THE UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST
FACULTY OF LETTERS
DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL STUDIES
SPECIALIZATION: EUROPEAN STUDIES
NATIONALISM AND ITS EFFECTS
Coordinator:
Univ. Lecturer. Dr. Micu Cornel student: Dumitrache Ana-Maria
Bucharest
May 2017
To define nationalism, the concept of nation must also be taken into account as they are interdependent. The term nation began to be used in Europe just before the 1800s referring to the inhabitants of a territory, a country, but also to make known a collective identity that shares different things, such as history, religion, language, traditions, law and even Political rights.
Nationalism, on the other hand, is a newer concept that has become more important since the nineteenth
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Many of these definitions overlap, but an important observation is that none is more correct than the other.
One of the most important definitions of the concept belongs to Anthony Smith, who states that nationalism is "an ideological movement to obtain and preserve the autonomy, cohesion and identity of a population that some of its members regard as a" current or potential "nation" . As you can see, Smith emphasizes three main purposes of nationalism: autonomy, national unity and national identity, and even if the definition of this term is very much debated, Anthony Smith believes that nationalism is a phenomenon of modernity.
And as there are different types of nationalism, civic nationalism is generally defined as a group of people who show some loyalty to civil rights or laws and are committed to complying with these laws. On the other hand, ethnic nationalism consists of a group that has a culture, a territory, a language, etc. common. This type of nationalism is much more specific, in the sense that it says exactly who belongs and who does not belong to that group. Smith continues by saying that "every nationalism contains civic and ethnic elements in different quantities and forms. Sometimes civic and territorial elements predominate; At other times, ethnic and indigenous components are accentuated.
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Another point of view belongs to Ernest Gellner, who studied nationalism in the meantime, saying that "nationality is primarily a political principle that states that political and national unity must be in agreement." Although most researchers in the field claim that nationalism emerged after the French Revolution, Gellner believes that nationalism is a "sociological necessity in the modern world."
Besides these theoretical aspects of nationalism, it can be added that it is of several types. Here are some of these.
Civic and / or liberal nationalism
This type of nationalism defines the nation as an association of people, and they believe that they belong to the nation, have equal political rights and share it among themselves, and show themselves in the