Frontiers in Social Science features new research in the flagship journals of the Social Science Research Council’s founding disciplinary associations. Every month we publish a new selection of articles from the most recent issues of these journals, marking the rapid advance of the frontiers of social and behavioral science.
In this article, authors analyze how histories of geopolitical competition and conflict determine which forms of nationalism, and who they include and exclude, arise within 43 countries around the world.
Geopolitical competition and conflict play a central role in canonical accounts of the emergence of nation-states and national identities. Yet work in this tradition has paid little attention to variation in everyday, popular understandings of nationhood. We propose a macro-historical argument to explain cross-national variation in the types of popular nationalism expressed at the individual level. Our analysis builds on recent advances on the measurement of popular nationalism and a recently introduced geopolitical threat scale (Hiers, Soehl, and Wimmer 2017). With the use of latent class analysis and a series of regression models, we show that a turbulent geopolitical past decreases the prevalence of liberal nationalism (pride in institutions, inclusive boundaries) while increasing the prevalence of restrictive nationalism (less pride in institutions, exclusive boundaries) across 43 countries around the world. Additional analyses suggest the long-term development of institutions is a key mediating variable: states with a less traumatic geopolitical history tend to have more established liberal democratic institutions, which in turn foster liberal forms of popular nationalism.
Through the study of fascistic nationalism in postcolonial Korea, this article argues for the need to rethink existing Eurocentric approaches to the concept of fascism and broaden its geographic and temporal applicability.
The study of fascism has long been dominated by a Eurocentric perspective that dismisses the presence of fascist ideologies and movements outside the interwar European context. But existing scholarship has been trapped in a circular logic that inevitably disqualifies non-European cases for not fitting the criteria for fascism determined by specifically European historical experiences. The existence of nationalist discourses in postcolonial Korea—which vehemently emphasized the supremacy of the ethnic nation while calling for a third way beyond capitalism and communism—that strongly resembled European fascism, however, demonstrates the possibility that fascism can exist not just outside Europe but also even in anticolonial nationalisms. Through the study of fascistic nationalism in postcolonial Korea, this article argues for the need to rethink existing approaches to the concept of fascism and broaden its geographic and temporal applicability.