Essay on Nationalism

Citizen’s motivation towards attaining self-determination raises concern regarding if it ought to be understood as entailing complete statesmanship with absolute power over national and global matters. It is, thus, traditional to differentiate between a state and a nation. While a nation is composed of a cultural community, a state is majorly a political unit that enjoys increased sovereignty. Even though several nations are states in some dimension, many nations are not completely sovereign states. This paper examines the concept of nationalism, its scope, and impacts both nationally and globally. People who are part of a given nation value their liberty and identity in their state. Moreover, nationalists usually have the belief that their assimilated attributes are higher, which make them stereotype diverse ethnic, cultural and religious groups (Amadeo 1).

As a result, the prejudice is essential for their nation’s unity. Accomplishing a self-governing state is the goal of nationalists with the government having exclusive control of the economy to foster the nation’s interest. In most cases, the government design policies that are aimed at strengthening the local facilities, which control factors of production. The two countries adopted a democratic rule with capitalist policies leading to the creation of Germany from several tribes. Besides, in the 20th century, the whole of American and European regions was ruled by sovereign states. Extreme economic conditions generated by the Great Depression pushed many nations to adopt nationalism as a defense mechanism. Various leaders including Adolf Hitler adopted nationalism to enable them to overcome self-interest.

Essentially, such leaders conquered the welfare of their citizens in order to accomplish social objectives, implying that within fascism, nationalism thrives in already existing structures despite altering the complexions. According to Nowrasteh (1), there are varying figures of people killed by different governments. Consequently, Nowrasteh (1) contend that approximately 150 million people have been killed by communist governments while nationalists are responsible for about 92 million deaths. The figures are inclusive of murder and killings that happened at the hands of Chinese, Japanese, Turkish as well as the European nationalists in the colonial period. However, the numbers are exclusive of the killings in the pre-communist nationals from Mexico, Pakistan, and Russia since they exhibited less external nationalism as compared to other governments. Particularly, the nationalist rule is clouded by extreme brutality.

Newspapers were often characterized by increasing rhetoric over nationalism and inciting stories including rival nation’s rumors and their bad objectives. Other elements of contemporary culture like music, theatre and literature also experienced nationalism. Moreover, citizens had exaggerated confidence in their states, governments as well as their military power, which offered them surety that their nation was righteous, fair and unblemished. However, nationalist ideologies served to break competing countries, branding them as violent, cunning, uncivilized and dishonest. Therefore, through over-confidence, nations were not afraid of participating in a conflict that motivated the outbreak of World War I. Other countries with an anticipated decrease in importance include Bulgaria and Romania (Mungiu-Pippidi 1). The contention of the effectiveness of politics and the state in delivering public property is missing in the countries.