation--human, economic, political--it wasn't a stretch to see nationalists figure out whom to blame and how to achieve spiritual and material renewal. Just make clear who belonged in the nation. And who didn't. At any cost.