Nationalism and the Political Theology of Populism: Affect and Rationality in Contemporary Identity Politics

Abstract

Nationalism and nation-state-building in Europe have in the modern period always centered round the question of cultural and ethnic homogeneity and the ideal of congruity between politics, culture and borders (Gellner 1983). Importantly, however, this has consistently been a homogeneity which has been guaranteed by states which, in opposition to the ancien régime, either spearheaded or were the primary object of the European modernization process. These states have since developed into safeguards of national loyalties based on sentiments of self-abnegation and sacrifice rather than selfish interest. European national identities are therefore in a very fundamental sense state identities, since they presuppose an interventionist state apparatus able to uphold not just the sovereignty of the nation-state on the international stage, but also domestic equality and freedom for and among its citizens in a way that commands their respect, even devotion (this argument is further developed in Hedetoft 2018). The identity of citizens may have started as a rational and calculated undertaking, but it always ends up as a deeply affective commitment (Hvithamar 2009). The central concepts of ‘nation’, ‘people’ and ‘citizens’ need to be briefly defined. They are often used interchangeably, but there are subtle differences (Yack 2012). Nation is imaginative, mythical and pre-political, the subjunctive root of ‘the people’, which is per se indicatively linked to its state through policies of ascription, self-definition and borders, and the third, citizens, indicates the individual members of the people as a collective political community, subdividing this ‘body’ into ethnic (original) and civic (newcomer) members. Together they provide the vertical (state-to1