A misconception is becoming popular again: Nationalism everywhere

Vladimir Putin wants Russians to see their history as a long series of brilliant victories by a people united for a thousand years by language, faith, and customs. They have indomitable resisted all invaders, from Genghis Khan to Napoleon and Hitler, and built a great empire. Anything that disturbs this image is dismissed as a minor footnote or dismissed as a slander against Russia .

Russia's constitution protects "historical truth." It speaks of the "heroic deed of the people in defense of the Fatherland" and prohibits its "denigration." Anyone in Russia who questions Putin's version of the past risks imprisonment.

Such dangers do not threaten the United States. But Donald Trump also wants to use state coercion to impose a view of history in which criticism of his own country has no place. At the end of March, he issued an executive order to "Restore Truth and Reason to American History." In it, he announced that he would put an end to hostile attempts to cast US history in a negative light.

Both Putin and Trump came to power with the promise of leading their nations to new greatness after years of—in America's case, alleged—decline. While Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again" is, Putin's is the countlessly repeated phrase that Russia is rising from its knees. In order to create the desired image of former greatness, dark sides of history are hidden and contradictions glossed over.

In Donald Trump's planned "National Garden of American Heroes," statues of 19th-century abolitionists will stand alongside those of Black civil rights activists, both as objects of national pride. In Putin's Russia, the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union are equally revered. Stalin, who had millions of people murdered—the majority of them Russians—is celebrated as the victor of World War II and the creator of a strong Russian state and empire.

The paths Trump and Putin took to power, the societies in which they grew up, and their demeanor are very different, yet the two share striking similarities. They are typical representatives of a movement that is currently experiencing a resurgence almost everywhere in the world and is in the process of destroying the international order of recent decades, founded on the pursuit of cooperation: nationalism.

This new nationalist wave takes many different forms: Putin's war against Ukraine , Trump's threats against Greenland, Panama and Canada, China's military maneuvers off Taiwan, the transformation of multi-religious India into a Hindu state, the electoral successes of EU-sceptic or even anti-EU populists in countries such as Italy, France, Spain, Romania, Hungary, Poland and other European countries.

It's no coincidence that Putin and Trump want to determine the history of their countries. This is part of the essence of nationalism, which places one's own nation above all else. "Forgetting—I might almost say historical error—plays a crucial role in the creation of a nation," wrote the French historian Ernest Renan in a text entitled "What Is a Nation?" in 1882. Since then, countless historians, sociologists, and political scientists have grappled with the question Renan posed.

Yet this question doesn't even arise for most modern people: The existence of nations is as self-evident to them as the existence of cities and villages, fields and forests. The existence of nations is usually not questioned, even by those who feel they do not belong to one—for example, due to a migration background. Nationalism, which emphasizes the distinctive characteristics of nations and places value on distinguishing them from one another, is more universal than almost any other idea.

Many people associate strong emotions with their nations: love and hate, joy and sorrow. This is what makes the Olympic Games and the Eurovision Song Contests so attractive – and has led to millions of war deaths, displacement, and genocide. National fervor has fueled freedom movements and paved the way for the worst oppression. The idea of ​​the nation has undeniable power. But as soon as one tries to define what a nation actually is, it becomes clear how complex and contradictory the term is. While state, language, and religion are often part of a nation, they are not clear-cut criteria.

Most states today are nation-states, but state and nation are not the same thing. There are nations without their own state, and nations whose settlement area extends beyond their own borders. This is particularly evident when peoples fight for their own state, as in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the late 1980s. Or when a state claims the right to interfere in a neighboring state, as Russia does in Ukraine on the grounds that Russians are being oppressed there.

Many people in Ukraine speak Russian in everyday life. But most of them consider themselves Ukrainians and are defending their country alongside Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians against the Russian aggressor. It's not unusual for people with the same native language to belong to enemy nations. In Latin America, Spanish is the official language in eighteen countries. This hasn't prevented them from waging war against each other. And while the Irish speak English, they fought for their independence from England at the beginning of the 20th century.

Religion plays a major role in the identity of many nations. Religious dividing lines can become national dividing lines, as was the case with the Catholic Croats, the Orthodox Serbs, and the Muslim Bosniaks, who barely distinguish each other linguistically. Historically, their separation into three peoples was not necessary, as another example from the Balkans shows: Catholics played a leading role in the national movement of the predominantly Muslim Albanians at the end of the 19th century.

Shared historical experiences can also contribute to the emergence of a nation. This could be, for example, the struggle for a political goal, such as the United States War of Independence in the 18th century, in which people of different backgrounds stood side by side against British troops; or shared living conditions in difficult times. But even here, there is no regularity.

The shared experiences of the people of the Soviet Union deeply affected the everyday lives of each individual. This applies to the horrors of the Stalin era and the German occupation as well as to the peaceful decades that followed. All Soviet citizens wore the red scarves of the communist youth organizations as students, survived in a scarce economy through relationships and bartering, and laughed at the same films. This is still palpable today. Nevertheless, in the end, nothing held Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Moldovans, and Balts together.

The British historian Hugh Seton-Watson concluded that a scientifically sound definition of "nation" was impossible. Almost fifty years ago, however, he formulated what was arguably the most elegant attempt at such a definition: A nation exists, he wrote, "when a significant number of people in a community believe they constitute a nation, or behave as if they constitute one." Seton-Watson deliberately left open how large such a group must be to be considered "significant." It depends on its political impact.

In many people's imaginations, their nations are something natural and very ancient. But in reality, nations in the modern sense only came into being at the end of the 18th century. There are no "old" and "young" nations—from a historical perspective, they are all new. When Putin speaks of the "thousand-year history of the Russian people," more than eight hundred years of that history are fiction.

Modern nations are the products of historical coincidences and purposeful work. Literary figures who enriched historical legends with new content (or created forgeries of supposedly ancient works), political activists who shaped political programs from them, and statesmen who made them the basis of their rule contributed to their creation. Nations are the most successful and consequential political invention of modern times.

Its history began with the revolutions in America and France, when a new force replaced religion and dynastic succession as sources of legitimacy for rule: the people. The idea of ​​a political community, to which all inhabitants of a country belong, rather than a small group of privileged individuals, was emancipatory.

But it would have remained abstract without long-standing historical narratives and founding myths. Only these created the illusion of a common ancestry, transforming previously coexisting social groups—townspeople and villagers, farmers, artisans, and traders—into an "imagined community" (as the American historian Benedict Anderson put it).

What Trump calls "Make America Great Again" today was called "national awakening" or "rebirth" in many national movements of the 19th century. The national myths that emerged at that time revolved around lost times of glory, new beginnings after a collapse, struggles against invaders, and the shaking off of foreign yoke. Political participation, freedom of expression, and social justice were demanded in the name of the nation.

The national idea was the vehicle for both revolutionaries and reformers to drive change. The creation of nation-states was accompanied by the overcoming of feudal power structures and the establishment of modern administrations.

All major political ideologies and systems have, at some point in their history, entered into connections with nationalism: monarchy, liberalism, socialism, and even communism. Because it is more a feeling than a formulated idea, and more narrative than abstraction, nationalism is compatible with every culture, every religion, and every political system. This is the reason for its global success.

By their very nature, nationalism and democracy are close relatives. But as is the case with relatives, their relationship is complex, complicated, and fraught with conflict. They have become enemies, yet cannot leave each other. The nation-state is the foundation of democracy; nationalism is a mortal threat to it.

In the first half of the 19th century, European monarchies still attempted to suppress nationalist aspirations. Then they shifted to using nationalism to serve their own ends. The nation, transfigured into a sacred cause, was intended to make rulers as untouchable as the divine right of sovereignty once was. The idea that the nation was something like a natural organism in which all social classes—each in its predetermined place—were united served to justify the rejection of social demands and the suppression of dissenting opinions.

The seeds of this had already been planted in the writings of early democratic champions of nationalism. These contain the image of the nation as a body that must be kept healthy by cleansing it of parasites and pests, and by excising ulcers if necessary. As early as the so-called Spring of Nations in 1848/49, some revolutionaries demanded not only unity and freedom for their own people, but also the oppression and assimilation of others. The religious exaltation of the nation was not invented by reactionary forces. They adopted it from those prophets of progress who, with great pathos, placed the nation above all rulers as the people's cause.

Thus, even in the seemingly innocent beginnings of nationalism, the path to the hell that was the 20th century began. Where sacred territorial claims clashed, there was no room for compromise. This was accompanied by a high willingness to kill and be killed for the greater cause. To keep nations pure, minorities were deprived of their languages, people were driven from their homelands, and thousands were murdered.

Nationalism left a bloody trail throughout the 20th century, and not just in the battles of the two world wars. The Armenian genocide, the struggles over the borders of the states that emerged from the legacy of collapsed monarchies after the First World War, Stalin's starvation of Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Volga Germans, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, committed in a delusional desire for national purity, the wars in the successor states of Yugoslavia—the list is incomplete.

After the Second World War, many in Europe hoped that, in light of the millions of deaths, nationalism had been discredited forever. The word had become so toxic that even the most hardcore nationalists no longer wanted to be called that. But nationalism never truly disappeared in Europe either – after all, for most people, the nation remains the community to which they primarily feel a sense of belonging.

In 1989/90, Europe once again experienced a national springtime. Freedom movements driven by national sentiments brought down communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe, but at the same time, the destructive power of national passions became apparent in Yugoslavia, in the pogroms against Armenians in Azerbaijan and the expulsion of Azerbaijanis from Nagorno-Karabakh, and in the civil war in Georgia. In Russia's war against Ukraine, the repressive and liberal versions of national ideas are now clashing head-on.

Nationalism developed its greatest power in the 19th century, during a time of rapid economic and social upheaval. Industrialization triggered a mass migration from villages to rapidly growing cities; family ties and thus social security dissolved. At the same time, newspapers and books became mass products. New ideas thus found their way to a population on the move, searching for new identities and communities.

We live in a time in which we are overwhelmed by the speed and magnitude of a multitude of simultaneous global changes: Climate change is challenging living spaces and traditional economic models, COVID-19 has eroded trust in government and science, migration flows are changing the appearance and social fabric of cities, and the global economic and political balance of power is shifting from the West to Asia. At the same time, the digital revolution is transforming both the world of work and the way people communicate.

It's not surprising that this is accompanied by a strengthening of nationalist forces that promise a return to lost security and former greatness. Nationalism is taking on new forms, using different symbols and a different language than it did a hundred or two hundred years ago. But today's nationalists follow the same patterns as those of past times. Nationalism is both adaptable and constant. And it is surrounded by the stench of mass graves that it took on in the 20th century.