Nationalism and Political Illegitimacy

Abstract

The analysis of nationalism has long been hampered by slipshod terminology. If anything, the situation has further deteriorated since 1939, when the Royal Institute of International Affairs prefaced a major study of nationalism with a warning ‘Note on the Use of Words’, whose opening sentence read: ‘Among other difficulties which impede the study of “nationalism”, that of language holds a leading place’.1 English-speaking societies are particularly prone to the careless interutilization of terms which in their pristine usage convey vastly different connotations. Thus, nation and state are commonly interutilized, and the term nation-state is regularly employed indiscriminately to refer both to uninational and multinational entities. As a result of this confusing interutilization of key terms, nationalism is used to connote two different concepts which are often in conflict with one another. At times it connotes identification with and loyalty to the nation in the sense of a human grouping which may or may not be essentially coterminous with a state (e.g., Croatian, Fleming, Scottish, or Ukrainian nationalism). More often it is used to connote identification with and loyalty to the ‘nation’ when the latter is used to indicate the state structure regardless of the national composition of the state’s population (e.g., American, Argentinian, Indian, or Filipino nationalism).2 In order to avoid the confusion surrounding two vitally different and often antagonistic loyalties, this writer has found it useful elsewhere to employ the term patriotism to refer to state loyalty, and ethnonationalism to refer to loyalty to the nation. While this vocabulary serves to distinguish between the two loyalties, it tells us little about the latter. It implies general agreement concerning the meaning of ethnic which, unfortunately, is not the case. As used today by most American sociologists,

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