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Ideas Of Nationalism

Decent Essays

Nations are created by specific social forces which promote a sense of ‘nationhood’ among the population. Because of the diversity of the conditions, nationalism has manifested itself in different forms depending on the needs of the people. States are generally multinational, rarely purely homogeneous and are quite often polytechnic. In a nation state, patriotism, as a sentiment, plays a crucial role in legitimizing the political authority of the state. Nationalism has become synonymous with patriotism.
Nationalism has developed from multiple and often overlapping factors encompassing social, psychological, economic, political and cultural factors. Nationalism develops when people have a common goal for the future. Industrial society necessitates literacy, since the members of the work force must be interchangeable with one another. This need leads to mass education, the homogenization at a basic level of the population, and social atomization. As a result of this process, the community augments until it encompasses the whole society. What makes each of the following modernist theorists distinct is their contribution to this picture. Deutsch introduced the idea of nationalism as a process; Anderson introduced the importance of print media; Gellner described the role of industrial society and mass education; and Hobsbawm showed how traditions, once invented, perpetuate nationalism. The issue with these theorists is that they assume perfect homogeneity and that nationalism

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