Civil War Nationalism

In 2018, at a rally in Houston, President Donald Trump announced to cheering crowds: “I am a nationalist!” The context was the imposition of tariffs on imports. “For once we’re taking care of ourselves.” Had it been delivered a century earlier (probably in Europe), such a pronouncement would likely have been followed by a catalogue of enemies––rival states, minorities, communists. But for Trump the enemies of nationalists were, and are, the “globalists,” who he identified with the Democrats.

Nationalism, many predicted, would be a thing of the past in what Clifford Geertz called “the post-wall world.” Globalization was expected to usher in a “flat world,” as Thomas Friedman announced in 2005. An interconnected world where collaboration and competition on a level playing field of trade would replace conflict. Frictionless circulation of goods, services, and information would breed convergence and quell national hostilities.

But, rather than through convergence, the world had become flat in a different sense, as Olivier Roy observes in The Crisis of Culture. The French title of his 2022 book is L’Aplatissement du Monde––the flattening of the world, by which he means not the absence of barriers but a cultural flattening, or rather the loss of culture as such. This may have reduced cultural disparities, but it has not quelled nationalist sentiments.

This is not the first time post-nationalist optimism had been frustrated. A century and a half before Friedman, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels made a similar prediction. “The bourgeoisie has ... given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country,” they wrote in the Communist Manifesto. “National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible” (a bold assumption to make amid “the spring of nations”). Yet, just when they were supposed to unite against the oppressors of their class, German, Russian, and other workers of the world enthusiastically marched off to kill each other for no good reason but the pride of their nations. Carl Schmitt drew the obvious conclusion: “the energy of nationalism is greater than the myth of class conflict.” The treatment of migrants, many of them laborers, by members of the working class evinces the lingering relevance of this observation.

If Marxists saw nationalism as a form of false consciousness, liberals often spurn it as archaic. Even as keen an observer as Tony Judt could write in 2003 that the nation-state was an anachronism in “a world of individual rights, open frontiers and international law.” Now it seems that it is these latter notions that might become anachronisms.

False consciousness or not, nationalism is proving more resilient than many of its detractors. Nationalism is forever returning, but––as Sigmund Freud said of the repressed––it returns, but in altered forms.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nationalism inflamed, even when it did not ignite, international conflicts. Now the main front is the home front. Our era is shaped less by wars than by civil wars. In the early 1990s, the German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote an essay titled “Civil War” in which he observed that political aggression had been domesticated. Enzensberger was looking at internal violence––militias in Afghanistan and the Balkans, African warlords, German skinheads, and rioters in Paris and Los Angeles––and what he saw was violence without conviction, violence that had “freed itself from ideology.”

The current civil wars, however, are mostly cold wars, conducted not in inner-city alleyways, but in legislatures, courtrooms, and the court of public opinion. And there is a lot of conviction in these cold civil wars , even if not a systematic ideology (they do not promote universal recipes as communism, fascism, and liberalism did before). These are not “wars about nothing at all,” as Enzensberger saw the civil wars of his time.

The current civil wars are about narrative and identity. (Is it surprising that an era of identity politics leads to identity wars?) Rather than a “clash of civilizations,” suggesting a homogenized West confronting a uniform East, we are faced with parallel clashes within civilizations. And the question at the heart of these civil wars is: what is the nation?

Nationalism is a strategic weapon in these civil wars. The nationalist warriors do not hurl Molotov cocktails; they refashion history and tradition. They use the instruments of constitutional democracy but only to upend it from within, making it subservient to the needs of the nation. Or rather of the nation as they conceive it. Their enemies are not other nations or a colonizing empire but primarily their fellow citizens who hold a different social morality, a different conception of the nation. The current fault lines are internal: nationalists against globalists, conservatives against liberals, traditionalists against secularists. Though these concepts are hardly synonymous, the social categories they designate are largely overlapping.

Classic nationalism was about self-determination, which meant release from alien domination and the sovereignty to determine a group’s own destiny. This included the liberty to define and redefine its identity and to remake its culture. That is why many nationalists saw nation-building as an opportunity to forge a new national culture (think of Kemalist Turkey, Tito’s Yugoslavia, or Zionism). The new nationalists often reject these national cultures in favor of real or imagined primeval identities. They have an essentialist conception of the nation, only tangentially and contingently related to its actual constituents.

Rather than self-determination, the new nationalism is about predetermination and pre-commitment. Actual living citizens are not sovereign to define their identity—instead they are committed to identities fixed and defined for them by previous generations. As cultures and traditions are never closed and determinate, these “essential” identities are highly selective. They tend to be socially conservative, sexually repressive, ethnocentrist, traditionalist, and masculinist. All other eras and aspects of national history, culture, and tradition are ignored or spurned as foreign influences, imposed by others or imported by soulless copycats. These atavistic identities are the justification for authoritarian impositions that supposedly express the “real will” of the people. Those who dispute them are by definition disloyal and dislocated, not genuine members of “the people.” This is the political substance of civil war nationalism, one far more important than the occasional populist rhetoric used by some of its champions that has captured so much attention.

The new nationalism is also reshaping the topography of international relations. The Cold War opposed alliances of statesalong ideological lines. NATO versus Warsaw Pact. In the “post-wall” era, an alliance of movements has replaced the alliance of blocs. When a French court recently convicted Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Rally, of embezzlement, Hungary’s Prime Minister Victor Orbán immediately tweeted “Je suis Marine!” Other nationalists around the world also rushed to express solidarity.

The network of like-minded leaders and parties that Orbán was central in facilitating is evident and in some contexts operational. The participation of many European nationalists in the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the United States and the formation of CPAC Hungary, as well as that of the Patriots for Europe group in the European Parliament are just the most glaring examples––I suspect the more significant collaborations are less glaring. It is a coalition of nationalists who see each other as brothers in arms. Their enemies are not other nations but other factions within their own. Unlike the Cold War or imperial alliances, this association is not about expanding spheres of influence or building military coalitions; it is more a fraternity of previous underdogs banding together to fortify their domestic power. What unites them is not a shared universalist vision, but an overlapping political agenda––to dismantle the liberal order.

The emergent Nationalist International demands an equally spirited liberal coalition. This requires more than the expression of moral outrage or treating authoritarian nationalism as an aberration that must simply go away so we can return to the good old times before Trump and Brexit. The vision of a free society must be refashioned in full cognizance of the betrayals of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. It should not dismiss people’s longing to belong or delude itself that technology will dissolve identity. But, at the same time, it must not surrender to the manipulative exploitation of these all-too-human traits.

Ondřej Slačálek is assistant professor of political science at Charles University, Prague. He was a guest at the IWM in 2025.