Defined as an ‘imagined community’ by Benedict Anderson, nation can be understood as a feeling of belonging to a common legacy and, at the same time, possessing commonalities in the present. And thus, nationalism should essentially mean loyalty towards one’s nationality. This was true when the nation-states first emerged in Western Europe, yielding a sovereign derived from a common consensus. The idea of nation can be said to have been premised on the idea of achieving cooperation and imparting a feeling of responsibility towards ‘others’ within a conscious boundary. It never implied a separation of this unit of cooperative-action from other similar or dissimilar units. Using the terminology of Hegel[i], it was meant to eliminate “universal egoism” from the civil society and replace it with “universal altruism”. Nationalism was a powerful idea which had the potential of transforming heterogeneous consciousness into a homogenous one. This power was overused and even misused by the edifice of a political party, which had a more or less contemporary emergence, to achieve a unified consciousness by creating a myth of a common legacy. This found an expression in the form of party-guided nation-building process in all state-nations where the party built a nation to suit itself. These nations are essentially guided by a political ideology which has achieved an authority similar to that of a legacy. This is exactly what we see in Hindutva-nationalism for example. The state-nations are a political unit founded on suppressed nationalities. The outcome of this adulteration in the concept of nationalism was a paradoxical understanding of the idea which was obviously not consistent with the original concept. The contradictions can best be seen in two by-products. Firstly, as pointed out by W.O. Conner[ii], nationalism now means loyalty towards the government and not your nationality. On a humorous note, you are actually anti-national if you are loyal towards your original nationality. Secondly, nationalism today separates one nationality from the other which was earlier absent. There is a need to highlight the original intentions of nationalism in order to protect it from unwanted distortions. - Aditya Nayak [i] Andrew Heywood- Politics. Publisher- Palgrave Foundation. [ii] Walker Connor, "A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is an Ethnic Group,…”
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February 2017
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