Photo: “Proud Boy with Confederates in Pittsboro (2019 Oct)“, by Anthony Crider licensed under CC BY 2.0. Hue modified from the original
Bieber, Florian. “Is nationalism on the rise? Assessing global trends.” Ethnopolitics 17, no. 5 (2018): 519-540.
Abstract
Like air, nationalism is both ubiquitous and elusive. It permeates the global system, states, peoples’ behavior and can be seen as both conservative and as a revolutionary force, threating the status quo. The end of nationalism has been predicted multiple times. When Eric Hobsbawm wrote his seminal study on nationalism in the 1980s, he saw his subject as a dying breed (Hobsbawm, 1990). Yet, the end of the cold war ushered in a period nationalism, reflected in civil wars and genocide from Yugoslavia to Rwanda. Until recently, that period of nationalist resurgence appeared behind us.
Over the past years, rising nationalism is seen everywhere and in everything. From the election of Donald Trump to Brexit, the nationalist policies of the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe, his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the success of far-right parties in Italian, German and Austrian elections in 2017 and 2018, nationalism appears to be on rise globally (Bremmer, 2017; Economist, 2016; Economist, 2017b). News coverage of nationalism has been global, focusing on US elections, and British referendum, but also government policies in Philippines, China and India, as well as in South Africa (Google Trends).
