Nationalism, territoriality and national territorial belonging

Abstract

Most studies of nationalism are based on an understanding of the nation as a cultural collectivity that can be located in historical terms in the passage from the pre-modern to the modern era. Rather less attention is paid to spatial considerations. In this light, the paper argues that we cannot fully understand nationalism and its relationship to the nation unless we take into account territory. Firstly, nationalists must make claims over territory, since when they seek some form of self-government for the Nation, such political power is premised on the possession of territory. At the same time, such claims and control over territory are justified by fusing nation and territory so that nation and territory come to be seen to belong to each other. The paper challenges the idea of national territorial control based on national territorial belonging from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective, before going on to explore some of the consequences of such a territorial understanding of nationalism, namely that the nation is a category based on spatial separation and thus all nationalist movements must conceive of the nation, at least partially, in exclusive, non-civic terms.