7.1 Overview of the Ideology

Nationalism is a political principle according to which political and cultural boundaries should be congruent. As Michael Hechter puts it: “nationalism is collective action designed to render the boundaries of the nation, a territorially concentrated and culturally distinctive solidary group, congruent with those of its governance unit, the agency responsible for providing the bulk of public goods within the nation’s territory” (2000, p. 7). A nationalist movement is a movement that aims to implement this congruence. Whereas liberalism sees free and rational individuals as the core constitutive unit of their worldview and Marxism sees relations between classes as the motor of history, nationalism sees nations as the most important political force and the nation as a concrete historical entity.