Nationalism: Core Ideas and Principles

Nationalism is the belief that humanity divides naturally into nations, and that the nation is the proper unit of political authority.

That single claim carries a large consequence. If nations are the real communities to which people belong, then governments derive their legitimacy from a nation rather than from a dynasty, a religion or an empire — and any nation ruled by outsiders has a grievance the world is obliged to take seriously.

Nationalism is the non-core political idea studied on this route, and it is unusual in one respect: it attaches itself to other ideologies rather than standing apart from them. It has been carried by liberals seeking self-government, conservatives defending national tradition, anti-colonial movements expelling empires, and expansionist regimes conquering neighbours. That range is the reason the specification examines four separate types.

Edexcel names six core ideas. Each must be linked to nationalism's view of human nature, the state, society and the economy:

Core idea	The claim in one line
Nations	Humanity divides into distinct peoples, though nationalists define them very differently
Self-determination	A nation is entitled to decide how it is governed
Nation-state	A nation ruling itself in its own state, controlling its own economy
Culturalism	Nationhood rests on shared culture, sometimes on mystical and emotional ties
Racialism	Nationhood is fixed by biology — a position held by a very small minority
Internationalism	Peoples should co-operate across borders in their common interest

The first distinction to fix is nation against state. A state is a legal container: territory, borders, sovereign authority. A nation is a community of identification. Nationalism is the demand that the two line up.

The specification is explicit that nationalists define the nation in sharply different ways, and that disagreement is the examinable content.

Definition	The nation is held together by	Who can join	Associated with
Civic	Citizenship, shared political values, participation	Anyone who commits to the values	Liberal nationalism; Rousseau
Cultural	Language, custom, religion, folklore, history	Those who absorb the culture, over time	Cultural nationalism; Herder
Ethnic	Common descent and ancestry	Those born into it	Exclusive forms of nationalism
Racial	Biological inheritance	Nobody who is not born to it	A very small minority of nationalists

This produces the inclusive/exclusive axis. Inclusive nationalism treats membership as quickly acquired, because belonging does not rest on a shared past — a naturalised citizen is as fully a member as anyone born there. Exclusive nationalism treats membership as slowly earned or simply inherited, because belonging rests on shared history, language or ancestry.

Worked example — the same person, four definitions. Consider someone born abroad who has lived in a country for twenty years, holds citizenship, speaks the language and takes part in public life, but has no ancestral connection to it.

• Civic: a full member. Citizenship and participation are exactly what the nation consists of.
• Cultural: a member, on the evidence of language and long shared life, though some cultural nationalists would say full belonging takes a generation.
• Ethnic: not a member, though their children born and raised there might be.
• Racial: not a member, and no length of residence changes it.

The same facts, four verdicts. That is why "nationalists believe in the nation" is a sentence that earns nothing on its own.

(Extra context — Benedict Anderson's description of nations as "imagined communities", constructed through shared print, language and ritual rather than discovered, is not named in the 9PL0 specification. It is a useful shorthand for the view that nations are made rather than found, and is worth a clause, not a paragraph.)

Self-determination is the claim that a nation, not an empire or a dynasty, is entitled to choose the government it lives under. It rests on treating the nation as a real political community that is fit to govern itself, rather than as a purely cultural one.

The argument has three steps:

1. Legitimate authority comes from the people. A government rules rightfully only where it rests on the consent of the governed.
2. The relevant people is the nation. Nations, not empires or dynasties, are the communities within which people recognise each other as belonging together.
3. Therefore rule by outsiders is illegitimate, however competent, and a nation is entitled to independence, or at least to a decisive say over its own government.

Self-determination has been one of the most consequential ideas in modern political history. It broke up the continental European empires after 1918, drove decolonisation across Asia and Africa after 1945, and remains the active claim behind independence movements.

It also generates hard questions the specification expects you to recognise:

• Which groups count as nations? Every claim to self-determination is contested by whoever currently governs the territory.
• What about minorities inside the new state? A nation liberated by self-determination frequently contains a smaller nation with the same claim.
• Does self-determination require independence? Devolved government, federalism and cultural autonomy are all offered as alternatives to statehood.

Worked case study — Scotland. The Scottish independence referendum of 18 September 2014 is the clearest modern British example of self-determination being tested by ballot rather than force:

Element	Detail
The question	Whether Scotland should become an independent country
Turnout	84.6%, far above any recent UK general election
Result	Independence rejected, on roughly 55% to 45%
The nationalist reading	Holding the vote at all conceded the principle: Scotland is a nation entitled to decide
Where it stands	The SNP won 57 seats at the Scottish Parliament election of 7 May 2026, and John Swinney was reappointed First Minister

The referendum illustrates a point worth making in an essay: self-determination was satisfied by the process, not by the outcome. A nation that votes to remain in a union has exercised self-determination just as fully as one that votes to leave.

A nation-state is a sovereign state whose population is a single nation, governing itself and running its own economy. For most nationalists it is the objective: the point at which cultural identity and political sovereignty coincide.

Its attractions are set out by nationalists in four registers:

• Political. Government by people who share the nation's history and interests is more likely to serve it.
• Cultural. Only a state controlled by the nation can protect its language, education and traditions.
• Social. Shared nationhood supplies the solidarity that lets citizens accept taxation, redistribution and mutual obligation.
• Economic. Controlling trade, currency and resources allows a nation to develop in its own interest rather than another's.

The specification is careful to add that most nationalists want a nation-state but not all of them do. Four kinds of exception matter:

Who qualifies it	Why
Expansionist nationalists	Deny that all nations are entitled to states; only the strongest deserve sovereignty
Nationalists with an internationalist outlook	Treat free nation-states as building blocks for a wider federation, not as the final destination
Some cultural nationalists	Seek recognition, language rights and autonomy rather than a separate state
Pan-nationalists	Aim at a larger unit — a united Africa, a united Arab world — rather than at separate states

Worked case study — Wales, May 2026. The Senedd election of 7 May 2026 shows a nationalist party advancing without an existing nation-state. The Senedd expanded from 60 to 96 members and was elected for the first time by a closed proportional list system across 16 six-member constituencies. Plaid Cymru became the largest party with 43 seats on 35.4%, ahead of Reform UK on 34 seats, with Labour reduced to 9 seats and turnout at 51.6% — the highest at any Senedd election. Labour left government in Wales for the first time since 1999.

Two lessons for this content area. First, a nation can hold substantial self-government without a nation-state: devolution grants a nation control over education, health and language policy inside a larger union. Second, the sequence matters — cultural recognition and devolved institutions frequently arrive long before, and sometimes instead of, independence.

Culturalism is the claim that nationalism rests on shared cultural values in society — language, custom, religion, folklore, art and a remembered history.

Its founding statement is Herder's: every nation possesses its own distinctive character, its Volksgeist, expressed most fully in language and in the ordinary culture of the people. On this view a nation is discovered rather than designed, and the nationalist's task is to recover and express what is already there.

Culturalism explains a pattern visible across two centuries: nationalist movements begin with scholars rather than soldiers.

Stage	Activity	Examples
Recovery	Collecting folk tales, songs, dictionaries and histories	Nineteenth-century folklore collection across German-speaking Europe
Standardisation	Fixing a written form of the national language	Language academies and national dictionaries
Education	Teaching the language and history in schools	Welsh-medium and Irish-medium schooling
Political demand	Claiming institutions to protect the culture	Devolved parliaments; official language status

The specification asks for two further things.

The mystical and emotional register. Cultural nationalism appeals to feeling rather than argument. Landscape, ancestry, sacrifice, soil, blood and destiny recur in nationalist language because they generate an attachment that reasoning cannot. It is why national anthems, flags and remembrance ceremonies do political work.

The negative side. A nation defined by culture has an inside and an outside, and the same emotional intensity that binds members can be turned against those outside:

• Minorities within the territory can be treated as contaminating the national culture rather than contributing to it.
• Cultural difference can be recast as threat, which is the route from culturalism to chauvinistic nationalism — the belief that one's own nation is superior and that others endanger it.
• Where culture is treated as fixed by birth rather than learned, culturalism edges towards racialism.

Keep the distinction sharp. Culture can be joined: a language can be learned and a history adopted. That is what separates even exclusive cultural nationalism from racialism, where the boundary cannot be crossed at all.

Racialism is the belief that humankind divides into separate races, each with a different inherent nature, and that nationhood is determined purely by biological factors.

The specification is unusually precise about its standing: this is the view of a very small group of nationalists. Treating it as nationalism's typical position misrepresents the ideology, and treating it as marginal without explaining it leaves out required content. Both errors are avoidable.

Where the argument goes:

1. Humanity is divided by biology into groups with distinct and inherited characteristics.
2. These characteristics are fixed, so they cannot be changed by education, residence or law.
3. The nation is therefore a biological community, and citizenship granted to outsiders is a legal fiction rather than a real membership.
4. Racial hierarchy commonly follows, with one race presented as superior and entitled to rule or exclude others.
5. The state's job becomes purity, producing exclusion, expulsion and, in the twentieth century's worst cases, extermination.

	Cultural nationalism	Racialist nationalism
Basis of belonging	Shared language, custom, history	Descent and biology
Can an outsider join?	Yes, through language and long participation	No, under any circumstances
Attitude to other nations	Difference, and often mutual respect	Hierarchy, with some races ranked above others
Political programme	Cultural protection and self-government	Exclusion, and control of who may live in the territory

The historical case is Nazi Germany, where nationhood was defined by descent, the state legislated to strip citizenship from those excluded by that definition, and the doctrine ended in genocide. This is why nationalism is so heavily contested as an ideology: its critics argue the racialist outcome is latent in any nationalism that defines belonging by birth.

A distinction that must not be blurred. Black nationalism, as set out by Marcus Garvey, promotes Black pride, empowerment, unity and self-determination, and Pan-Africanism holds that African people everywhere are one people. That is a claim to dignity and self-government made by a people subjected to colonialism and racism. It is not a claim of racial hierarchy, and it belongs in an answer about self-determination and pride, not in an answer about racialism.

Internationalism is the belief that the world should unite across national boundaries to advance interests held in common. Its relationship with nationalism runs in two directions, and the specification expects both.

Internationalism against nationalism. Two versions reject the nation as the proper political unit:

Form	Core claim	Institutional expression
Liberal internationalism	Nations are interdependent; co-operation and shared rules prevent conflict	The United Nations, founded 1945; international law; trade agreements
Socialist internationalism	Class solidarity matters more than national identity — workers of all countries share an interest against their employers	The internationals of the labour movement; Marx and Engels's call for workers of all countries to unite

Socialist internationalism makes the sharper attack. On this account nationalism is a device that divides workers who share a class interest, persuading them to identify with employers who happen to share their passport and to fight wars in that interest.

Internationalism alongside nationalism. Some nationalists are internationalists too, and Mazzini is the specification's own example. His argument runs: each nation must first be free and unified; free nations, unlike empires, have no reason to fight one another; a Europe of free nations can therefore federate in peace. Nationalism is the route to internationalism rather than its opponent. He founded Young Italy in 1831 and Young Europe in 1834 to pursue both at once.

Liberal nationalists make a related argument, so the two positions can be held together without contradiction:

• Self-determination for all nations means recognising other nations' claims as equal to your own.
• Equal, self-governing nations can build institutions between them, as European states did after 1945.
• Aggression is a failure of nationalism rather than its logical end point.

Where the tension bites. Membership of international organisations transfers decisions away from the nation, so nationalists divide over it. The United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union, voted for on 23 June 2016 by 51.9% on a 72.2% turnout and completed on 31 January 2020, was argued in exactly these terms: sovereignty returned to the nation, against co-operation surrendered by it.

The United Kingdom contains several nations inside a single sovereign state, which makes it an unusually productive case study for every core idea in this content area.

Case study 1 — Northern Ireland and competing nationhoods. Two national identifications share one territory: Irish nationalism, seeking unification with the Republic of Ireland, and Unionism, identifying with the United Kingdom. The institutions are built around that fact rather than around a single national identity. The Assembly and Executive have been sitting with Michelle O'Neill of Sinn Féin as First Minister and Emma Little-Pengelly of the DUP as deputy First Minister since 3 February 2024 — the first time an Irish nationalist has held the office of First Minister.

What it demonstrates:

• Nations can be defined by different people in the same place in incompatible ways, so the boundary of the nation is itself the political question.
• Self-determination can be handled by power-sharing rather than by partition or by a single winner-takes-all vote.
• The nation-state model has limited purchase where two national communities occupy one territory.

Case study 2 — devolution as an answer to self-determination. Compare the three devolved settlements as of September 2026:

	Scotland	Wales	Northern Ireland
Institution	Scottish Parliament, elected by the Additional Member System	Senedd Cymru, 96 members, elected by closed proportional list since May 2026	Northern Ireland Assembly, with mandatory power-sharing
Nationalist party position	SNP, 57 seats (7 May 2026)	Plaid Cymru, 43 seats on 35.4% (7 May 2026)	Sinn Féin holds the First Minister post (since 3 February 2024)
Nationalist demand it answers	Self-government inside the union, with independence still sought	Cultural protection, the Welsh language, and self-government	Recognition of two national identities at once

How to use this in an essay. A question on whether the nation-state is essential to nationalism can be answered through these three cases: nationalist parties have won power in devolved institutions without achieving statehood, which either proves the nation-state is not essential, or proves only that nationalists accept staging posts on the way to it. Take a side.

1. Using "nation" and "state" interchangeably

A state is a sovereign legal and territorial unit; a nation is a community of identification. Nationalism is the demand that they coincide. Getting this wrong makes the rest of the answer imprecise.

2. Treating racialism as mainstream nationalism

The specification describes racialism as the view of a very small group of nationalists. Explain it accurately, place it at the edge of the tradition, and keep it distinct from cultural definitions of nationhood.

3. Reading Garvey as a racialist

Black pride, empowerment, unity and self-determination, together with Pan-Africanism, are claims about dignity and self-government by a colonised and racially oppressed people. Filing Garvey under racialism misreads both him and the specification.

4. Assuming nationalism and internationalism are opposites

They frequently are, and socialist internationalism rejects nationalism outright. Mazzini's position shows they can also be held together, with free nation-states treated as the foundation of a peaceful federation.

5. Ignoring the economy

The specification requires each core idea to be linked to human nature, the state, society and the economy. Nationalists claim a nation should control its own economy, and they divide over protection, trade and international economic institutions.

6. Using undated contemporary examples

Devolved election results, party leaders and government composition change. Date every one: "at the Senedd election of 7 May 2026", "since 3 February 2024". A dated example ages visibly; an undated one silently becomes wrong.