Nazionalismo

This entry covers the concept of nationalism across three main dimensions. It opens with a definitional framing that highlights the semantic plurality of the term — ideology, belief system, psychological disposition — and its foundational claim that the nation constitutes the legitimate basis of political order. The second section traces the historical trajectory of nationalism from its late-eighteenth-century origins in German Romantic thought, through its transformation in the wake of the French Revolution, to its nineteenth-century consolidation as the dominant principle of political modernity. It examines the divergent trajectories of civic and ethnic nationalism, follows the radicalization of the concept in the age of imperialism and total war, and charts its subsequent global diffusion as an anticolonial idiom in the post-1945 period, before turning to its contemporary resurgence in the context of globalization and populist politics. The third section surveys the principal theoretical frameworks developed within the social sciences to account for nationalism as a historical phenomenon, from Hans Kohn's foundational civic/ethnic distinction to the modernist approaches of Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson, and the ethno-symbolist alternative proposed by Anthony D. Smith. The entry concludes with an analysis of illiberal nationalism as a contemporary ideological formation, exploring its convergence with authoritarian governance, economic nationalism, and the politics of memory, particularly in post-communist Eastern Europe. Throughout, nationalism is presented as an inherently protean category that oscillates between inclusion and exclusion, civic universalism and ethnic particularism, emancipatory politics and authoritarian closure.