Nationalism: everything you wanted to know

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Humans tend to identify with being in a group, and historically few groupings have been more potent than the idea of the nation. But when did people first turn to the idea of nationalism? Is it predominantly a right-wing creed? And does it thrive during periods of crisis and uncertainty?

Well in this Everything You Wanted to Know episode, Danny Byrd puts these questions and others submitted by our listeners to the academic and author Dr John Hutchinson. John, let's start with the word nationalism. From a historian's point of view, what exactly is nationalism? How should we define it? That is one of the most complicated questions in the social sciences, but by and large, nationalism is seen as an ideology, perhaps the most powerful ideology in in the modern world, an ideology that states that the world is divided into nations and that members of the nation

seek three things in particular. One, the political freedom of the nation, the sanctity of a territorial homeland, in other words, the defense of a territorial homeland, and thirdly the cultural distinctiveness or uniqueness of the nation. Other people have said, well, beyond the ideology of nationalism, there's national sentiment. The ideology of nationalism is generally viewed as emerging really roughly in the 18th century, but the sentiment, by and large, can be seen to be older, can trace it back to medieval times. And just to clarify, how does nationalism differ from something like patriotism?

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