Nationalism: threat or opportunity to critical intercultural communication?

Abstract

When formulating the theme and question for this special issue in 2021, we could not have anticipated how timely this project would become, with our work compiling the papers from our contributors running parallel to the political and intellectual debates on nationalism that emerged in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The ongoing war in Ukraine marked the end of more than 75 years without international conflict in Europe, reinforcing nationalist discourses, ideological positions, enemy images and military manoeuvrings that contemporary Europeans had come to associate with a distant, violent past. Ukraine reminded us of the dangers of nationalism when the idea is hijacked by political leaders, such as Vladimir Putin, to unite the population against a common enemy. Putin’s ‘greater Russia’ speaks to a common ethnicity, religion, history and language; which includes the Krim peninsula, parts of Eastern Ukraine, and Russian-speaking parts of Estonia, to name a few; echoing the ‘hot’ or ‘ethnic’ nationalism identified by Michael Billig (1995) and Anthony Smith (1991) in the 1990s (Leoussi, 2016). Yet daily reports from Ukraine also showed us how the idea of ‘our’ nation provided the common purpose and power that motivated citizens to stand up and defend their imagined community (Anderson, 1991). Writing in May 2022, the American intellectual Francis Fukyama declared the Ukranians’ struggle an expression of their loyalty to ‘an independent, liberal democratic Ukraine’ (p. 3), insisting that ‘liberalism needs the nation’. Like Billig, Fukuyama accepts that there are many forms of nationalism and national identification – and that ‘societies can exercise agency in choosing among them’ (p. 9). Fukuyama’s comment appears thirty-three years after his famous proclamation of ‘the end of history’ (1989), which would bring about the era when Western-style democracy and ideological liberalism became universally accepted. An age of global principles and solidarity had no need for nations, national culture, and nationalism, which, in the words of British historian Eric Hobsbawm (1990, p. 182), might consequently give way to ‘the new supranational restructuring of the globe’. Over the next twenty years, intellectuals’ representation of globalisation as a phenomenon that had superseded the nation became dominant in the Social Sciences, including Sociology, Anthropology, International Relations, and Intercultural Education. In 2007, the eminent German sociologist Ulrich Bech thus issued this warning against ‘methodological nationalism’: