It is common to think of nationalism as a modern, secular form of identity that supplanted the influence long exercised by universalistic religions in shaping conceptions of temporal authority, membership, rights or privileges, and obligation in human societies. Under stereotypically modern conditions, religion is supposed to be largely confined to its own spiritual sphere, operating on a separate plane from that of the national. Yet the chapters in Part ii have shown how much more complicated the relationship between transcendentally transnational and boundedly national frameworks of belief and belonging can be. They are shown to operate not on separate, parallel planes, but as fields of belief and action that intersect, converge, and shape – as well as clash with – one another in myriad ways.

Michael Howard maintains that most nation-states that came into existence before the mid-twentieth century were created by war or had their boundaries defined by wars or internal violence.1 The role of war, however, has been neglected in theories of nationalism, which tend to focus on the rise of nations and nation-states as a recent phenomenon generated by various forms of modernization. This comment does not apparently apply to the work of Charles Tilly and Michael Mann, who draw on the historiography of the European early modern “military revolution.”2 Military innovations, they argue, meant that success in warfare required an efficient process of fiscal extraction (taxes), which in turn was dependent on the development of a centralized state administration. Even in these accounts, however, nationalism and nations were relatively late derivatives of these modern processes, emerging in response to state centralizing pressures in the late eighteenth century.

In the century of nationalism, the House of Habsburg ruled over a vast territory in East Central Europe. Second only to Russia in size on the European continent, the Habsburg lands stretched from the Alps to the foothills of the eastern Carpathians and from the shores of the Adriatic to the Sudetes mountain range on the border with Saxony. The core of this territory in the Alps, corresponding roughly to what is today Austria and Slovenia, had been ruled by the Habsburgs from the High Middle Ages. In 1526, the Habsburgs made a decisive step to become East Central Europe’s leading power by acquiring the Bohemian and the Hungarian crowns. After one and a half centuries of warfare against the Ottoman Empire, the long eighteenth century witnessed the Habsburgs’ decisive eastern expansion. First, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they reconquered central Hungary and Transylvania from the Ottomans.

While most critics focus their attentions elsewhere, A Passage to India is at least partly a book about tourism and about the sort of interactions that regularly take place between myriad groups as a consequence of this pastime. There is quite a lot of evidence for reading the novel in this way. The first two of the three sections in the book begin with short chapters written loosely in the form of a guidebook introducing geography, geology, history, and cultural differences. Mrs. Moore and Adela Quested are ultimately tourists anxious “about seeing the real India.”1 Their arrival in Chandrapore spawns relationships and drama around which the plot revolves, including a pivotal crisis experienced during an ill-fated excursion to see the Marabar Caves. The book ends with the contrast of religious festival and touristic gaze as the English characters, along with Muslim protagonist Dr. Aziz, watch a festival related to Lord Krishna.

Fundamentals of our National Polity (Kokutai no hongi), where these quotations are from, was published by Japan’s education ministry in March 1937, months before the nation plunged into war against China and, subsequently, the Second World War.1 A portable canon of imperial ideology, the Fundamentals attacked the alien ideas that had become too prominent in Japanese society, particularly “individualism, which is the root of modern Occidental ideologies.”2 Yet the booklet contained more than simple propaganda; by instructing the imperial subjects to reaffirm their loyalty to the emperor and the nation, it reflected the Japanese state’s attempt to enlist citizens in its revolt against the West. As such, the pamphlet provides a useful historic vantage point. It illuminates, retrospectively, what had gone wrong in Japan’s quest for modernity over the preceding eight decades, which ended in an all-out confrontation with the Allied powers.

Empire, in the Western tradition, was a unitary and universal thing. There was and could be only one empire at any one time, and it was, in principle at least, a world empire. In this case, all roads led to and from Rome. Herodotus had introduced the idea, if not the term, of translatio imperii, the transfer of empire from one ruler to another. In his account the succession was from the Assyrians to the Medes, to the Persians. Later writers saw the Macedonians, in the person of Alexander the Great, as successor to the Persians, and later still it was relatively easy to see the Romans, with their admiration for Greek culture, as heirs to the Hellenistic empire of Alexander.

The relationship between capitalism and nationalism escapes easy generalization – hardly surprising given the many conceptions of nationalism, and the many stages and varieties of capitalism. Let us begin, then, with some ideal-typical definitions.

Nationalism is a form of politicized ethnicity in which a self-identified cultural group seeks to create or succeeds in creating a nation-state of its own. It also refers to ideological goals and tangible policies oriented to the preservation or strengthening of the nation-state.

There are as many ways of defining capitalism as there are of nationalism. For our purposes, this definition is most useful. Capitalism is a political-economic system in which property rights are legally protected by the state, in which prices are set primarily by supply and demand in a market composed of profit-seeking entrepreneurs or companies, usually (but not always) employing free wage labor.

Empires and nations pull in different directions. Empires are founded on principles of institutionalized differences and distinctions, both laterally between peoples or geographies and vertically between those on top whose superiority grants them the right to rule over others and those below whose inferiority condemns them to be ruled by others. Nations, in contrast, are imagined and affective communities that promote, at least rhetorically if not always in practice, the commonality, horizontal equivalency, and homogeneity of the population that constitutes the nation. A nation at its inception is a political claim that a shared culture, ethnic, political, or religious, gives a people the right to self-rule, and possibly to sovereignty and statehood. At one end of the political spectrum, empires operate through hierarchy and difference between subjects and rulers, while at the other end, nations function on the basis of equality and shared nature, whether ethnic, religious, or political, of their citizens.

The main debates about nationalism during the past two decades have concentrated on the effects of changing means of communication and processes of de- and reterritorialization. The entangled web of relations which traversed national boundaries did not produce “the utopia of a post-national history,” but the “stabilization and territorialization of the nation-state,” in Sebastian Conrad’s view.1 Whereas the dynamics of nationalism have generally been located within nation-states, as “imagined communities,” “invented traditions,” or reactions to modernization, Conrad’s own case studies show that “the shifts and changes in the discourse of nationalism … appear not only as effects of internal trajectories, as the familiar picture would suggest, but just as much of the larger process we retrospectively call globalization.”

The Dutch Empire lasted from 1600 to 1975 and beyond; even now there are some Caribbean island dependencies left. The size, shape, and nature of the empire has evolved and altered, but over those centuries the Dutch colonies have been an important, if fluctuating, component of the national consciousness. Economic advantages were very considerable, but arguably the Dutch gained just as much in terms of self-confidence and status for their small nation: in the nineteenth century the empire was seen as absolutely essential in terms of both economics and prestige. Even in the twenty-first century, a centrist prime minister could call for a return to “the mentality of the VOC” (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, United East Indies Company), a remark that was not universally well received.

Developing “friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples” is one of the purposes of the United Nations Organization, as stated in the founding charter of 1945. The principle of self-determination has even become a right through the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples (December 1960). The Declaration states that: “All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” Self-determination has thus entered international law. Strangely enough, however, nowhere are the bearers of this right defined: who are the peoples entitled to claim self-determination? This omission is not there by chance. Indeed, the definition of peoplehood is far from evident. Should a people be defined on a territorial basis, i.e. include all the population living within a given territory delimited by given boundaries?

Genuine, refined, and updated scholarship in recent decades has gradually refuted the view of nationalism as a strictly modern phenomenon. That view in general had tended to interconnect nationalism with the industrial revolution and capitalism. According to this approach, the objective emergence of national markets combined with subjective manipulations by interested capitalists served to mold, often invent, nationalism; the conspicuous political expressions of this modern process are – per the modernists – the national states of western Europe. By contrast, my approach criticizes this dogmatic, often Marxist and Eurocentric, view, and is closely related to the new keen scholarship, which explores nationalism and nationhood, also beyond Europe, deep into antiquity, and aspires to avoid dogmas which ignore the rich, variegated, and eventful history of ethnopolitical identities. The Jewish nationalist case, as we shall see, conspicuously fits into the meaningfully nuanced long history category.

The nation-state is undoubtedly the most important political formation in modern world history. It is universally recognized and aspired to, but not universally realized. The nation is never a finished project, and nationalism, which is understood here as the cultural politics that has the nation as its subject and its object, derives its energy and motivating force from perceived threats from within and without. While nationalism is a modern phenomenon, religion is often regarded as either ancient or transcending history. Before the nineteenth century, religion everywhere in the world was an integral part of statecraft. The legitimation of rulers came from heaven and was mediated by priestly and monastic classes. This is true in Christendom, but also in other major religions like Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Shintoism.

Is nationalism compatible with Islamic belief and practice? Debates on this question began with the rise of modern nationalism in the Muslim world during the nineteenth century and continue in varying forms in the twenty-first century. The middle of the twentieth century marked an important moment in the evolution of these debates. Muslim leaders and activists worked to define the political and cultural identity of the Muslim countries that were becoming independent from European imperialism. They were also defining the possible relationships between Islam and nationalism. The broad spectrum of their views reflects the fundamental issues involved in deciding whether nationalism is compatible with Islam.

On 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, a young Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Austrian heir presumptive, Franz Ferdinand. By killing the archduke (and his wife), Princip set in motion the well-oiled wheels that would, just a month later, lead to the outbreak of what George F. Kennan called “the great seminal catastrophe of [the twentieth] century,”1 the First World War. It resulted in the demise of most European monarchies and empires, and – by extension – triggered the next two global conflicts, the Second World War and the Cold War. Princip was a member of the secret Serbian society the “Black Hand,” which had grown in response to the illegal occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Habsburg Monarchy in 1908. He shot Franz Ferdinand to intimidate Austria-Hungary so that it would let go of Bosnia and Herzegovina.2 This assassination demonstrates how terrorism and nationalism can be intertwined and how potent and destructive this mix can be.

In 1921, Marianne Weber published one of the greatest works of her late husband, Max, a book destined to become one of the foundations of modern social theory. Economy and Society was of such a scope and breadth that it touched on almost all aspects of social, economic, and political thought and, inevitably, a section was devoted to the nation. According to Weber, the latter could never be defined unambiguously, in terms of the qualities and traits shared by those who saw themselves as its members. The nation, he argued, meant “above all, that it is proper to expect from certain groups a specific sentiment of solidarity in the face of other groups.” Thus, “the concept belongs in the sphere of values” and there “is no agreement on how these groups should be delimited or about what concerted action should result from such a solidarity.”

When the German national parliament, the Bundestag, held a ceremony to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War on 8 May 2015, the historian Heinrich August Winkler was asked to deliver the main address. In his speech, Winkler confirmed the central role of National Socialism and the Holocaust for German national identity. Germany’s responsibility for genocide and war meant, seventy years after the events, a special responsibility toward Israel, and for the states of east-central and eastern Europe, which had suffered most terribly under German occupation, and for the European Union project as a project of peace and reconciliation in a continent where German hypernationalism had brought destruction on a hitherto unprecedented scale.