The New Nationalism’s Utopia of Industrial Society

New nationalists have delivered several surprises over the last 15 years. The first is the level of their success. But what is even more surprising is their profile. These nationalists mostly do not care about national culture; language is mostly secondary in their mind; and they are definitely not obsessed with searching the “spirit of the nation.” Quite the contrary! Their politics is almost a copy-and-paste version of one another’s. Even their claim to fight for national sovereignty is secondary to a struggle against the “decadence” of liberal culture and migrant “others,” for “western civilization.”

If once the nation was embodied by an anonymous, heroic “unknown soldier” and leaders fit to be represented in statues in city squares, now the representative of the nation can be a Père Ubu-like figure, a bankrupt entrepreneur well-known equally for his “grab them by their pussy” boast and for the political slogan “Make America Great Again.” It is as if the nation’s main task were to demonstrate inclusiveness: “Look how ugly and uncultured I am, and I still can represent the nation.” You can be whoever you want and still be part of the nation; the only condition is to win the correct passport in the lottery of birth. As the historian Holly Case wrote, unlike the dictators of the early 20^th century, today’s authoritarian leaders do not want to create a “new man.” The new nationalist leader does not call on the individuals that make up the nation to “mobilize all your forces for your community” but simply to “relax, bro.”

In our contemporary context, it may seem strange to remember Ernest Gellner. His theory of nationalism, which was often challenged even during his lifetime, seems very far removed from our reality. Above all, he defined nationalism as the ideology that cultural and political units should overlap, but does this make any sense in a context where nationalism does not care very much about national culture?

Gellner also connected the invention and success of modern nationalism with the advent of industrial society and its tendency toward equality, as opposed to the extreme hierarchy of agrarian society. However, some have questioned Gellner’s argument regarding this connection, including Rogers Brubaker who pointed out that Gellner demonstrates a functional logic for why industrial society needs nations but definitely not that historically industrial society produced the nation. The problem today is not only that we live in societies that have been described as “post-industrial” or “de-industrialized” for almost 50 years but that we do not live in a world that exhibits a tendency toward equality as depicted by Gellner. Instead, we are faced with deepening inequality, and contemporary nationalism contributes to this phenomenon. The almost cartoonish illustration of this was the recent inauguration of Donald Trump, which could also be considered as the coming-out of the US oligarchy.

The question this raises is clear: if nationalism once worked as a promise of some level of equality, as a negation of a previous society of “estates,” and as a coping mechanism for accepting some level of inequality within the nation, how can it work today given the obscene level of inequality—especially when nationalism contributes to this inequality, giving even more advantages to the people who are already at the top of the oligarchic pyramide and are trying to raise inequality to an almost unimaginable level?

In my view, there are three interconnected answers.

First, contemporary nationalism is strongly linked to the social Darwinist imaginary. Those who have something simply have it: those who do not have it have themselves to blame and no one else. This is a “natural” situation and any attempt to change it makes things worse. And any power relationship is legitimate. After decades of neoliberalism, one cannot doubt where this came from—the difference is in emphasis, not in content.

Second, and even more important, this social Darwinist imaginary somehow corresponds to experience. In a world that is becoming interconnected ever faster, the huge amount of illegitimate injustices is much more visible. The climate crisis, for example, is exacerbating the extent of these injustices. This can be read as definitive confirmation of the diagnosis of the Hungarian philosopher Gaspar Mikloś Tamás, who referred to post-fascism as the loss of the horizon of universal citizenship, the acceptance that the fate of a huge part of humanity will not include the basic human and political rights that the rest take for granted. First formulated in the late 1990s, this might sound a typical example of the radical left-wing excessive use of the word fascism, but in its core Tamás’s diagnosis has unfortunately proven correct.

The radical nature of global inequality is evident in mass migration and wars. It is no longer the case that we can only watch the suffering in distant countries on our screens with mixed feelings. In Western societies, there is a widespread belief that mass migration can cause exactly the violence that migrants are fleeing. This brings back a dichotomy discussed by Gellner: that between the order of coercion and violence and the order of economic inequalities and redistribution. While migration is linked to both, the contemporary situation looks like an illustration of Gellner’s thesis that the order of violence and coercion plays a more important role. As images of migration conjur images of disruption, nationalists can harvest fear. In this context, even obscene economic inequality can be accepted. Confronted with images of disruption and collapse, people are inclined to accept the wealth and power of billionaires—and it can be even reassuring for them to have the feeling that such wealthy and powerful men are on their side.

Third, while contemporary nationalists are often depicted as purely negativist because they focus on rejecting the liberal world, they have also a positive dimension: the return to industrial society. While every nationalist movement needs an image of a golden age of the nation, these nationalists do not seek it in the distant past. Their golden age (or in their words “normal times”) is the industrial decades after the Second World War, which in retrospect can be seen as a time of order and wealth. Since industry today is often spatially dispersed due to globalization and often attacked by environmentalist movements, nationalists come as its vocal defenders.

While in the period relevant to Gellner, the industrial revolution was a modernizing and innovative force, today the defence of traditional industry, which has been uprooted and relocated, has a conservative character. While the 19^th-century nationalists could seek the “heartland” of their nation in the collective memory of the rural areas and in their reconstructed (and heavily edited) culture, for contemporary nationalists, the “heartland” is the culture of former industrial centers with factories that have been shut down and disappointed voters. These are people who can embrace the nationalists’ promises to humiliate peacock-like liberals and to reconstruct “normal” industrial society.

Nevertheless, two key questions remain unanswered. Do Père Ubu in the White house and the other new nationalists in power mean what they promise? And, if so, are they capable of rebuilding the old-style Western industry?

At least one thing we know for sure: even if the answer to both questions is “yes,” the return of industry to Western countries will not have the impact that nationalist leaders promise and their followers expect. It will neither bring about the utopia of a “normal world” nor overcome contemporary social problems and uncertainties. Of course, this is not the purpose of utopias. Their purpose is not to be materialized but to inspire social action and hope. The industrial utopia of the new nationalists is the element of hope in their imaginary.

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