Nationalism: A Literature Survey.

The article outlines the main theoretical positions in research on nations and nationalism. The normative polarization between primordialist and constructivist positions is projected onto the separation between agency-oriented and structural forms of explanation: where theorists wished to discredit evolutionist notions of national emergence, they focused on agency and when the opposite was true, structural explanations of one type or another were used. Only in the 1980s did nationalism become a developed field of enquiry, with journals dedicated to the study of nations and nationalism. The history of research on nations and nationalism has been the history of a gradual problematization of that view, as authors argued that nations are modern and deliberately constructed, and of an evolutionist backlash defending the nation as a natural category. Theorists have recently begun to get beyond this debate, with more adequate approaches to agency/structure and the interplay of identity/interest. Nationalism theory has no consistent theoretical questions, but has worked around four main problematics: the epoch of nations; the content of nationalist discourse; nationalist political mobilization; and the nationalization of the masses.