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This modern idea of nationalism has its roots in the enlightenment and liberal
conception of self-determination, in the French revolution ideas and in the thoughts
from German philosophers like Johann Fichte and Johann Herder.
The nationalism boosted the expansion of the European empires, but it also
created movements against these empires, for instance the independence of LatinAmerican nations, the Boxer war in China, the Zulu war in South Africa and other
nationalist movements that fought against European empires. They fought for selfdetermination and they struggled against the global economic and political regime the new capitalism - that European empires wanted to impose around the globe.
Thus, we can see some functions of nationalism: resistance against a regime and
claim for self-determination. In the current world occur similar situations like in the
nineteenth century, nowadays we see several nations that struggle for selfdetermination in their territories like the case of Kurdistan, Chechenia, Catalua
and other nations. However, there are other functions of nationalism as protection
of sovereignty, like happened in the boxer war in nineteenth century, when China
fought against the UK and its economic policies in order to protect its sovereignty.
Nowadays many countries also struggle against economic policies to protect their
sovereignty, due to the powerful countries, through its imperialism, have wanted to
impose their economic policies to other countries, for instance, the imposition
case of Russia in Ukraine or the case of the USA in the Middle East.
The other function of nationalism in the globalized world is glorifying the nation and
creating strong feeling of superiority in regard to other countries. In this sense, we
watch the case of Russia, North Korea, China or even the USA where exists a
strong speech to glorify the nation and create awareness of a superior country. But
this tradition comes from the invention of a globalized world in the nineteenth
century. In fact, the empires of this age did the same thing: they glorified their
nations to create a feeling of superiority. However, glorifying the nation not only
serves to create this kind of feeling, but it also serve to create a feeling of selfdetermination, territoriality, and therefore of independence. In this order of ideas,
these feelings for nationalism have led to create extremism among the population,
hence appear problems such as xenophobia, war between nations or no
cooperation in international institutions. Nevertheless, we have to take into account
that nationalism can represent a resistance against globalized world where
powerful countries and international institutions are able to damage selfdetermination and a sovereignty of a state.
Its important that we wonder if currently the states can really trust in the right of
self-determination. This is a good question that we would allow to analyse the
principle of self-determination in this globalized world, and its interesting to see