Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States and the first acts of his administration have been the most recent and resounding indication that the world is experiencing a nationalist resurgence. In both the United States and Europe, there is a powerful backlash against unrestricted immigration, most notably when integration in terms of culture, values, and identity seems to be problematic. Muslim immigration, in particular, has been singled out, because of concerns over its alleged cultural alienation, militancy, and involvement in terrorism, both actual and potential. Meanwhile, the European Union — celebrated only a decade ago as the paragon of a post-national future — has experienced massive waves of refugees, the Brexit vote, internal pressures in some member countries to leave the EU, the rise of far-right anti-immigration parties, and separatist movements seeking independence from some of the European countries themselves. Asia and Africa are experiencing even more powerful ethnic and national pressures. The resurgence comes as a surprise to many, not least because of the widespread view — promoted by the modernist school in the study of national phenomenon — that nationalism is recent, superficial, and contrived. This view dominates college education, where Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities tops students’ reading lists, as Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” did a generation earlier. Indeed, reflecting the post-1945 climate of ideas and ethics, this trend has been closely intertwined with a growing tendency among some left-leaning liberals to question both the significance and legitimacy of the very idea of the nation. This widespread dismissiveness of nationalism misunderstands how the world works — past, present, and future.

A crowd of soldiers in stands at attention beneath a reviewing stand where Adolf Hitler delivers a speech at the 1936 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg, Germany. (Photo credit: Getty Images)

In my book (with Alexander Yakobson), Nations: The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism, published in 2013, just before the current national resurgence, I discussed how ethnic and national sentiments are evolutionarily engraved in human nature in the form of people’s propensity for affinity, solidarity, and mutual cooperation with their perceived kin-culture communities. These attachments, permeating social life and extending beyond family to tribe and ethnos, became integral to politics when states emerged millennia ago. Ethnicity has always been political and politicized, because people have always been heavily biased toward those whom they identify as their kin-culture community.

None of this is to suggest that any particular national identity or ethnicity is a given, unchanging quantity. Identities changed throughout history and will continue to do so. Still, ethnic and national identities, though they are always in flux, are also among the most durable, and most potent, of human cultural forms. They often span centuries and even millennia.

These realities have gotten lost amid a drive to expose chauvinistic national myths and naïve anachronisms, a very necessary project by itself. And yet, while myths abound in the nationalistic discourse, modernist countermyths have been created at a nearly equal rate. That nations are “imagined communities” does not mean they are arbitrary inventions, nor does invented tradition imply wholesale fabrication. The fashionable shibboleths that dominate in the social sciences obscure that social phenomena — including nationalism — tend to be both deeply rooted and constructed. There is nothing mutually exclusive here.

The doctrine of popular sovereignty, the dominant political legitimation principle in modern times, is regarded by many as the source of the national phenomenon. But national sentiments of common identity, affinity, and solidarity among the people long predated the modern era. Indeed, popular sovereignty has given free vent to national sentiments as much as it contributed to them. The people’s will, once spoken, has been revealed to be unmistakably pro-national. This is why free government and national self-determination appeared as two inseparable aspects of the progressive agenda during the 19th century. In the wake of World War I, they were together posited by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson as the basis for a new — just, democratic, and secure — world order.

During the 20th century, liberals became understandably concerned about the horrendous manifestations of chauvinistic and aggressive nationalism. It is hardly a coincidence that nearly all the founding fathers of the modernist school in the study of the national phenomenon — historians and sociologists such as Hans Kohn, Karl Deutsch, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, and Elie Kedourie — were immigrant refugees from the horrors of the 1930s and ’40s.

Other cognitive problems have contributed to our contemporary misconceptions concerning nationalism. Scholars have lacked the theoretical tools to comprehend the deep naturally evolved roots of the ethnic and national phenomenon. For much of the 20th century, the idea that human nature had anything to do with social realities was an anathema to historians and social scientists. And that which we lack the means to comprehend we do not see even if it is staring us in the face. Repeatedly confounded by the ferocious “atavistic” irruptions of ethnic and national forces, theorists and commentators have nonetheless dismissed them as the outcome of “manipulation” or as epiphenomenal.

Furthermore, ever since Immanuel Kant (if not Plato), both the rational and the moral have been equated with the universal. Thus, many fail to realize that the space of loyalty and benefit sharing from the individual to humanity is curved rather than flat. It extends, as Aristotle saw, from family to wider kin-communal circles, real or perceived, and to their political expressions, such as city-states, national kingdoms, and, indeed, multiethnic empires, which usually centered on an imperial people or ethnos.

In our times, when national rights have been secured domestically and genuine foreign threats seemed to have practically disappeared, it is hardly surprising that national sentiments have been taken lightly or even viewed disparagingly in Western liberal democracies. National self-determination remains a central political idea, founded on the liberal principle that people are entitled to choose for themselves. At the same time, the moral status of national affinities and loyalties has come to be viewed as deeply problematic, in the same way that their source has remained a mystery.

As is said about good health, some things are missed only when they are gone. National identity and sentiments in the West have seemingly disappeared from the eye, having become largely implicit, liberal, and nonaggressive — transparent or “banal,” as some scholars have dubbed them. And yet they are anything but nonexistent. As liberal, prosperous, and peaceful countries like Canada (Quebec), Belgium (Flemings versus Walloons), the United Kingdom (Scotland, Brexit), and Spain (Catalonia, Basque Country) have discovered, ethno-national divisions easily acquire great political salience. And the response across the West to nonintegrating immigrants has made that all the more apparent.