Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Nationalism can be both an ideology with specific constituent ideas or a set of sentiments, loyalties, and emotional predispositions. Outside Africa, nationalism emerged in the course of the development and maturation of the European nation-state. For many European and later African nationalists, no distinction was made between loyalty to the state as a system of authority (vertical allegiance) and loyalty to the nation as a fellowship of community (horizontal allegiance). To most nationalists, one's own state or nation was entitled to supreme loyalty. In the history of Europe, nationalism emerged with the decline of two earlier paramount allegiances – the erosion of more localized feudal fiefdoms, on the one hand, and the decline of the transnational influence of the Church in Christendom, on the other. Defeudalization and the beginnings of secularization left a fertile ground for new foci of fidelity. The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 had been the midwife of the new nation-state. By the eighteenth century nationalism had become one of the ideological forces of Europe. In Africa, defeudalization sometimes took the form of detribalization – to be followed by wider allegiances. The political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was complex, but it did include a nationalist tendency. His distinction between “the general will” and “will of all” was a distinction between the inviolate will ... log in or subscribe to read full text