Markus Lundström and Tomas Poletti Lundström – Radical nationalism

Abstract

Radical nationalism is a political ideology centred on tying an imagined people to a bordered territory. It grows from nationalism’s root system into a diversity of political manifestations aimed at sealing the people-territory bond. By theorizing radical nationalism, this article outlines a political-ideological approach that opens new pathways for studying the so-called far right. The article draws on Michael Freeden’s conceptual-morphological theory and delineates how nationalism’s thin-centred conceptual core – people and territory – can thicken into a full-bodied political ideology: from football and flags to systemic discrimination, deportations, and mass violence. In response to the empirical observation that radical nationalism nurtures historical and contemporary actors across the left-right spectrum, the article offers a political-ideological lens for transhistorical analyses of various political manifestations that sprout and flourish from the exclusionary roots of the modern nation-state.