Nationalism, nations and the crisis of world order
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117819842306 |
| Author | Michael Cox |
| Subject Matter | Part Two: Norms and Process |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117819842306
International Relations
2019, Vol. 33(2) 247 –266
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117819842306
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Nationalism, nations and the
crisis of world order
Michael Cox
The London School of Economics and Political Science
Abstract
One hundred years ago, the first Department of International Politics was established at the
University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, with the express purpose of seeking in Arnold
Toynbee’s prophetic words (uttered many years later) – of breaking decisively with the ‘habit
of nationalism’. As David Davies in the founding statement put it, by moving beyond ‘insular and
vested prejudices … the shattered family of nations’ could be brought back together again and
a new world order established. Yet as the history of the twentieth century showed – and the
new century looks to be no nearer to realizing that original dream – nationalism has throughout
continued to retain its power of mobilizing peoples and setting nation against nation. How and
why this happened and with what consequences is the subject of this article.
Keywords
Aberystwyth University, Alfred Zimmern, David Davies, E.H. Carr, Karl Marx, nationalism,
nation-state
Introduction
But what are nations? What are these groups which are so familiar to us, and yet, if we stop to
think, so strange …? (Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics, 1872)
The twentieth century has been referred to at different times by different writers as
being an age of extremes,1 a century of illusions and disillusionment,2 as being both
‘short’3 and ‘long’,4 as well as being a tragic detour based on what one author has termed
an ‘illusion’ which saw the birth of communism in 1917 and then its collapse with the
passing of the Soviet Union in 1991.5 The future we were then reminded had been tried,
the future had been found wanting, and we could now all look forward to a new era - an
‘end of history’ no less - the result according to Francis Fukuyama of the ‘unabashed
Corresponding author:
Michael Cox, LSE IDEAS, Pankhurst Building, Floor 9, 1 Clement’s Inn, WC2A 2AZ London, UK.
Email: m.e.cox@lse.ac.uk
842306IRE0010.1177/0047117819842306International RelationsCox
research-article2019
Article
248 International Relations 33(2)
victory of economic and political liberalism’ over all its many ideological rivals. The
‘West’ and the ‘Western idea’ had not merely survived the bloodiest and most dangerous
century in history. It had in his view emerged triumphant.6
Yet even the optimistic Fukuyama could not deny that liberalism might face some
serious challenges in the years ahead – and the one ideological challenge that seemed to
concern him most was nationalism. And for good reason. As he went on to point out,
nationalism had been the underlying cause of many of the deadliest conflicts in Europe
in the nineteenth century; it had then spawned two ‘cataclysmic world wars’ in the next
century; and while it may have held less sway in western countries after World War II, it
remained alive and well in both the ‘Third World’ and in what Fukuyama identified in
1989 as ‘post-historical’ Europe, places like Northern Ireland. Yet at the end of the day,
there was not too much to be concerned about he believed. Nationalism had after all lost
most its dynamic appeal in the West; as an ideology, it did not pose a more general alter-
native to liberalism; and if it continued to survive at all, it only did so in places where
people were ‘forced to live in unrepresentative political systems’. Elsewhere the world
had moved on, or was in the process of doing so. A post-national, somewhat boring,
future beckoned.
Even if Fukuyama’s rather too easy dismissal of nationalism in the post-Cold War
world may strike some of us today as being either premature at best or plain wrong at
worst (something he later came close to accepting himself),7 he did at least pay lip-ser-
vice to the impact which nationalism in all of its complex varieties had played in history.
Yet as we shall see, recognizing the significance of nationalism is one thing: defining it,
or understanding its deeper causes, is something else altogether. As Clifford Geertz much
earlier observed, though millions of words may have been expended over the years try-
ing to fathom the meaning of nationalism and nationality, there remained what he thought
was a ‘stultifying aura of conceptual ambiguity surrounding the subject’.8 F H Hinsley
had come to much the same conclusion in one of the few books written on nationalism
by a scholar of International Relations (IR). Nationalism, he ruefully noted in 1973,
‘continues to be a source of confusion’ for writers, though not, he might have added, for
their want of trying.9 Indeed, within a few years of his wry observation, a whole raft of
books on both nationalism and the nation had quite literally spilled off the presses, many
of them very scholarly and quite a few original and challenging such as those by Smith,10
Anderson,11 Gellner,12 Hobsbawm,13 Breuilly,14 Billig15 and Hastings.16 But none of this
work created anything like a consensus. As another seasoned writer on the subject
observed, we know that nations ‘exist’ and have done so for a long while, but thus far
(Hugh Seton Watson was writing in 1977) nobody had as yet devised a scientifically
agreed definition of what a nation actually is.17
Nor did things become much clearer thereafter. In fact, the more books that got to be
written on the subject, the less agreement there seemed to be among scholars as to
whether or not nationalism preceded nations or nations came before nationalism,18
whether nations were ancient or modern,19 whether or not nationalism could be defined
objectively or only existed in the imagination, why certain nationalist ideas had ‘met
with wide and strong responses at certain times and places and with almost no response
at others’,20 whether we should try and draw a clear distinction between different forms
of nationalism – some passionate and ‘hot’ and others benign and virtuous21 – why some
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