Nationalism as a concept has only held prevalence for a little less than 150 years, a minuscule amount of time when compared to the entire history of human civilization, which stretches back to over 20,000 years ago. With the way nationalism is often detailed, you would think it an eternally-binding concept of societal and political organization. However, it would not be until the 1870s when common ethnicities would finally unify their disparate governments into the modern nation states of Europe, including Germany and Italy.
This is an important fact to realize, especially with the ongoing debate, particularly in Europe, between nationalism and globalism. Both ideologies are relatively new players on the world stage; it is not sufficient to claim nationalism’s superiority based on its being traditional, since it has only been tradition for a mere century and a half! Therefore, both must be judged on their merits alone.
That said, how compatible is nationalism with the global world we live in today? Globalism is self-explanatory in its compatibility. But as for nationalism, how does it stand in a world where information, more than ever, is easily exchanged over new technologies such as the Internet? How is a nationalist government supposed to drum up patriotic support for a conflict by denigrating its foreign neighbors, when its citizens can have a chat in as little as five minutes with those neighbors themselves? How is a nation supposed to see itself as exceptional when its citizens by conversation alone can see its issues are little different from those of foreign nations abroad and its experiences it once thought uniquely its own it finds to be commonly shared ones around the world? These questions make the end of nationalism eventually inevitable. It most likely will not come today. It probably won’t come tomorrow. But over time, perhaps at the close of this century, little will be remembered of national identities other than what’s said in the textbook. Whether that is good or bad- we will have to wait and see.
Globalism, while the eventual result, can be achieved in a variety of ways, some of which are far preferable to others. Whatever way is selected, however, there will inevitably be backlash, which we have already begun to see with the seeming-resurgence of nationalism in Europe, BREXIT, and the election of Donald Trump. As globalism strides forward, it is likely these elements will become increasingly belligerent and even violent, and conflict might be the result of trying to fuse many cultures together, especially those that hold very different values in high esteem. While the result may ultimately be good, it may be likely that the way it is achieved will strike out what benefits it brings with evil.