Encyclopedia > Cultural production and nationalism
Literature, visual arts, music, and scholarship have complex relationships with ideological forces.
The 19th Century
In the 19th centurynationalism was an especially potent influence on all of these fields. To summarize, every established national group used cultural productions to assert and strengthen a sense of national unity and destiny; less politically consolidated groups, especially those pursuing the goal of nationhood, used them in the same ways, though often with a note of determination that makes them easier to see from our contemporary point of reference.
Natural admiration for excellence and justifiable pride in a predecessor's achievements is sometimes difficult to sort out from other intentions. Dante was a great poet, the Societa Dantesca Italiana did great work in editing and publishing a usable and affordable text, but the Divine Comedy was certainly used by the newly unified Italian governemnt (see History of Italy) to encourage a more homogenous, Tuscan-influenced dialect for the whole peninsula (see Italian language).
This relationship between ideology and serious work is particularly ambiguous in the academic fields of historical importance. Much as 19th century science is often treated as the inventor of conceptions of evolution and race which had serious negative political and social consequences, many 19th century historians pursued what they intended as reasonably objective research projects in the history of their own and other regions either to end by themselves using the results to support nationalistic goals or to see their work used that way by others.
More politically consolidated nations sponsored historical research projects which produced results of permanent value - such as the Monumenta Gemaniae Historica ("Monuments of German History") project. The MGH is a vast series (it runs to hundreds of volumes and is still publishing) of edited primary source material essential for scholarly work on late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. However, the term "German" in the title was interpreted in the broadest possible sense, and its initial royal patronage made the connection clear between a perceived unity of Germanness in history and 19th century Germanness.
The term “nationalism” is generally used to describe two phenomena: (1) the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity and (2) the actions that the members of a nation take when seeking to achieve (or sustain) self-determination.
Nations and national identity may be defined in terms of common origin, ethnicity, or cultural ties, and while an individual's membership in the nation is often regarded as involuntary, it is sometimes regarded as voluntary.
Nationalism in a wider sense is any complex of attitudes, claims and directives for action ascribing a fundamental political, moral and cultural value to nation and nationality and deriving special obligations and permissions (for individual members of the nation and for any involved third parties, individual or collective) from this ascribed value.
One of the fundaments of nationalism is the sense of folk, of a kinship derived from a common ancestry.
Nationalism was a cover for the erosion of civil liberties identified with McCarthyism, for the corruption of government by the accretion of enormous power in the hands of the executive, and for the corresponding diminution of power in the Congress.
Nationalism makes certain political claims based upon this belief: above all, the claim that the nation is the only legitimate basis for the state, that each nation is entitled to its own state, and that the borders of the state should be congruent with the borders of the nation.
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