Goodbye Nations?

At various points in history, many authors have argued that nationalist politics was entering its final phase. In early nineteenth-century liberal thought, there was already the belief that nationalism was a declining phenomenon, destined to disappear soon with the expansion of global trade. The idea that people’s national identity (their nationality) was losing importance due to the expansion of world capitalism was shared by Marx in his youth (though not in his more mature writings). This position enjoyed a certain popularity in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, albeit cyclically: it disappeared during periods when nationalisms erupted or clashed militarily, only to resurface in subsequent periods.

In the 1980s, Eric Hobsbawm suggested that the great increase in studies on nationalism was a sign that the phenomenon had finally entered its concluding historical phase: “The owl of Minerva which brings wisdom, said Hegel, flies out at dusk. It is a good sign that it is now circling around nations and nationalism.” Hobsbawm was correct in noting that studies on this subject had significantly increased during those years; however, his hope, like that of others before him, proved erroneous. Only a few years later, with the fall of the Socialist Bloc and its fragmentation into numerous nation-states, there was an outburst of several nationalist claims and conflicts that were thought to be outdated.

In the relative optimism of the 2000s, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri reiterated the view in Empire that global capitalism was at last wiping out the reactionary narrowness of national belonging. Thus national identity came to be seen not only as something to be rejected politically but also as an issue of minor significance. And yet, in the last decade, we have once again witnessed the resurgence of the nation as a conflicting political identity, largely championed by right-wing or separatist movements. Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, the rise of Scottish independence in the United Kingdom and Catalan independence in Spain, the electoral success of several nationalist right-wing parties across Europe, and the dramatic Russian invasion of Ukraine with increasingly radicalized Russian and Ukrainian nationalisms — all these diverse phenomena share a common denominator: the mobilizing power of national identity.

It is undeniable that the political power of nation-states is diminishing in many parts of the world, weakened by an increasingly globalized economy and the growing strength of transnational corporations and organizations. However, this should not be confused with the political decline of national identities, a conflation Hardt and Negri made in their book. On the contrary, the weakening of nation-states’ power often goes hand in hand with the spread of nationalist sentiments. Globalization, migratory flows, the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state, and the decline of deeply rooted collective identities such as religion and class belonging seem to have strengthened national identity. This is reminiscent of Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s characterization of contemporary society as “liquid,” marked by instability, precariousness, and uncertainty: a society based on fluidity and mobility, where social relations and structures are unstable and changeable, leading to increasing inequality and a loss of community and solidarity. In the face of this reality, national identity has reemerged as a safe haven for people seeking a sense of belonging and community. It has become a symbolic identity to cling to in order to reduce feelings of alienation and uncertainty.

Thus, while neoliberal globalization has uprooted many traditional identities and communal values, the national community has once again become a source of collective identification, revitalizing nationalist politics. According to the World Values Survey of 2017–2022, 88.5 percent of people interviewed worldwide stated they were “very proud” or “quite proud” of their nationality. Furthermore, the survey included only the nationality corresponding to the nation-state of the interviewee, thereby excluding minority nationalities, a factor that would likely have further increased the overall value. In Europe, as shown by the European Quality of Government Index, the nation remains the territorial identity to which citizens feel most attached, more than regional identities and much more than European identity. Finally, the popular classes, particularly those with lower levels of education, tend to be more “nationalized” in their culturalization process. This means they are more responsive to symbolic and cultural elements related to national belonging compared to individuals with higher educational or class backgrounds, who tend to be more culturally cosmopolitan.

Nazionale-Popolare

In light of this situation, the Left cannot simply ignore the existence of national identities. These identities are integral elements of the political and social landscape in which the Left operates and, for the foreseeable future, they do not appear to be diminishing in importance. Thus, calls for the Left to reject national identity are a dead end and risk distancing it from its own popular traditions. On the contrary, it seems necessary for the Left to embrace — at least to some extent and in certain ways — national belonging.

This is not a novel idea: strange as it may seem today, the concepts of “left” and “nation” were originally not far apart. Hobsbawm goes so far as to suggest that these two political concepts not only arose from the same cradle — the French Revolution — but were also in some way synonymous. In the troubled French summer of 1789, the Third Estate declared itself the complete nation, initiating the French Revolution and boosting the very concept of nation at the political level. The estates-based political representation of the realm was about to be supplanted by the idea of the people-nation: the conflation of the nation with a collective entity, the people, as the bearer of sovereignty and in opposition to the privileged classes. When the people of Paris stormed the Bastille on July 14 and took control of the city, they did so in defense of the Third Estate, which had transformed into the National Assembly. Once the National Assembly was fully established, the supporters of the Revolution and the former Third Estate sat on the left side of the chamber. As such, they were described as both “the National Party” and “the Left,” creating the political concept of the Left at the same time.

The example of the French Revolution reminds us of an important element of this discussion: the idea of “the people,” which intersects with both left-wing and national politics and remains a constitutive and overarching concept of contemporary politics. If the aim of the Left is to build popular consensus and pursue politics that address the interests of common and working people, then it must forge an emotional bond with the people. But who exactly are the people? As Ernesto Laclau explained, the people as a sociological category hardly exist and are rather a political construction. This means they do not exist independently of politics; instead, politics gives them shape and meaning. The people are a political construction that unites (or articulates, as Laclau says) a plurality of claims, needs, and identities that are diverse but collectively perceived as ignored by the elite, who hold economic and political power. Through this process, the people become a new political entity that cannot be reduced to the mere sum of its diverse components, as it transcends them into a single unifying identity in which different individuals can recognize themselves. For our discussion, it is crucial to note that it is very difficult to conceive of the people politically other than as a “nation-people.” In the vast majority of contemporary societies, the people largely constitute the national community, and the defense of popular sovereignty takes place within the borders of the nation-state. Moreover, the nation generates rituals, symbols, and cultural references that are crucial in shaping popular identities and a sense of belonging among the people. This further merges the people with the national community.

Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of nazionale-popolare to indicate what is both national and popular. Initially, he specifically related it to cultural productions: literary or artistic works that express the distinctive characteristics of national culture and are recognized as representative by the popular classes. Today we use the term “national-popular” in a more general sense to refer to all those cultural, aesthetic, behavioral, and habitual traits widespread among the common people of a particular country. However, the concept in Gramsci’s writings also goes beyond its cultural dimension and concerns the identification of the popular masses with a common national project. For Gramsci, revolutionary struggle should not fall into “the most superficial cosmopolitanism and anti-patriotism.” Instead, it should forge a sentimental bond with the “people-nation.” Gramsci believed that every revolutionary movement striving to govern must embody and identify with the country itself, and this principle should also be applied to the working class in its hegemonic struggle against the bourgeoisie. This reflection did not arise in a vacuum; it was already sketched in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, when Marx and Engels wrote that the proletariat, to achieve victory, “must constitute itself the nation” and is therefore “itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.” One can hear in these lines the echo of the French Revolution, with the Third Estate turning itself into the nation. But there are different senses of being national.

Examples of this national-popular dimension are endless in the history of the twentieth-century Left. The communist and working-class parties of the past century were deeply rooted in the traditions, history, and culture of their respective countries. This was not a harsh or conservative nationalism but a combination of love of homeland with the imperative need for friendship among all peoples; national identity was an integral part of political identity without undermining a commitment to socialism, progress, and internationalism.

This is precisely the aspect that Jean-Paul Sartre identified as the key to the success of the postwar Italian Communist Party (PCI), which went on to become the strongest communist party in all of Western Europe. As longtime Italian communist Luciana Castellina recounts, Sartre said during one of his visits to Italy, “Now I understand [why the PCI is so strong], the PCI is Italy!” By this, Sartre meant that the party was not a separate vanguard but a body shaped by the same emotions, behaviors, and memories as the Italian people at large.

The history of twentieth-century antifascism is also imbued with patriotism. Examples are numerous, from the Italian communist partisans, who were named after the national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi and who fought against the fascist “traitors of the homeland,” to the Portuguese communists under António de Oliveira Salazar’s regime. As their leader Álvaro Cunhal said in 1946, it is

in the struggles against fascism installed in power that the working classes found their homeland again: Portugal that struggles for freedom and democracy, Portugal that aspires to well-being, progress, and culture, Portugal that wants an honorable place in the world of democratic nations. Fighting against fascism, the Portuguese people learn to sing the Portuguesa [the national anthem] and learn to wield the national flag.

The same holds true for many leftist parties in the Global South, both old and new. The Bolivarian Left in Latin America, particularly exemplified by Hugo Chávez, illustrates this well: a socialist Left steeped in patriotic rhetoric and national symbolism. Chávez’s frequent appearances in a tracksuit bearing the colors of Venezuela were symbolic of this. Yet this did not hinder significant progress toward supranational cooperation among Latin American countries. If Venezuela was the patria, then Latin America was the patria grande.

Hegemony, Counterhegemony, and the Problems of Resignification

If the history recounted thus far sounds too simple, it is because there is yet another crucial issue that must be incorporated: the contemporary hegemony of the Right in defining national identity. In recent years, many Western countries have witnessed the consolidation of right-wing dominance in the realm of national identity, with national identity being politicized and shifting to the right. When we think of national identity and pride today, we frequently associate them with conservatism, the defense of traditions, ethnic belonging, hostility toward diversity, and rhetoric against migrants. What it means to belong to a country and be proud of it is currently heavily controlled by the Right, which has excelled in appropriating this identity and filling it with its own political values.

If the Left wants to put forward a national-popular project, it must do so not simply by incorporating elements of national identity into its discourse but by wresting them away from the Right, giving them an inclusive and progressive interpretation. Borrowing Marx and Engels’s words, it ought to be national, “though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.” To do so, it is necessary to engage in counterhegemony. On paper, this is possible because the nation is neither predetermined nor fixed; national identity and belonging are not univocal phenomena but can assume different meanings and be linked to different sets of political values. Nations are, as argued by Benedict Anderson in his groundbreaking work Imagined Communities, “modular,” and thus “capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations.”

The nation always has a boundary that divides who is part of it and who is not (as Anderson explained, a defining characteristic of the nation is that it is “limited”), but this boundary is ever changing and political. It is a line of exclusion that can be based on diverse criteria, from race to social class, from ethical values to language or culture. Having the privilege to determine this boundary is at the core of the struggle for hegemony over the national terrain and is, in fact, a crucial issue in contemporary politics.

The experience of Podemos in Spain during its early years is perhaps the most systematic example of counterhegemonic politics on the national terrain. The leadership of the party was convinced that, in order to advance a popular and leftist agenda, it was necessary to reclaim national identity from the Right and redefine it. Podemos leaders thus began to recurrently declare their pride in and love for Spain. They praised the patria and their being Spaniards, and they openly labeled their party’s policies as patriotic. On one hand, they did this to attack their political opponents, specifically those on the Right, labeling them as “enemies of Spain” and “anti-patriots” due to corruption, privatization policies, welfare cuts, and tax breaks for the wealthy. On the other hand, they aimed to promote a progressive form of patriotism that left-wing individuals and ethnic minorities could identify with. They did so by defining the country’s core attributes as popular mobilization, solidarity, a welfare state, and a moral community not based on linguistic or ethnic particularism.

Engaging in counterhegemony on the terrain of national belonging is a political choice that appears to be crucial. Failing to do so means leaving the field open for the Right to seize all the national-popular elements that are part of our collective life, associating them with its own conservative ideas. This allows the Right to impose its idea of what the country represents and what it means to be part of it without challenge. The result is a conservative and exclusionary national identity for which migrants and minorities pay the price every day, labeled as nonmembers of the community. For this reason, the founders of Podemos argued, nothing worries the Right more than seeing the emergence of an open and inclusive idea of the nation, with which people of different origins and cultures can fully identify and where loving the country means fighting for quality public schools and hospitals rather than wanting to seal the country’s borders.

However, we must not fall under the illusion that this is a simple political strategy, nor that it is free from risks. Magical solutions rarely exist in politics. If the Right has managed to hegemonize the sense of belonging to a certain country, challenging it with a counterhegemonic project requires resignifying many aspects of national identity — and resignifying is by no means easy. Precisely because resignifying is important, it is necessary to look with open eyes at the issues associated with this political choice.

The first issue is that it requires significant hegemonic strength. Memory plays an important role here, and when a certain meaning of national identity is deeply rooted in the collective imagination, changing it can prove quite difficult. Altering widespread meanings in a country’s common sense usually requires considerable time and power. In this regard, the example of the Italian right is illuminating. Silvio Berlusconi and Matteo Salvini have both been very capable of hegemonizing and changing the meaning of Italian identity, detaching it from the national myth of the Resistance and associating it with anti-communism, cuts to public spending, and free enterprise (in the case of Berlusconi), and xenophobia and hatred of the other (in the case of Salvini). But this was accomplished with political and media power: Berlusconi controlled the country’s most important television channels and used them shamelessly to promote a narrative advantageous for his party, Forza Italia. Salvini benefited for years from dominance on social networks, supported by an aggressive, unscrupulous, and extremely expensive social media apparatus known as La Bestia. Without political or media power, it is difficult to resignify national identity, and such attempts may backfire. National identity, for all the reasons mentioned, is a powerful force. Engaging with it is like playing with fire. If you politicize national identity to use it against the Right but eventually fail to alter its meanings in society, there is a concrete risk that you will have contributed to popularizing words, symbols, and forms of belonging that the Right will continue to exploit for its political goals.

Another issue is that the more you need to resignify, the more it indicates that you are not at ease with the sedimented elements of national identity. You risk being alienated from the popular classes, for whom national cultural references tend to be more common. In short, if the preexisting elements you can rely on to build a left-wing idea of the nation are few, it means you will have to construct an idea of the country with radically new meanings, and this may create difficulties in communicating with already nationalized popular sectors. It is necessary to continuously find a difficult balance between the need to resignify national belonging and pride with progressive meanings and the need to stay close to the words, symbols, and cultural references of the people.

Years ago, when I was interviewing members of Podemos for my doctoral research on the party’s patriotism, they told me how lucky we were in Italy, where, according to them, it would be much easier to reclaim national identity for the Left. They believed this because Italy had Garibaldi, the Resistance, and the victory over Nazi Fascism, from which the new Italy had been born. Meanwhile, they had no similar historical references in Spain and were forced to pursue a patriotism that was strongly rhetorical but devoid of cultural symbols, with a national flag too closely associated with the monarchy and too difficult to resignify. Exemplary of this is the Madrid uprising against Napoleon’s invasion in 1808, often cited by first leader of Podemos Pablo Iglesias as an example of Spanish pride, which likely has much less symbolic power than, for example, the Italian Resistance.

There is one final point that merits discussion: the issue of migration. In an era when European countries are experiencing significant migratory flows — despite governments’ criminal attempts to block them, resulting in the Mediterranean Sea becoming a graveyard for thousands — people with diverse ethnocultural backgrounds increasingly settle in Western cities, frequently becoming victims of poverty, discrimination, and exploitation. How can the Left assert a connection to national identity without turning a blind eye to these individuals?

The very framing of this question suggests that, to some extent, we have already internalized the right-wing discourse on what it means to belong to a particular country. Ethnic and cultural pluralism is considered an issue for the nation only from a right-wing perspective, and challenging this notion is a core aspect of the counterhegemonic effort. Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France is emblematic of this. His idea of France and French pride, as promoted by his party, La France Insoumise, embraces ethnic and religious pluralism. Mélenchon even adopted the concept of “creolization,” the continual blending of different influences that together constitute a national culture. In his words,

being French does not mean belonging to a particular religion or having a given skin color, cooking certain dishes, or loving specific works. To be French in the Republic is to subscribe to the program ‘liberté, égalité, fraternité’ and respect the law. It is the universalism of the French Revolution that allows France to be a creolized country.

It is therefore unsurprising that, despite France Insoumise’s extensive use of national symbols and positive references to France, the party performs very well electorally in the Parisian suburbs, which are home to many individuals originating from outside Europe. This strategy can be complicated by the fact that migrant communities might be less responsive to the use of certain national-popular references specific to the host country, as their own cultural references differ. The goal is to find a balance between the need to resignify national belonging and pride in a manner that fully includes people with migratory backgrounds and the need to remain close to words, symbols, and cultural references that are national-popular. Nonetheless, this objective may be relatively easier to achieve than it seems, given that migrant populations in the host country tend to socialize within the lower strata of society due to discrimination, lack of resources, and limited opportunities. As a result, they come into frequent contact with national-popular cultural and symbolic references, which, as previously mentioned, are more prevalent in the manual working class than in the urban and educated middle class.

Just Another Battleground of Class Struggle

“What I want to demonstrate is that you can be black, come from the suburbs, dress modestly, and still love France. Because France belongs to all of us!” With these words, Stéphane Blé concludes his first candidate speech in the French Netflix series En Place. Stéphane is a social worker from the suburbs of Paris and a leftist, but he is disillusioned with the opportunism, cynicism, and lack of ideals of the center left, so he decides to run for the presidential elections himself. With the slogan “France for Everyone,” Stéphane begins an unconventional and original electoral campaign that, as the series progresses, brings him closer to the possibility of becoming France’s first black president.

Stéphane’s statement illustrates the central argument of this article: the need for a left-wing idea of the country that represents an inclusive and progressive community while challenging the right-wing vision of what the nation stands for. This is a necessary condition for political consensus because, as Michael Harrington wrote in his autobiography, “If the Left wants to change this country because it hates it, then the people will never listen to the Left and the people will be right.” Loving one’s country does not mean loving it as it is, but, in Harrington’s words, “to sense the seed beneath the snow; to see, beneath the veneer of corruption and meanness and the commercialization of human relationships, men and women capable of controlling their own destinies.” It means actively working to change the country while identifying with it and representing it. This is the profound sense of the expression that the proletariat “must constitute itself the nation” that appears in the Communist Manifesto and carries with it the echo of the French Revolution.

To be politically effective, an innovative idea of the country cannot be completely alien to the existing society and its core values. From a socialist perspective, the relationship between the present and future society is indeed always dialectical. Marx did not question the goals of modernity, such as freedom and progress, nor the means to achieve them, such as the development of productive forces, but he argued that none of these modern ideals could be fully realized without overcoming society’s class division. Similarly, to build a new idea of the country, the relationship with the national-popular must be dialectical: references and words are taken from popular culture, leveraging some, attempting to change the meaning of others, and adding new ones. As Gramsci taught us, a new society cannot be born in opposition to popular sentiments and common sense; instead, these must be the starting point, toward a new “collective national-popular will” that transcends and incorporates them into a new vision.

It is undeniable that patriotism also poses risks for the Left, because the sense of national belonging today leans to the right in many European countries and beyond. And when you use the political weapons and words of the opponent, you risk legitimizing those weapons and words without changing them, losing your own values and strategic horizon. What is needed to avoid this pitfall is a comprehensive and counterhegemonic idea of the nation, not a sporadic and instrumental use of the opponent’s rhetorical weapons. A left-wing idea of the country should oppose the right-wing vision by exposing its miseries, hypocrisies, and inhospitableness, presenting itself as a more attractive option. It should not be the exclusionary, ethnically and culturally homogeneous nation of the Right, where everyone fends for themselves at the mercy of market laws, but a solidaristic community that loves its land and rejects all forms of discrimination and marginalization — where the emotional bond with the country does not mean a desire to close the borders but an insistence on the dignity of common people who uphold society through their work.

This does not imply that the Left should shift the grounds of political confrontation solely to the issue of national belonging, nor that it should give it primary political importance. It means recognizing that national identity is not external to the political struggle but is rather one of the battlegrounds where the fight for hegemony takes place — a battleground the Left should not abandon, where it can bring its own values and idea of community, preventing the Right from deciding exclusively what the country represents. Otto Bauer was the first Marxist politician and intellectual to write a treatise on nations from a Marxist perspective, and what emerges from his complex theoretical reflections is that nationality is ultimately an unstable terrain, perpetually in flux and torn by the constant conflict between class viewpoints. In other words, national belonging is just another field for class struggle.

For all these reasons, one cannot simply combine the recognition of national interest with the Left’s battles, because national interest detached from political articulation does not exist. What is in the nation’s best interest depends on what the nation is and where its political boundaries are drawn. It is therefore not a matter of addition but of hegemony: the point is to assert that the Left’s battles are in the national interest.

After all, how could we not treat measures such as expanding and improving public health, schools, and transportation; reducing the tax burden for the working class and increasing it for those with immense wealth; public control of national energy production to initiate a real ecological transition toward clean energy; new laws ensuring no one is discriminated against based on their sexual orientation, gender identity, or skin color or left alone in the face of poverty, uncertainty about the future, and loneliness; and new labor protections that combat capitalist exploitation and low wages as battles for the country? These are left-wing programs that would make the country a better place to live and give it a future after decades of neoliberal policies have worn it out, sold it off, impoverished it, and embittered it, creating enormous inequality and injustice.

A national-popular project can give meaning, credibility, and vigor to left-wing goals, articulating and merging them into an idea of the country.