The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (178 page)

Along with the
Most Favoured Nation
clause, the principle of national treatment underpins
GATT
. It means that a government must not apply regulations or restrictions to imported products any more strict than those applied to domestic producers.
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Nationalism turns devotion to the nation into principles or programmes. It thus contains a different dimension to mere patriotism, which can be a devotion to one's country or nation devoid of any project for political action.
It is important to distinguish between particular nationalisms, which do not imply a general approach to politics, and a universal principle of nationalism. Most ‘nationalists’ have a programme for their own particular nation; but do not necessarily hold views about the significance of nationality elsewhere. It is in this sense that nationalism has been described as an ideologically empty bottle with strength and shape, but no particular content. Thus, the nationalism of the Congress Party in India before independence was able to incorporate such varied figures as Jawaharlal
Nehru
, a modernizer and believer in rational planning, Krishna Menon , a Marxist, and M. K.
Gandhi
, an anti-industrial Hindu ascetic.
The general feature of universal principles of nationalism is an assertion of the primacy of national identity over the claims of class, religion, or humanity in general. One strain can be loosely labelled ‘Romantic’ nationalism. It is particularly associated with German reactions to the universalism and rationalism of the
Enlightenment
. In this view people can be better understood in terms of the linguistic, cultural, and historical factors which bind them to a particular territory than by reference to their general human capacities. Thus the important meanings and values which form societies and provide the context for human action are local, not universal. The leading theorist of romantic nationalism was J. G. Herder (1744–1803) who wrote of the importance of the
Volksgeist
, the essential spirit of a particular people.
The economic dimension of such nationalism is the belief that the ownership and control of important resources should be maintained firmly within the nation itself. The political application is the principle of self-determination which seeks to base political life on the
nation-state
, a sovereign entity dominated by a single nation. One advantage of nation-states is that their authority, as a natural embodiment of the identity and will of the citizens, creates a firm base for legitimate government. Another is that, as the American poet Robert Frost put it, ‘good fences make good neighbours’: peoples who are secure, economically and culturally, behind their own borders can negotiate with each other fairly and amicably. The great disadvantage of this idea of the nation-state is that it does not correspond to reality. The populations of the world are not distributed on clear-cut national territories and there are always minorities whose presence in the national state is difficult and potentially disruptive. Even such massive and painful demographic movements as the exchange of population between Greece and Turkey after the 1914–18 war and the expulsion of Germans from (re-defined) Poland after the 1939–45 war have barely alleviated the problem. In particular, the German, Russian, and Turkish peoples are distributed across the Eurasian land mass in such a way as to defy any attempts to draw boundaries for self-determination. The implementation of the principle of self-determination by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 created states which were too small for successful defence or economic management, regimes which were oppressive and illiberal, and ethnic grievances which have proved persistent. The same argument would suggest that such multinational entities as the Austro-Hungarian Empire and (later) the Soviet Union have important advantages over nation-states.
What it is particular nationalisms seek to achieve can vary considerably. In the ‘classic’ cases, in nineteenth-century Germany and Italy, the core of the nationalist project was to establish political unity and independence. But nationalists can also seek to maintain a cultural identity: according to almost all the protagonists of Welsh nationalism, the preservation of the Welsh language and culture is the defining project of the movement. Nationalists may also seek to extend territory or to protect the interests of extraterritorial nationals. Equally, the issue can be the maintenance of cultural or political autonomy. For instance, ‘English nationalism’ is rarely thought of
per se
and references to ‘British nationalism’ are almost unknown. But where England or Britain is threatened by integration into a larger, European, entity and/or by disintegration, then it becomes possible to talk not only of English nationalism, but also of British nationalism.
The varieties of nationalism are determined in large part by the broad and indeterminate range of the term ‘nation’. The word exists in English and in all the Latin languages with a root related to birth as in ‘natal’ and ‘native’. But
nationem
in Latin referred to units much more like ‘tribe’, ‘clan’, or ‘family’ than the large, territorially based groupings which we think of as nations today. In eighteenth-century English there were references to ‘nations’ of Smiths, Hebrews, and gypsies or ‘the royal nation’ (meaning the royal family or dynasty). The idea that a ‘nation’ refers primarily or solely to something like England or France is a relatively recent development in the use of the term.
The question of what constitutes the common characteristics of nationality, and therefore the distinguishing criteria of membership of a nation, has diverse and confusing answers. It is no longer the case that the criteria must be related to birth, since one can acquire nationality; indeed, some modern nationalities, like American or Israeli, consist mainly of people who have, or whose known ancestors have, transferred from another nationality. Some of the classic arguments for nationalism, those of such German nationalists as J. G. Fichte and the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm , and of Welsh nationalists, insisted that common
language
was the key to nationality since it was possession of the language which related people to history, legend, and territory in the way that defined nations. This triadic relation between language, territory, and myth/shared experience constitutes probably the most coherent and developed theory of nationality, but it is incapable of explaining such multilingual nationalities as the Swiss, Indians, and Belgians and fits oddly to a modern reality in which many different nationalities speak Spanish or English as a first language.
Modern nationality thus consists in varied parts of ‘ethnic’ and linguistic identities, a common consciousness of shared historical experience, shared ‘culture’, mythology, and religion. One could not understand the politics of the South African
Boers
(or linguistically,
Afrikaaners
) or the
Québecois
without understanding that their group unity has passed over some crucial threshold into nationality, a threshold which was not crossed by the ‘
Pieds Noirs
’ settlers in Algeria and has not been crossed by African Americans.
The phrase ‘the age of nationalism’ has been applied most often to post-Napoleonic Europe and to the movements which culminated in German and Italian unification. The particular importance of this period was that it established influential paradigms and approaches in the understanding of nationality. But distinctly nationalist sentiments can be detected in England and France centuries earlier and Shakespeare put such sentiments into the mouths of many of his medieval characters, including King John, Henry V, and (paradoxically) John of Gaunt. The late twentieth century can also be described as an age of nationalism; indeed, some of the assertions of nationality among the ‘hundred nations’ of the former Soviet Union following its collapse in 1991 might be described as nationalism
ad absurdum
.
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The transfer of private assets into public ownership, in Britain usually in the form of a public corporation. The main wave of nationalization in Britain was under the Labour Government of 1945–51 when public utilities such as electricity, gas, and the railways, and basic industries such as coal, were brought into public ownership. The steel industry was nationalized, then partially denationalized by the succeeding Conservative Government, only to be renationalized by the Labour Government of 1966–70. Aerospace and shipbuilding were nationalized by the Labour Government of 1974–9. By this time, failing companies such as British Leyland were also coming into public ownership, but with government shareholdings placed under the supervision of the National Enterprise Board rather than as public corporations. The political, constitutional, and administrative problems associated with nationalization created an active subfield of British political science which addressed such questions as what form the relationship between government and the public corporations should take and how Parliament could secure the accountability of the nationalized industries.
WG 

 
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