In the reflection of our small group discussion on Hroch’s explanation of the term ”nationalism” in ”Nationalism and national movements: comparing the past and the present of Central and Eastern Europe”, I considered relevant to post a piece that I bumped today online from “Learning from Small Nations”, interview with Miroslav Hroch, New Left Review, 58, 2, pp. 49-50.
Q: Could you explain why you feel the term ‘nationalism’ is so dysfunctional?
A: It is very easy to label as ‘nationalism’ every phenomenon or attribute that has anything to do with the nation or national matters, rather than differentiating between national identity, national consciousness, national awareness, patriotism, chauvinism, loyalty and so on. And it is not at all a ‘neutral’ term, as many Anglophone authors believe. In the American case, this supposed neutrality is pure hypocrisy: you find thousands of titles about ‘American patriotism’ but almost none about ‘American nationalism’—the others are nasty nationalists, but we are noble-minded patriots! According to this terminology, both an ss man in occupied Norway and a member of the Norwegian resistance are ‘nationalists’. In that case, what use does the term serve? Naturally, one can add adjectives to it, as Carlton Hayes did early in the 20th century. Tom Nairn’s concept of nationalism as Janus-faced is helpful, to a certain extent. But does nationalism refer to an activity or a state of mind, or both?
We also need to bear in mind that the word ‘nation’, from which the term derives, has different connotations in different languages. In English, ‘nationalism’ is understood to imply a struggle for statehood, but this is not the case in German or Czech. In 18th-century definitions one can already see a difference between a ‘political’ concept of the nation in English and a ‘cultural’ one in German and Czech. The French understanding is somewhere in between, with both state and linguistic unification forming the basis for a nation. Anglo-Saxon authors writing on Slovene, Czech or Slovak national movements describe them as ‘nationalist’, with the explicit or implicit view that they were focused on a struggle for statehood, and then seem surprised when these leaderships did not fight for independence. This is an error, based on the fiction that a nation cannot exist without a state.
…I use the term ‘nationalism’ only for extreme cases, where expressions of national identity extend into overestimation of one’s own nation and hatred towards others, as in the case of Croatia in the 1990s, for example.
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Whilst browsing the internet I came upon this personification of Flanders and Wallonia as husband and wife, which I thought other nationalism students would find as interesting as I did. It’s taken from 
Nationalism Studies 
Inside, outside; core, periphery; ‘proper’ and ‘accented’ speech
Posted in Comment on January 27, 2011| 2 Comments »
This post is expanding a bit on my mention of a language being ‘a dialect with an army and a navy.’ The relevant point I’d like to make about English nationalism is that a characteristic of a dominant group which exerts its influence upon surrounding groups becomes seen as general to all of them, and ultimately the central group, now lacking anything specific to them in that category, is seen as missing part of an identity.
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