What can the study of nationalism contribute to our understanding of international relations?

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IR 410 International Politics

Author: Elena Stepanova

What can the study of nationalism contribute to our understanding of international relations?

The notion that the study of nationalism can contribute to our understanding of international relations would be dismissed out of hand by conventional international relations thinkers, despite the role which nationalism played in reshaping the political map of contemporary world. Its role can also easily seen in the prolifiration of sovereign states, particularly during the twentieth century, and the emergence of many conflicts where nationalism was one of the decisive factors. Lapid and Kratochwil (1996, p.105) point out that “it is indeed strange but hardly overstated that, in an age of nationalism, international relations and most other social disciplines seem to have converged on little else but the sustained exclusion of the national problematic from their respected research agendas, relegating it to a fringe phenomenon”. Studies on national identity and nationalism have of course a long tradition in IR, but before 1989 these were largely marginalized, in a discipline dominated by rationalist and systemic approaches. Traditionally, those occupying the mainstream of international relations theory have failed to take nationalism and national identity seriously. Nationalism has been regarded as a “convinient black box into which whatever cannot be explained in any other way… can be filed away without further consideration”(Mayall 1990, p.5).

The widespread `interutilisation` (Connor 1994 cited Özkirimli 2000, p. 58) of the words `state` and `nation` lead to confusion and misuse of these terms by many scholars of IR. The origins of this confusion go back to Jeremy Bentham, who in the 1780s invented the term `international` for what we would now define as `interstate` relations (Halliday 2001). In the nationalism literature the central part of most definitions of `nation` is the importance of the belief in unity by some set of characteristics on the one hand, and in territorial self-determination on the other. Defining “nationalism” is no more promising. For the purposes of this essay, it would be logical to focus on nationalism as an idea, which determines certain actions based on it. Ignatieff (1993), for example, defines nationalism as a notion that combines the political idea of territorial self-determination, the cultural idea of the nation as one´s primary identity, and a moral idea of justification of action to protect the rights of the nation against the other.

The study of nationalism which covers issues of identity, culture and legitimacy can contribute to our understanding of international relations in three different ways.  First, it can provide us with understanding of how the modern system of sovereign states emerged and the mechanisms which allow a nation to claim exclusive rights and distinctive characteristics for itself. Second, it can contribute to our understanding of the interplay between domestic and international in the process of national identity formation. Finally, it lays the emphasis on the importance of pshycological factors in foreign policy making. Although nation as a form of collective organization which claims political rights originated in Europe and is not the only type of community (if not the rarest nowadays), the impact of nationalist ideas on our understanding of international relations cannot be underestimated. In the following pages I shall briefly outline the role that the study nationalism has in highlighting the problem of identity in international relations. Further, I will present the importance of nationalism for establishing the principle of popular sovereignty. The final section will give some conclusions.

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Nationalism has, more than any other social force, highlighted the importance of national identity in international politics, though the notion of ‘national identity’ is often used undistinguished from ‘nationalism’, which is a related but different term. Identity has been firmly established within IR with the ‘cultural turn’ and the ascendance of social constructivist IR theory. There were a few efforts within neorealism to broaden the agenda by including “the national” into security studies (See Weaver et al. 1993), but as Lapid and Kratoshwil demonstrate (1996, pp. 116-120), these attempts were not very successful. Social constructivism, in contrast, relies on ...

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