Nationalist Internationalism

The Case for Nationalism Beyond the Nation-State

Nationalism’s Progressive Role in History

Many people take for granted how far we have come. The nation-state, despite being a relatively recent historical construction, serves crucial functions in organizing human societies. Before nations, we had centralized monarchies held together by the principle of divine right. These monarchies set the first stage for modern nation-states, replacing the fragmented feudal order where power was dispersed among local fiefdoms controlled by knights and the Church.

The story of modern nationhood begins with the rise of absolute monarchy, when monarchs sought to enhance their power through centralization. The abuses and tyranny of absolutism eventually sparked the bourgeois liberal revolutions that brought us modern liberal states and democratic governance. France is often considered the first modern nation-state, with the French Revolution playing a pivotal role in creating a nationalizing process, establishing a mandated national French language instead of regional dialects to create a united France.^[1] The American experiment followed a similar path, though America only truly became a nation after the Civil War, what some have called the “second American revolution.”^[2]

Nationalism has not only been reactionary. Historically, it also played a progressive role. Today, nationalism is associated primarily with reactionary thought, largely due to the experience of fascism, a particular form of ultranationalist, totalitarian ideology exemplified by Nazi Germany’s racial nationalism. Many also attribute the catastrophe of World War I to nationalism, though the causes were far more complex. The contemporary revival of right-wing populist nationalism is a reaction against neoliberal globalization. As left-wing populism diminishes in influence, it has emerged as seemingly the only significant alternative to the globalized status quo.

Before the modern nation-state, human communities organized political loyalty through smaller and older forms of solidarity. First the tribe and the clan, then towns and regions, then kingdoms and empires, and often religion as a unifier that scaled obligation beyond kin. Nationalism did not appear out of nowhere. It was one stage in the historical expansion of political cohesion, and it is part of why internationalism, in any meaningful sense, presupposes nations that can actually act and cooperate.

Who’s Afraid of Nationalism?

For many leftists and liberals, nationalism is still a scary word. They immediately think of “national socialism” and equate all nationalism with the ethnonationalist project, or assume that being nationalistic entails uncritically defending everything that the nation in question has done or does. Some leftists reject nationalism on the flimsy basis that nations are modern “social constructs” that have only existed for a few hundred years and thus we should not be tied to them. I find this argument in particular to be a non-argument. Money is a construct. Marriage is constructed. Universities are constructed. The law is constructed. The very language in which you shout “social construct” is constructed. The question is not whether nations are invented. The question is whether the invention serves human flourishing, civilization, and the interests of ordinary people. The fact that nations are social constructs does not change the reality that nationalism has been one of the most powerful political forces of the modern world, and that it can either be used as a progressive force or be left to be abused by reactionary forces. Even Benedict Anderson, the man who helped popularize this “nations are a construct” view through his highly quoted and frequently misunderstood book Imagined Communities,^[3] believed in some role for a “humane nationalism” rather than rejecting it.^[4]

Do People Still Identify with the Nation?

The softer version of the anti-nationalist argument is that nationalism is not only dangerous, but obsolete. People no longer identify with the nation, we are told, because we live in a borderless world of migration, free trade, the internet, global brands, and global culture. There is some truth in this, especially in North America. Americans and Canadians live in huge immigrant societies with continent-sized geography, porous cultural borders, and identities constantly reshaped by global flows of people, money, media, and taste. That may explain why cosmopolitan liberals in places like Toronto, New York, Vancouver, or Los Angeles can mistake their own detachment from national belonging for the direction of history itself.

But this is not how most of the world experiences politics. Anyone who watches the World Cup can see that national feeling is not dead. For a few weeks, people who supposedly live in a post-national world suddenly know exactly which “we” they belong to. The flag, the anthem, the shirt, the collective humiliation, the collective joy: all of it still works. Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World is useful here because soccer shows what globalization has not dissolved. Global markets can sell the same sport everywhere, but they do not produce the same identities everywhere. Soccer reveals the persistence of local cultures, old rivalries, sectarian hatreds, civic loyalties, and national attachments that liberal globalization assumed would fade away.^[5]

This does not mean nationalism today is as dangerous as it was in the age of fascist mass politics. In a more pluralistic, mediated, and globally connected world, it is harder to recreate the totalizing national mobilizations of the 1930s. The danger is different now. The need for belonging does not disappear; it gets displaced into club fandom, ideological tribes, diaspora politics, consumer identities, or ugly resentments. Nationalism remains powerful because the desire for a shared “we” remains powerful. The question is not whether people still identify with the nation. They do, unevenly and sometimes in fragmented ways. The question is what kind of nationalism gives that identification political form: a civic nationalism that binds strangers through common institutions, or a bitter tribal nationalism that turns belonging into hatred.

Patriotism vs. Nationalism

When asked whether the left should at least tap into nationalist sentiments strategically, many left-liberal intellectuals and politicians disavow the idea as chauvinistic or inherently reactionary. At most, they will support a vague notion of patriotism while opposing nationalism. You will often hear liberals and leftists insist that patriotism is fine but nationalism is bad.

In this conventional distinction, patriotism is supposedly an innocent feeling of love, loyalty, attachment, or devotion to one’s country or homeland, whereas nationalism is treated as an organized political doctrine aimed at the sovereignty and self-determination of the nation, asserting that humanity is naturally divided into nations and that the only legitimate form of government is national self-government.^[6]

Because nationalism acquired a deeply pejorative reputation after World War II, many people began using the word patriotism simply to make nationalist sentiments sound more palatable and less unseemly. Trying to carve out a hard distinction between patriotism and nationalism is often a form of semantic dodging that misses the political continuity between them. This is one reason many leftists have remained skeptical of patriotism itself, regarding it as little more than nationalism expressed in softer language. But nationalism is not a coherent doctrine with a fixed set of principles that can simply be accepted or rejected on the grounds of abstract moral argument. It is better understood as a political style and a political technology: the political mobilization of a national form of group feeling.

There is no single set of principles or characteristics inherent to nationalism because it can be filled with radically different ideological content. There have been liberal, republican, conservative, socialist, anti-colonial, imperialist, fascist, civic, ethnic, and religious forms of nationalism. To take the characteristics of one particular nationalism and treat them as the essence of nationalism itself therefore misses the point.

National feeling is an evolved outgrowth of the natural human inclination toward group attachment and tribalism. In the absence of a wider national identity, that inclination has generally organized itself around ethnicity, religion, clan, locality, province, or family. Nationalism appeals to an identity above these narrower attachments, attempting to construct a larger political community capable of encompassing people who might otherwise possess little in common. It is, in this sense, a tribalism above the petty tribalisms. This does not mean that national identity eliminates those divisions, but it can create a wider identity through which they are politically contained and partially transcended.

As a political technology, nationalism is therefore not so much a complete body of beliefs as a way of constructing, addressing, and mobilizing a political people, a body of citizens who constitute a polis. Its content depends upon the political project making use of it. National feeling can be mobilized for conquest, exclusion, and domination, but it can also be mobilized for democracy, social reform, national liberation, redistribution, economic development, or resistance to foreign rule.

Patriotism is the feeling of attachment, loyalty, or belonging to one’s national community. Nationalism is what happens when that feeling is politically mobilized. It is patriotism translated into a claim about sovereignty, collective obligation, national self-government, or the political priorities of the community. The distinction is not entirely nonexistent, since a person can feel affection for a country without possessing a political program. But the attempt to turn that distinction into a firm moral boundary between benign patriotism and malignant nationalism is untenable. Once patriotic feeling is applied to political questions, the distinction begins to collapse.

Consider the narrow definition of nationalism so often juxtaposed with patriotism. If nationalism means believing in the sovereignty and self-determination of the nation, recognizing that humanity is politically divided into nations, or prioritizing the problems of one’s own country, then all it takes to be a “nationalist” is a recognition of the nationalist world as it actually exists, and of the fact that one must adapt to its logic. We live in a world of national political communities with interests that sometimes overlap and sometimes conflict, not within a democratic international polis. This recognition of the real world of nation-states, and the realist implication that one must politically adapt to it, cuts against the dismissive anti-nationalist view that nations are merely “social constructs” that are obsolete, inherently oppressive, or both. Whatever one might ultimately hope to build beyond this system, serious politics must first adapt itself to the institutions through which people currently possess citizenship and political power.

To be an anti-nationalist, therefore, one would have to believe one of two things: either that nation-states are obsolete and no longer the central arena of political activity, or that this nationalist world order does indeed exist but that its logic should be resisted by pushing for an internationalist politics. I am sympathetic to internationalists of the second kind, who at least recognize the reality and strive to move beyond it. Yet I remain unconvinced that the road to a new international system can run through an “internationalist” politics, of which I have never seen a viable example that was not simply a version of the already existing cosmopolitan liberal globalism, or of the failed Marxist idea of proletarian internationalism, which could not move beyond nationalism even at the height of working-class power. I will return to why this is so.

This does not mean believing that only one’s own country matters. Most people are citizens of one country, perhaps two, and possess limited time, knowledge, political influence, and responsibility. They cannot participate equally in the politics of every society or treat every issue on earth as though it imposed the same obligation upon them as the problems of the community in which they actually live. People may care deeply about other countries, but their capacity to act democratically is largely confined to the political institutions of which they are citizens.

Every nation-state consequently prioritizes its own interests, or at least attempts to, unless its government has become subordinated to a foreign power or to institutions beyond the control of its citizens. This is not necessarily because nation-states are intrinsically selfish or evil. It follows from the fact that governments are supposed to answer to particular bodies of citizens. The citizens of those states will naturally give priority to the issues affecting the polis to which they belong.

In my experience, distinguishing patriotism from nationalism in order to argue for a patriotic socialism usually falls on deaf ears. Much of the left opposes patriotism and nationalism alike and will describe patriotic politics as nationalist regardless of the language used. In certain circles, patriotic socialist functions as a slur for something inherently fascistic. The attempt to salvage patriotism therefore does not address the underlying problem in the left’s relationship to national attachment.

Some of this opposition is driven by the anti-patriotic and cosmopolitan sentiments I discuss below. Another part is driven by a mix of rootless cosmopolitans and hipsters who use leftism as a badge of distinction rather than as a serious mass political project. A third comes from the Marxist use of nationalism as a methodological category. In that sense, any politics centered on the nation-state is nationalist because it presupposes a national road to political change. Under this broader definition, merely substituting the word patriotism does nothing to resolve the actual disagreement. I return to this Marxist use of the term later in the essay.

The liberal form of anti-nationalism has a somewhat different basis. Many liberals treat nationalism as simple-minded or parochial because their own cosmopolitan socialization encourages them to imagine that they stand above national attachments. Yet many of the founders of modern nationalism were themselves liberals or republicans. Contemporary liberal anti-nationalism often amounts to a defence of technocratic global institutions and neoliberal globalization against the populations that feel disempowered by them. It is frequently an expression of what might be called cosmopolitan privilege: the outlook of people with enough cultural and economic capital to travel between global cities while remaining detached from the embedded national cultures of the countries in which they live.

The reason I do not settle for merely advocating patriotism while rejecting nationalism is that patriotism is only a feeling. Recognizing that political candidates should make patriotic appeals is the bare minimum of political strategy. It says nothing about how political change is supposed to occur. The nationalist component is the recognition that we live in a world of nation-states and that any serious transformation will require a national road. If one is a social democrat, that means a national road to social democracy. If one is a socialist, it means a national road to socialism. Even a project whose ultimate goals are international must acquire political power somewhere before it can cooperate with political forces elsewhere.

It is easy to say that one is patriotic. The declaration is sufficiently vague that it carries few necessary political consequences. It does not reckon with the institutional reality of the nation-state, the political limitations of citizenship, or the need to mobilize a national public behind a concrete program, and it does not recognize the broader nationalist reality in which we live. Nationalism is not going to disappear because the left chooses a more tasteful word. We cannot escape the question of nationalism until we have an international system. Someone is going to use it, and the political sides that do will have a massive advantage over the ones that refuse to.

Once nationalism is understood as a political technology rather than a doctrine, the meaningful line no longer runs between patriotism and nationalism. It runs between the different kinds of political content with which national feeling can be filled. The real question is not whether national attachment becomes political, since it inevitably does. The question is whether it will be used to construct a democratic and solidaristic political people or abandoned to forces that will fill it with something far worse.

Anti-Patriotism on the Left

Leftists often take pride in the most arbitrary things but condemn the idea of having pride in one’s nation. One could say, as Schopenhauer did, that pride in one’s ethnicity is for those who have nothing to be proud of. But leftists are perfectly comfortable with pride in sexual identity and racial identities, as long as it is not white or white-adjacent ethnic identities.^[7]

While the more rootless cosmopolitan types often reject nationalism because they do not identify with their nation, or because they are fortunate enough to hold passports to several of them, there is another type of leftist, more common at the far end of the left, whose opposition is driven less by internationalist principle than by anti-patriotism as such. By anti-patriot, I mean the leftist who opposes nationalism not out of any universalist commitment, but out of a deep animosity toward his own country, all while cheering on nationalism elsewhere. This archetype, often embodied by the Marxist-Leninist or ‘tankie’ who romanticizes the authoritarian nationalist socialist experiments of the Third World, is a nationalist for nations they do not even belong to.

When I describe this tendency, I say anti-patriots rather than internationalists, because many people, especially on the far left, tend to be more hostile to their own nations than committed to a truly universalist political doctrine. Meanwhile, liberals are often indifferent to nationalism rather than supportive of internationalism. They are typically not as hysterically anti-patriotic as far-left ideologues, yet they rarely see the appeal of nationalism either, especially if they are cosmopolitan liberals. These are generalizations, but they hold true.

So why do so many Western leftists drift into anti-patriotism? It was not always the case that leftists were anti-patriots. As I explain later in this essay, most socialist and social democratic experiments had a nationalist component in practice, both in terms of the movements that arose and the governing ideology. In countries where socialism failed to gain mass popularity, especially in England and the United States, anti-patriotism can become a symptom of political impotence.

When people feel impotent in their own countries, it can create a self-fulfilling prophecy. The inability to make progress and spread an ideology breeds hostility toward one’s nation and toward the people who reject those beliefs. That posture gives the movement a more antisocial character, making it harder to reach out to ordinary citizens. Instead, it turns inward, fixating on the most negative aspects of the country’s past and attacking it in the hope of fostering hatred toward the nation, rather than embracing national feeling to garner support for concrete political projects.

In contexts where far-left ideologies are marginal, organizations often attract social outcasts or groups that feel they do not belong elsewhere. They frequently draw from a university-educated stratum and a fallen professional class, as discussed in other essays like “Genealogy of Wokeism” and “The Cosmopolitan Delusion.” Their hostility to nationalism often comes from social position, distance from ordinary people, and repeated political failure.

This is not genuine internationalism. Often, it is nationalism by proxy. They are nationalists for other countries. Despite their hostility toward nationalism in their own country, they effectively support nationalism for other countries, so long as it is what they deem to be an oppressed country, one they imagine as fighting against the West. When their political activity fails, they retreat into vicarious fantasies away from politics. They look outward for inspiration, engaging in cheerleading spectatorship. They embrace the nationalist politics of other states, often China, Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, and Russia, which are frequently more nationalistic than their own countries.

They accept the idea that socialism can be built in one country, imagining that this is happening in these other countries whose nationalism they defend, while rejecting any nationalist or even patriotic sentiments in their own countries. The framework used to justify this is the “oppressor vs. oppressed nations” argument.

Oppressor Nations vs. Oppressed Nations

A position on nationalism you will often encounter within leftist circles is the “oppressor vs. oppressed nations” thesis, which divides the world into guilty “core” states and virtuous “peripheries,” declaring nationalism legitimate only for the latter as a vehicle of anti-colonial self-determination. In “oppressor nations,” any nationalism is presumed chauvinist, an ideological cover for empire. Thus, radicals there should reject national identity in favour of abstract internationalism and solidarity with the oppressed abroad.

That frame is a moral cartoon masquerading as analysis. It replaces the fundamental conflict between capital and labour with a West-vs-anti-West melodrama in which the West is evil, the anti-West is virtuous, and class disappears into the background.

This might surprise lefties in America, but in Canada it has historically been those on the left of centre who have been more nationalistic, while the Canadian right has often wanted the country to become more capitalistic and more like the United States.^[8] However, many of the overrepresented voices of the university activist left regard Canadian nationalism as an illegitimate and indefensible position. While this remains a fringe position outside the academy, that loud minority frequently weaponizes the settler-colonial legacy of Canada and the United States to justify its nihilistic antipathy toward its own countries and its effective abandonment of the American and Canadian working classes.

As many Americans can relate, one of Canada’s worst sins, invoked whenever a leftist makes a case for patriotism, is that the country was created through settler colonialism. Canada was built on lands inhabited by numerous Indigenous peoples, while the Canadian state, often in complicity with the Church, subjected Indigenous communities to residential schools, coercive sterilization, forced displacement, and appalling conditions on reserves.^[9] For the ultra-left, and particularly for the academic New Left that emerged in the 1960s, this history renders Canada nothing more than a settler-colonial project, a country founded on genocide and the extermination of Indigenous peoples, and Canadian nationalism, even Canadian patriotism, fundamentally illegitimate.

However, this logic is applied very inconsistently and with remarkable historical myopia. This slave morality is directed chiefly against wealthy Anglo settler states such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, while rarely being applied to Latin American countries with violent, genocidal settler-colonial pasts, such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, or Cuba, because the latter are placed in the “oppressed nation” category.^[10] The left will therefore excuse, and often celebrate, nationalism in Latin America despite those countries’ own colonial and settler histories, while treating even mild nationalism in the Anglo settler states as illegitimate because of theirs. This is especially perverse given that the United States produced a globally historic revolution with progressive consequences, whereas Spanish colonialism in Latin America produced genocides of its own without a progressive, internationally transformative revolution to show for it. Therefore, the leftist oppressor-versus-oppressed-nation logic that cherry-picks which countries can and cannot have nationalism tends to be driven more by an anti-Western, Third Worldist slave morality than by internationalist principles, or even by the content of the nationalism in question.

The oppressor-versus-oppressed framework misses this. This is where the left’s inconsistency shows. It will often defend ethnic nationalism in “oppressed” contexts, but it struggles to sympathize with ethnonational sentiment in countries such as Ireland or Poland, which have their own histories of oppression and national survival, because, and let us be honest, white people are involved. Many leftists defend nationalism in Latin American settler states and Third World nationalisms in general, even ethnonationalisms (seen in the shocking ways in which leftists are willing to defend Han Chinese chauvinism against the Uyghur population). The ideology of Marxist-Leninists does not actually transcend nationalism whatsoever. They merely pick and choose which nationalisms they support based on a very flimsy moral compass that is driven more by white guilt and geopolitical campism rather than a genuine internationalist project. Nationalism should not be justified or condemned on the basis of “oppressor vs. oppressed” narratives. It should be judged on its substance and what it plans to do.

Ethnonationalism vs. Civic Nationalism

A major problem with the left’s “oppressor vs. oppressed nations” framework is that it usually refuses to distinguish between ethnonationalism and civic nationalism. For many activists and theorists, what matters is which countries are “oppressors” and which are “oppressed,” not the substance of the nationalism itself. If a nation is labeled “oppressor,” its nationalism is condemned as inherently suspect. If a nation is labeled “oppressed,” its nationalism is treated as automatically legitimate, even when it is explicitly ethnic.

Nationalism should be judged by what the nation actually is, and what kind of “we” it is trying to build. My own distinction is different. I separate nationalisms by their foundations and their content. In countries founded on immigration and universalist political principles, like Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and in a different way France with its republican tradition and national culture, nationalism tends toward a civic basis, even when it still has a real identity. In more ethnically homogeneous countries, nationalism can be partly ethnic, and that desire to preserve some degree of homogeneity is often understandable, especially in places with long histories of invasion, partition, or colonial domination. North America complicates the usual left-wing story.

Canada and the United States are useful cases because their most dangerous white supremacist movements have often been decentralizing, separatist, or anti-federal: from the Confederacy’s attempt to break away from the Union, to calls for whites-only autonomous regions among American neo-Nazis, to organizations such as the KKK. In Canada as well, far-right racialist movements have typically leaned toward separatism and balkanization rather than coherent civic nationalism.

The defence of racist policies throughout North American history, from slavery to segregation, has consistently been made on the basis of “states’ rights” or provincial and local autonomy against federal oversight. Southern states invoked states’ rights to preserve Jim Crow. In contrast, nationalism in the United States served as a unifying force that preserved the Union and later enabled federal civil rights legislation to dismantle legal segregation. In Canada too, federal nationalism has often been the vehicle for extending rights and protections to minorities against the particularist prejudices of local majorities. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a nationalist document par excellence, has been one of the primary tools for protecting minority rights against provincial discrimination.

In our current moment, we are seeing a return of white nationalist groups that, recognizing an entirely white Canada or United States to be impossible, instead advocate whites-only autonomous regions and the balkanization of North America into racially segregated territories.

Civic nationalism paired with a socialist program that distributes the fruits of these societies more evenly can reduce resentments when they are rooted in genuine material inequalities rather than racial grievance politics. Racism is not defeated simply by calling people racist, nor does it help when younger leftists insist that our countries are inherently and irredeemably racist. Canada and the United States are not uniquely racist societies. They are among the few large, immigrant-based, multiracial democracies where civic nationhood and ethnic diversity have become central parts of national self-understanding.

The problem with ethnonationalism is not that it is automatically evil. The problem is that when a nation is defined only by race, it becomes spiritually thin. It has no content beyond exclusion, and it tends to derive meaning by scapegoating others. By contrast, even a historically ethnic nation can have real substance when it is also defined by institutions, values, and a shared historical project. Poland’s national identity, for example, is not reducible to race. It includes modernization against the odds, democratization, and a Catholic tradition that shaped a Christian-democratic value system. Ireland too has a distinct identity shaped by Catholic heritage, democratic struggle, and anti-colonial history, but also a modern political self-understanding.

What makes nationalism good or bad is which parts of a nation’s past and identity are emphasized. Is it a nationalism of values and ideas that bind people together and justify solidarity, or is it a nationalism like Nazi racial mysticism, or Mussolini’s mythologizing of a glorious Roman past? Refusing to distinguish between different kinds of nationalism is as stupid as refusing to distinguish between different kinds of socialism.

Nationalism and Democracy

The world we inhabit is one of democratic, marginally democratic, and undemocratic nation-states, some less sovereign and some more powerful than others. Democracy, where it exists at all, exists at most at the national level. Political life can become more immediate and participatory at the local and regional levels, while at the transnational level democratic control under the present system all but disappears.^[14]

This does not mean that local, regional, or national governments are automatically democratic. It means that these are the levels at which citizens presently possess recognizable political rights, shared institutions, practical knowledge of the conditions around them, and some ability to hold power accountable. The further authority is removed from a concrete population, the more likely it is to be exercised by administrators, experts, and officials insulated from democratic pressure. Distant institutions may coordinate markets or issue regulations, but they do not thereby acquire a democratic public capable of authorizing, contesting, and revising their decisions.

There is a reason for the strong connection between nationalism and democracy. The French Revolution, which birthed modern nationalism, was a democratic revolution. The American Civil War, through which the Union made America a modern nation, was won by the more democratic side of the conflict, the side that wanted to broaden suffrage rather than restrict it. Today, nationalism is associated with populism, and whatever one thinks of any particular populism or the political solutions it advocates, populism is democratic in an obvious sense: it appeals to the popular sentiments of the masses.

The reason nationalism tends to overlap with populism is that most people who participate in a democracy as citizens want their nation’s interests to be prioritized. When they feel that their nation is not doing so, they develop nationalist sentiments against their own government. This is where patriotism proves very inadequate as a framework. If one’s nation is working on behalf of a foreign nation, or if its leaders are more loyal to global investors than to their own voters, how exactly does patriotism factor in as a mobilizing force? If anything, one would feel less patriotic in such a situation. Nationalism arises as an attempt to preserve sovereignty and to maintain the nation’s integrity. This is why nationalism is a more radical force than mere patriotism. Patriotism is often encouraged by the very politicians who wish to preserve the status quo, since it invites people to dwell on the good side of things rather than to complain about what is wrong. Patriotism is only a feeling, and a feeling alone tells us nothing about the political project of the movement that invokes it. Nationalism, if it truly cares about the nation, is driven by that feeling but grounded in action. Bad governments can make citizens feel less patriotic, but governments that fail to act in the best interests of their nations give rise to nationalists who seek to put patriotism into practice rather than treat it as a token gesture.

This is why most national liberation movements, indeed most of the nationalisms that even the left will support, were nationalist and not merely patriotic. In interwar China, in Vietnam, in Egypt under Nasser, the response of the masses was not merely to become more patriotic. If anything, they did not feel represented by governments they regarded as beholden to foreign interests. Nationalism, not patriotism, was the movement that brought about their independence.^[15]

Leftists will argue that nationalism in powerful first-world countries is unjustified because those countries occupy dominant positions of power. But this is really a question about the kind of national content we are talking about. There is the nationalism of empire, and there is nationalism of the democratic sort. When we speak of the democratic kind of nationalism, we are speaking of the sentiments that simultaneously produced the popularity of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump: the feeling that the American working class was sold out by its own capitalists, who shipped their jobs to countries with cheaper labour and abandoned their factories. This nationalism of a democratic subkind is not a nationalism directed against other nations. It is an attempt to preserve national democracy against oligarchy.

There is, however, a limit to what this democratic nationalism can achieve on its own terms. The capital that sold out the American worker now moves through the global rules of the neoliberal world order and institutions like the WTO and the EU, which allow it to circumvent national regulation, and reining it in would require a new international system, one that could only be reached, as I will argue, through the nation-state itself.

National Class Consciousness

Why emphasize national consciousness rather than class consciousness? This question likely raises objections from Marxists, anarchists, and various leftist tendencies who reject the premise of national consciousness, seeing it as a distortion of class consciousness. These critics believe that class consciousness, workers recognizing their shared interests across national boundaries, is what must be facilitated to build effective political movements. This ideological assumption is often rooted in the Marxist notion of international class consciousness, which assumes that members of the broadly defined working class have more in common with fellow members of that class across borders than with compatriots outside their class. Not only has this ideological assumption never really been grounded in reality, or in how most working-class people actually experience it, but even assuming that this rigid, economistic assumption were true, is shared rational self-interest enough to mobilize people politically? More importantly, is it enough to justify the dismissal of nationalism?

The leftists who dogmatically reject nationalism in favour of cosmopolitan internationalism fundamentally misunderstand human nature and what drives people towards radical political change. Unless they are cosmopolitans without roots, most ordinary citizens do not mobilize around cosmopolitan ideologies based on vague visions of internationalism. Most people see themselves as part of a place, not as “citizens of the world,” which is a feeling that only people with very particular circumstances tend to have. They organize through shared language, institutions, memories, obligations, and places they actually recognize as their own. When the left abandons that terrain, the right fills it with blood-and-soil kitsch.

Aside from the alarm that nationalism and socialism provoke when combined, many cosmopolitan leftists behave as though socialism and patriotism were simply incompatible. They regard patriotism as chauvinistic, especially when the country in question has committed real crimes. I argue the opposite. Socialism and patriotism are both collectivistic principles, and they belong together, for both are driven by isothymia, the desire to be recognized as the equal of others. The socialist impulse, where it is genuine, begins in love of one’s neighbour and in the wish to help those who are less fortunate, not merely in the urge to punish the powerful.

Socialism need not be nationalistic in the narrow, zero-sum, tribal sense. Yet a socialism that is not in some way patriotic can never materialize into anything but a destabilizing force. This is precisely why anti-nationalism is the greater problem on the left, for it rejects patriotism wholesale and is animated by misanthropy rather than by any genuine desire to serve more than one nation, which would at least be understandable. To condemn all pride of place is to reveal one’s own true colours. Any ‘socialist’ who hates his or her nation, and not merely its government, is driven not by love but by hatred.

Do Workers of the World Have No Homeland?

A major ideological opposition to nationalism comes from Marxists (the “real Marxists” not the Marxist-Leninists), who tend to reject nationalism on the basis that it diminishes class consciousness. They see nationalism as inherently at odds with their internationalist political goals of proletarian world revolution. Even leftists who do not actually believe in communist revolution tend to be stuck in Marxist thought taboos when it comes to nationalism, which are rooted in the ideas of Karl Marx himself. This anti-nationalist position is captured best in Karl Marx’s famous internationalist dictum that “the working class has no homeland” and the famous slogan “Workers of the World Unite.” These sound appealing as slogans, but does anyone truly believe them? Does anyone outside of cosmopolitan intellectuals, or anti-nationalist outcasts, seriously believe that the working class has no homeland? In reality, this dogma is often a projection of the prejudices and socialization of internationalist Marxists. It reflects the anti-nationalist sentiments I described above. Marxists tend to feel that the working class has no homeland because they themselves do not belong to one. They imagine themselves as citizens of the world, citizens of all nations, because they do not belong to any, or because they have the privilege of passports to many.^[16]

It is worth being precise about what Marxists of this kind actually mean when they call someone a nationalist. Many people want to pretend that there are only reactionary nationalists, when there have obviously been many different kinds of nationalism, some with leftist content and some with rightist content. Marxists, especially those who know their Marx, are in fact well aware of this, even if they sometimes employ the word disingenuously, to insinuate that someone is a reactionary deviationist. They have always known that there were nationalist socialists and nationalist liberals who were nothing like the Nazis. They routinely called social democrats nationalists, and they tended to call the Marxist-Leninist regimes nationalists, which of course they in fact were.

This is because Marxists use the word nationalism to designate a methodological approach to change. When they call Marxist-Leninists or social democrats nationalists, what they are saying is that both are methodologically nationalist: both believe in a national road to socialism or to social democracy, whereas the Marxist internationalists believe that only an internationalist road of proletarian world revolution can get there. This ideological opposition rests on different principles from the liberal and anti-patriotic varieties examined earlier. The Marxist opposes nationalism because he sees capitalism as a world system, and concludes that only change on a world scale can overcome it. And it is precisely this ideological, internationalist reason for opposing nationalism that the patriotism versus nationalism dichotomy fails to address.

Marx’s assertion that the working class has no homeland was also a projection of his own life experience. He felt that way because he did not belong to any nation and did not identify with the concept of nations or particular cultures, as he was an outsider. Driven out of various countries, he moved from Prussia to England, and even sought documents for possible emigration to the United States.^[17]

In fairness to Marx, a more cosmopolitan, internationally mobile working class was emerging during his time, with workers migrating from local areas to big cities and from other countries to industrialized nations. However, urbanization does not predispose workers to international revolution, nor does it eliminate nationalist sympathies, which have always been a stronger mobilizing force than class interests alone.

The problem is that class interest alone does not explain why people fight, sacrifice, or take political risks. Humans have always been driven by purpose and sacrifice. Marxist internationalism often lacks this sense of sacrifice, belonging, and sacred duty. People will commit to projects with a high probability of failure only when they feel they are sacrificing for a cause beyond themselves.

The only doctrine that has come close to a truly internationalist political project is not Marxist socialism, but something like Christianity or political Islam, each of which possesses a robust eschatological doctrine. They are overtly religions. Marxism, by contrast, tries to be scientific, yet in practice it becomes too intellectual to succeed as a religion and too religion-like to be used consistently to analyze reality. Instead, it often functions as a device for rationalizing dogmas, one of which is internationalism as an ideology.

Internationalism as a political ideology lacks staying power. People do not identify with cosmopolitanism in the same way they identify with local cultures, unless they themselves are cosmopolitan. Even cosmopolitans tend to gravitate toward a limited number of cultures. Humans can only know and experience a limited number of things; no one can experience everything or know every culture.

Internationalism should be a Political Goal, Not an Ideological A priori

The distinction is between internationalism as a practical goal and internationalism as an ideology. As a practical goal, internationalism can mean institutions, treaties, or federations that address transnational problems. As an ideology, it often becomes cosmopolitan blindness. Nationalism or localism as a political ideology can be rooted in local particularities and mobilize populations without necessarily being nationalist in governance. Currently, we even see elements of the European populist right attempting to cooperate internationally to solve problems, with leaders like Giorgia Meloni acknowledging the need for Europe to work with Africa to collectively manage and prevent mass migration. We need not reject nationalism entirely to organize transnationally across nation-states to solve international problems that are inherently outside the scope of what the nation-state is capable of dealing with. ^[18]

The Only Alternative to Nationalism is more Local Tribalisms

The fact that democracy generally operates at the local, regional, or national level helps explain why the principal historical alternative to nationalism has not been the international class consciousness imagined by Marxists. More often, the alternative has been another and narrower form of collective identity: localism, regionalism, ethnic separatism, religious sectarianism, clan allegiance, or some other form of tribal loyalty. The rejection of nationalism does not abolish group identity. It usually causes group identity to reappear at a smaller scale.

Globalism certainly exists as an economic and administrative phenomenon, but there has rarely been anything resembling a democratic globalist mass politics. Political movements can spread across borders, yet wherever they take root they acquire the particular character of a country, region, people, and culture. Movements require an identifiable political community whom they can address, organize, and mobilize. So far, that community has almost always existed at a scale no larger than the nation.

The history of socialism itself illustrates this. Most Marxist-Leninist projects were either direct outgrowths of national revolutions and national liberation struggles or became nationalist in practice once they took power. The European social democracies were likewise rooted in national labour movements, national institutions, and patriotic appeals to the welfare of a particular people. Even projects committed in theory to international socialism had to mobilize actual populations whose identities, grievances, histories, and institutions were national.^[19]

Where radical left-wing politics assumed a more localist or regionalist form, it was frequently bound up with ethnic separatism. Major currents of the Catalan and Basque left in Spain combined libertarian, socialist, or anarchist politics with movements for regional national independence. The Zapatistas remain a largely local experiment rooted in the particular social world of Chiapas, while Rojava is as much a Kurdish national liberation project as it is a libertarian or democratic experiment. None of these movements escaped collective identity. They organized it at a smaller scale.^[20]

This is because socialist projects, like every durable political project, require some kind of shared culture or social glue. Historically, that cohesion has often been provided by locality, ethnicity, religion, language, inherited customs, institutions, or some combination of them. Nationalism attempts to construct a broader identity through shared language, national culture, historical memory, common institutions, and civic membership. In diverse societies, a civic national identity can bind together groups that would otherwise remain politically divided along ethnic, religious, or regional lines.

Whatever its imperfections, nationalism can therefore act as a unifying force against more fragmented and destructive forms of tribalism. In Nigeria, for example, the effort to construct a national identity has had to bind together immense ethnic, linguistic, regional, and religious differences. Those differences would not necessarily become more peaceful if national unity disappeared and they hardened into competing separatist projects. The struggles of Arab nationalism likewise show how difficult it can be to construct a wider political identity capable of overcoming tribal, sectarian, dynastic, and regional divisions.^[21]

The failure to establish a broader national solidarity does not leave behind a society of liberated cosmopolitan individuals. It frequently leaves the field open to older and more parochial loyalties. Lebanon remains hostage to sect and clan, while Somalia continues to struggle against the pull of clan and family.^[22] To imagine that societies can vault over this whole historical inheritance and arrive directly at internationalism is a fantasy. A national identity encompassing an entire political society can at least transcend some of the petty tribalisms beneath it; dismantling that wider identity may simply release narrower antagonisms from whatever had contained them.

Abandoning nationalism consequently creates two political openings. First, it allows the political right to monopolize national identity and present itself as the only force willing to defend the country, its people, or its sovereignty. Second, it leaves the left vulnerable to separatist movements that reproduce many of the defects it attributes to nationalism, only at a more atomized scale. This was one of the recurring problems of the Spanish left, much of which became entangled with Catalan and Basque separatism while Spanish national symbolism was increasingly surrendered to the Falange and later to Francoism. There is no need to romanticize Francoist centralism to recognize that the absence of a democratic left-wing Spanish national project helped surrender the national question to reactionary forces.^[23]

Left-wing separatism also inherits the practical limitations that Marxists traditionally identify with nationalism. If socialism cannot be securely constructed in one country because production, capital, and power operate internationally, it is even less plausible to imagine that a single city, province, or culturally homogeneous region can carry out a comprehensive socialist transformation in isolation. Local experiments can deepen democratic participation, create useful institutions, and demonstrate possible alternatives, but they possess even less economic reach, coordinating capacity, and state power than a nation-state. Regionalism does not overcome the limitations of socialism in one country. It reduces the scale at which those limitations must be confronted.

Perhaps new institutions could eventually make genuinely democratic politics possible on a transnational or global scale, but those structures do not presently exist. Until they do, the realistic alternative to nationalism is usually not emancipatory internationalism but localism, regionalism, tribalism, sectarianism, or fragmentation. This is why the left cannot simply reject nationalism and assume that universal solidarity will fill the vacuum.

There Is No Internationalist Politics

Once the localist alternative is set aside, anti-nationalists usually point upward, toward some form of politics beyond the nation-state. Marxist internationalists imagine a proletarian workers’ international or a future world government. Liberal globalists see a partial version of their ideal in institutions such as the European Union and the World Trade Organization, which facilitate international coordination and peaceful economic competition. Both positions imagine that political life can be reorganized above the nation without first resolving the problem of who constitutes the political people at that level.

The liberal vision, unlike Marx’s proletarian internationalism, is based on something closer to the Kantian ideal of perpetual peace: establish a bourgeois internationalism of nations trading with one another, and a more peaceful world order will follow. We are now seeing the limits of that order in the reactions against the EU and related institutions. The internationalism of the Marxists, meanwhile, has always failed completely; it has never worked in practice, and it survives today largely as a fantasy of rootless cosmopolitans. What survives is less an international politics than two rival ideologies of the supranational: a technocratic liberal globalism and a Marxist fantasy of proletarian world revolution.

Neither vision practices an internationalist politics, because no one does, and no one can. People have the time, energy, knowledge, and political standing to act only within the polis to which they belong. Internationalism as a practical goal and as a mode of organization, meaning cooperation between nations on transnational issues facilitated by supranational institutions, is perfectly coherent. But there has never really been such a thing as an internationalist politics, because there is no international polis. Politics exists within concrete political communities, and aside from the national polisthere is only the regional and the local.

Marxist internationalism sought to make the proletariat the subject of an internationalist politics, with organizations like the Communist International serving as the polis of the internationalist communist movement. In practice, the polis was just the politburo of the most powerful nation-state, dictating communism from above and making all the communist parties around the world that belonged to it follow its command.

There can be international political ideologies, and there can be global political movements that spread across multiple nation-states. There can even be internationalist creeds, doctrines with universalist principles that are tied to no single nation-state, are supposed to apply everywhere, and are spread internationally. Christianity and Islam, which as I noted above came closer to genuinely internationalist projects than Marxism ever did, have been the most potent attempts at such creeds; most other religions remain particular to the regional cultures and ethnicities in which they operate, and nothing else has come remotely close. Yet even in these cases, the politics of the creed is bound to the region in which it operates, whether the nation-state or a territory below it: the province, the region, the municipality. Even creeds that are universalist in theory end up bounded by the places in which they actually do politics.

The closest we have come to a global politics is the power of transnational capital, facilitated by globalization; yet politics itself remains bounded by the nation-state. And because our problems are increasingly international, increasingly beyond the capacity of any single nation-state to control, there is a growing need for international political cooperation. This requires internationalist politics in one specific sense: people of different nations coming together to make important decisions despite everything else that divides them.

But we will not get there through an “internationalist movement.” To move to a new order, we need movements capable of changing things, and those movements will naturally be rooted in the particularities of the regions in which they operate. There can be no internationalist road to internationalism, because there is no internationalist political movement: all movements that involve masses of people, even those that claim to be based on universal ideals, have to work with the socio-cultural contexts they inhabit. That is why the only way to internationalism is through nationalism, by which I mean that there can only be a national road to internationalism. I cannot imagine the possibility of an “international” route to internationalism that would be democratic. Trying to bypass the nation-state means bypassing the one arena in which ordinary people retain some semblance of democratic control over the decisions that affect their lives; people complain about the EU precisely because of things like this. A nation-state, aside from local and regional governments, is the only place where meaningful democracy still exists, and I can only see a national road to a new international system if that system is to be democratic at all.

The most compelling proposal I have ever seen for an internationalist politics, one that actually involves a new international system for doing politics, is Benjamin Studebaker’s proposal of a “SupraNational Federation,” articulated in his six-part essay series and discussed on my podcast, 1Dime Radio.^[24] Studebaker himself does not believe that nation-states can be the actors in charge of facilitating such an order. Yet even granting that premise, an international order would need some degree of democratic legitimacy to work at all: it would need to be not too distant from the people, and it would need to derive their consent somehow. The question of how such a system could ever be established, and of the political movements needed to get there, remains a wide open one, and I am highly skeptical that we could ever arrive at such a system without first going through national politics. By this I mean that national governments would need to change in such a way that new political leaders, with enough popular legitimacy behind them, would be willing to work with other nations on establishing a new international system to which all nations would be bound. And for this to happen, we would need grassroots movements that adapt to the polis and to the socio-cultural peculiarities of the regions in which they operate, unless this new international federation were to be established at the behest of a top-down globalist elite, with no consent or input from the peoples of all the regions who would be subordinated to it. Which brings us back to the inescapable question of nationalism.

Internationalism is Necessary, but Nationalism is Unavoidable

Embracing nationalism as a political tool does not entail rejecting internationalism in the sense of cooperation among nations to solve global problems. Such cooperation remains essential for addressing pandemics, climate change, migration, capital mobility, and the prevention of war. Effective internationalism must be built upon functioning national polities because it requires sovereign nations capable of choosing and sustaining cooperation.Internationalism is only thinkable today because modernity produced nation-states powerful enough to unify different groups, tribes, religions, and languages within political communities capable of acting together.

In order for internationalism not to merely be a guise for a new imperial project led by a powerful nation trying to establish a new world order with rules that favour itself at the expense of the rest of the world, nations need to have their sovereignty. In order to have sovereignty, you need a strong nation-state capable of defending itself militarily and reining in corporate power and making it accountable to the people. In theory, multinational corporations could be regulated by an international body. However, the precursor to building effective international organizations is the nations themselves.

Some insist that any genuinely supranational body must transcend the nation-state, bypassing the national leaders whom they do not trust to build it. Yet I have never been presented with a convincing alternative. The suspicion such bodies provoke is not without reason. It arises precisely when people sense that they hold no power over institutions they neither understand nor chose.

Right now, the closest thing we have to an international order is a set of economic institutions like the WTO and the EU: neoliberal capitalist institutions overseen by globalist technocrats. This is why, despite their benefits, among them economic growth and the substitution of economic competition for military competition, these institutions are seen by many people as anti-democratic and biased toward elites. We do have international organizations that facilitate cooperation, and in the United Nations we even have an institution that is political in principle, one whose “rules-based international order” is far more civilized and more internationalist than the world that preceded it. But as we all know, these institutions have very limited efficacy in a world of great powers. The national sovereignty of some nations is routinely eroded by hegemonic ones, which no genuine commitment to the principle of national self-determination for all nations could justify, yet the lack of political power these institutions possess makes the enforcement of their rules very weak. The problem here is a lack of adherence to nationalist principles, the self-determination of all nations, and the way imperialism hinders nationalism, rather than an excess of nationalism. We have international coordination, in other words, but not true internationalism in the sense of political cooperation.

To truly move beyond nationalism toward an international order that is actually democratic and works in the interests of common people, one would need the political movements capable of getting there. Bringing about a new order that favours the interests of the common majority would require a combination of benevolent elites and mass democratic movements capable of pressuring those leaders, who naturally tend to come from elite backgrounds, or become elites once in positions of leadership, to actually deliver on the promises on which they were elected.

Any viable radical project that wants to change this order will need enough public support for national governments to cooperate in constructing a new one. Because people will continue to prioritize the concerns of their own nations and regions, such a project must adapt to particular national circumstances rather than arriving with a prefabricated internationalist ideology. The route to international cooperation will therefore pass through movements rooted in their own political communities, not around them.

Internationalism vs. Globalism

The word internationalism has the word nationalism in it for a reason. Before anyone can talk seriously about humanity transcending nations, nations must first exist as stable political communities capable of cooperating with one another. This is the difference between internationalism and globalism. Internationalism means cooperation among sovereign nations to solve common problems. Globalism describes the erosion of national sovereignty by transnational capital and institutions that have superseded the authority of nation-states without becoming answerable to a democratic public.

What I call nationalist internationalism is the recognition that national problems are frequently international in scale and that international cooperation is necessary to resolve long-term national problems such as immigration, ecological collapse, wage depreciation, and wealth inequality. It begins from a simple point: the things nationalists claim to want, sovereignty, control over capital, lower inequality, and a sane migration policy, cannot actually be secured by one country acting alone. Capital mobility cannot be controlled domestically when corporations can relocate to countries with lower taxes and weaker regulations.^[25] Inequality cannot be solved through domestic redistribution alone when the international financial system is built to move wealth around national controls. Migration cannot be managed durably without addressing the conditions that lead people to leave their countries in the first place.^[26]

The problems that give nationalism its force are therefore not purely national problems. They are transnational problems handed to national governments that no longer have the reach to solve them by themselves. Cooperative internationalism is not a betrayal of nationalism. It is how national sovereignty survives under global capitalism. But the reverse is also true: international cooperation only works when the nations involved actually exist as sovereign political units. Without that foundation, the alternative is not global solidarity, but fragmentation into regions, tribes, local factions, and competing ethnic claims. Internationalism is not a shortcut around nationalism. It depends on nations, just as nationalism now depends on international cooperation to deliver on its own promises. Attempting to build sovereignty in isolation leads to exclusion from the international community. To mitigate capital flight, different countries must implement regulations and change ownership structures together, not just one country in isolation.

Countries need to arrive at socialistic ideals through paths that reflect their unique histories and conditions. National consciousness is not invented out of thin air. It grows out of shared institutions, conflicts, memories, borders, languages, and material conditions. As these conditions change, national consciousness must evolve as well, or it loses its grip on the popular imagination.

Am I a Nationalist?

It may surprise some of my readers and viewers that I would defend nationalism at all, and the surprise is fair, because in terms of my political philosophy and ideological orientation, I am not a nationalist. Yet I am not an anti-nationalist either. This is where my earlier distinction between internationalism as a political goal and internationalism as an ideology becomes important. It is useful, and perhaps even necessary, to wield nationalism as a political tool, rather than cede that instrument to opponents who would put it to far worse ends.

Even so, I would not use nationalism to describe my ideology. National problems demand international solutions, and one plainly ought to care about more than one’s own nation. Yet most people can change only what lies within the borders where they possess citizenship. Any grassroots political movement must therefore be either localist or nationalist. An internationalist grassroots movement is very nearly an oxymoron, for to be rooted is to be embedded in the particular socio-cultural conditions of the place where one acts. This is why every genuinely distinct socialism has been, in practice, a national socialism, a socialism rooted in the conditions of a particular people.

I reject nationalism in the narrow, zero-sum sense of advancing one’s country at the expense of everyone else. That position is not only morally narrow; it ignores the failures of the European and post-colonial nationalisms that treated national interest as self-sufficient. The Arab world in particular shows the limits of national projects unable to cooperate across borders or resolve the international conditions shaping their domestic problems.

There is a further reason I decline the label, even as I favour nationalism as a tool and defend a people’s pride in its nation. Nationalism as an ideology is vacuous, for the reasons established earlier: it is a style rather than a doctrine, with no settled body of principles, no monopoly holder, and no founding canonical thinkers in the way that Marxism has. That is why the same vessel could hold the civic, liberal nationalism of Mazzini and the American founders alongside the fascist nationalism of Mussolini and the racial populisms of the last century. Precisely because it is so vague, nationalism is easily co-opted, and it comes to depend on a charismatic demagogue, a Bonapartist figure, to give it shape. Even critics on the right concede that right-wing dictatorships such as Franco’s were capitalist dictatorships with little vision beyond keeping the left at bay, and the Arab nationalisms proved so contingent on their strongmen that, once the leaders or the geopolitical winds shifted, they abandoned their own stated principles.

As an ideological starting point, then, nationalism is neither good nor bad; it is empty. I favour it as an instrument, but my ideology is neither nationalism nor anti-nationalism. I do not think that one’s political project should solely revolve around advancing the interests of one’s nation at the expense of the rest.

My own vision is closer to a distributist one: a democratic post-capitalist society informed above all by Christian and radical republican principles. This is why I have at times been drawn to a label such as liberal-conservative socialist, and why I am, perhaps surprisingly for someone who reads a great deal of Marx, not a believer in Marxist communism. I value Marx for his analysis and his critique of capitalism far more than for his solutions, for I hold that the answer is not the abolition of private property but its distribution, a question I will take up elsewhere.

My convictions rest on fundamentally universalist principles. A political ideology, however, must reconcile itself with the realities of the world it enters, which means adapting to the socio-cultural contexts of the places or the countries we are citizens of. Those with a large reach across the internet and media can influence people in many nations at once, and it is precisely this social position that deludes the cosmopolitan symbolic-capitalist types of art, academia, media, and entertainment into believing their universal ideas can simply be copied and pasted anywhere. The universal must always reckon with the contradictions of the particular, at the point where ideology meets the concrete policy realities of different regions.

This is why the solution to our present problems can be neither nationalism in the narrow sense nor internationalism in the vague one. To move through history and resolve the international problems that are inseparable from our largest national ones, we must pass through the nation in order to reach the supranational. This is the dialectic I mean to capture in the idea of nationalist internationalism. Internationalism should be understood as a political goal and an objective necessity, not as an ideology defined by its opposition to nationalism, a posture that is futile and that merely hands the weapon of nationalism to rival tendencies. Nationalism is not going anywhere. Rather than insisting that it remain a narrow, nativist attachment to the particular, we should grasp the universal truth that national concerns now require international solutions. Rather than rejecting all nationalisms, we ought to accept all of them. Every people has a right to take pride in its place, and it is only natural to care first for the concerns of one’s own place before those of others. Accepting this nationalist inevitability while recognizing the need to move beyond it is what nationalist internationalism is all about.

Conclusion: The Dialectic of Historical Progress

The nation need not be the enemy of internationalism. It is its precondition. The utilisation of nationalism in politics and the goal of international cooperation to solve problems that transcend the nation-state are not mutually exclusive. Assuming that they are will lead not to the triumph of internationalism but to ceding the potentiality of nationalism to those who have a far more narrow-minded vision of it. Just about every actually existing socialist experiment that was grassroots either emerged out of a nationalist liberation project or a regional autonomy movement. The Marxist notion of communist internationalism has always been a pipe dream of rootless cosmopolitans that, in practice, was used as no more than a guise for Soviet expansionism, just as the liberal internationalist goal of “spreading democracy” became a veil for American influence. The left did not transcend nationalism. They surrendered it to demagogues, who then defined the very terms on which leftists today oppose it.

Leftists who dogmatically oppose nationalism delude themselves into thinking they are defending internationalism and resisting reaction, but in practice they do the opposite, because they hand over nationalism, the most powerful weapon in modern politics, entirely to the political right.

The nation-state by itself is inadequate for solving national concerns caused by problems that are inherently global in scope. People are starting to realize that every country’s politicians end up acquiescing to the logic of global capital and quietly continue to increase the rates of mass migration while failing to address issues like climate change, the power of AI, and wealth inequality, due to the power of capital mobility in the current international world order. Therefore, a new international rules-based order is necessary to address the most pressing issues that should concern every patriot, who cannot rely only on the capacities of their nation-states alone.

But we will not arrive at a new world international system with any democratic legitimacy through a vague cosmopolitan “internationalist movement.” We can only get there one step at a time, through political movements that are adapted to the national context in which they operate. We will not get to internationalism merely by opposing nationalism. The only alternative to better nationalisms is either more reactionary, narrow-minded forms of nationalism or more local, parochial tribalisms. What is needed are civic nationalist movements that do not limit their horizons to the nation-state. In other words, we will not get to national internationalism by skipping past nationalism. The only way beyond the impasse of nationalism is to go through it, and for national governments to set their horizons towards a new international system suited to address the contradictions of the latest stage of history.

For more on the problems with the leftist conception of internationalism, I will be putting out an essay in a few weeks that elaborates on my critique of Marxist communist internationalism in particular, and the history of why it failed as badly as it did.

Footnotes/Works Cited

1. David A. Bell, “Lingua Populi, Lingua Dei: Language, Religion, and the Origins of French Revolutionary Nationalism,” The American Historical Review 100, no. 5 (1995): 1403–1437.

2. James M. McPherson, Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019).

3. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006).

4. Aris Roussinos, “Benedict Anderson: Humane Nationalist,” UnHerd, November 1, 2025, https://unherd.com/2025/11/benedict-anderson-nationalist-prophet/?edition=us.

5. Franklin Foer, How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 5–6, 197–199, 247–248.

6. Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th expanded ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 1.

7. Arthur Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life, trans. T. Bailey Saunders (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1890), chap. 4.

8. David Blocker, “Labour and the Waffle: Unions Confront Canadian Left Nationalism in the New Democratic Party,” Labour/Le Travail 87 (Spring 2021): 49–92; Luke Savage and Ed Broadbent, “Canadian Socialism Against US Domination,” Ed Broadbent Digital Archive, Broadbent Institute, December 11, 2024.

9. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report(2015); Karen Stote, An Act of Genocide: Colonialism and the Sterilization of Aboriginal Women (Black Point, NS: Fernwood Publishing, 2015).

10. Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Studies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964); Richard Gott, “Latin America as a White Settler Society,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26, no. 2 (2007): 269–289.

-3 citations in between here were removed because I cut out the “Nationalism and Citizenship Section” to make the essay a bit shorter.

14. Statistics Canada, “Canada’s Population Estimates: Strong Population Growth in 2023,” The Daily, March 27, 2024; Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Canada’s Housing Supply Shortages: Moving to a New Framework (Ottawa: CMHC, 2025).

15. Robert A. Dahl, “Can International Organizations Be Democratic? A Skeptic’s View,” in Democracy’s Edges, ed. Ian Shapiro and Casiano Hacker-Cordón (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

16. Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895–1949 (New York: Routledge, 2005); David G. Marr, Vietnam 1945: The Quest for Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Adeed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

17. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, trans. Samuel Moore (1888), chaps. 2 and 4.

18. Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Karl Marx, “Marx to Chief Burgomaster Görtz in Trier,” October 17, 1845, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 4 (New York: International Publishers, 1975).

19. Giorgia Meloni, “Opening Address at the Italy-Africa Summit,” January 29, 2024; Karim Mezran and Alissa Pavia, “Giorgia Meloni’s Foreign Policy and the Mattei Plan for Africa: Balancing Development and Migration Concerns,” IAI Commentaries23|36 (Rome: Istituto Affari Internazionali, July 2023).

20. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

21. Daniele Conversi, The Basques, the Catalans, and Spain: Alternative Routes to Nationalist Mobilization (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1997); Neil Harvey, The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Michael Knapp, Anja Flach, and Ercan Ayboğa, Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan (London: Pluto Press, 2016).

22. Eghosa E. Osaghae, Crippled Giant: Nigeria Since Independence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century.

23. Bassel F. Salloukh et al., The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (London: Pluto Press, 2015); I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Somali: Nation and State in the Horn of Africa, 4th ed. (Oxford: James Currey, 2002).

24. Conversi, The Basques, the Catalans, and Spain.

25. Benjamin M. Studebaker, “Why Federalism,” six-part series, Streit Council: “The Problem that Needs to Be Solved,” October 25, 2024; “Creating the Cataracts,” November 17, 2024; “The Unit Question,” February 13, 2025; “On Citizenship,” May 8, 2025; “On the Role of China,” October 11, 2025; and “The Conclusion,” December 15, 2025. Studebaker discussed the proposal on 1Dime Radio,

26. Dani Rodrik, “Capital Mobility, Distributive Conflict, and International Tax Coordination,” Journal of International Economics54, no. 1 (2001): 57–73; Clemens Fuest, Bernd Huber, and Jack Mintz, “Capital Mobility and Tax Competition: A Survey,” CESifo Working Paper no. 956, May 2003; Philipp Genschel, “Globalization, Tax Competition, and the Welfare State,” Politics & Society 30, no. 2 (2002): 245–275.

27. Jørgen Carling and Francis Collins, “Aspiration, Desire and Drivers of Migration,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44, no. 6 (2018): 909–926; Jørgen Carling and Cathrine Talleraas, Root Causes and Drivers of Migration: Implications for Humanitarian Efforts and Development Cooperation (Oslo: Peace Research Institute Oslo, 2016).