Political Ideological Theories of Nationalism: State and Identity

When we talk about nationalism, it is tempting to assume that nations have always existed and that people naturally feel a deep bond with their countrymen. Political ideological theories of nationalism challenge this assumption directly. Instead of treating the nation as something ancient and natural, these theories argue that national identity is largely a product of the modern state and the political interests that shape it. Scholars such as John Breuilly, Anthony Giddens, and Paul Brass have shown how states and political elites actively manufacture a sense of “us,” using power, institutions, and symbols to bind diverse populations into a single political community. This article explains how these thinkers understand the deep link between the state and national identity.

What political ideological theories of nationalism actually claim 🔗

Political ideological theories belong to the broader modernist school of nationalism studies. The central claim of this school is straightforward: nations are not timeless. They are recent creations that emerged alongside modern political and economic structures. Where older “primordialist” views treat national feeling as a natural, almost biological attachment, the political approach insists that national identity is constructed, and that the construction is driven by political power.

Two ideas sit at the heart of this approach. The state comes first: nationalism is tied to the rise of the centralised modern state and its institutions. Elites do the building: dominant groups consciously shape national identity to serve their political and economic interests. National unity, in this reading, is not something a people simply discover. It is something that is produced and maintained through deliberate political work.

John Breuilly: nationalism as a form of politics 🔗

John Breuilly, a professor of nationalism and ethnicity at the London School of Economics, gave this perspective one of its clearest statements in his 1982 book Nationalism and the State. His core argument is that nationalism should be understood as a form of politics that arises in relation to the modern state. In other words, nationalism is not primarily about culture or sentiment. It is a political instrument used to gain, exercise, and legitimise state power.

Why culture is not the starting point 🔗

Breuilly deliberately rejects the conventional view that nationalism grows out of a pre-existing cultural identity. He turns the explanation around. Rather than culture producing nationalism, he shows how elites, social groups, and even foreign governments deploy nationalist appeals to mobilise popular support in their struggles over the state. Nationalism becomes a way of creating a shared identity where one did not clearly exist before, precisely because that identity is politically useful.

The state as both target and tool 🔗

For Breuilly, the modern state is the focal point of nationalist politics. Nationalist movements either seek to capture an existing state, build a new one, or reshape the one they have. He supports this with a wide historical sweep, examining national opposition in early modern Europe, the unification movements in Germany, Italy, and Poland, separatism within the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, and the anti-colonial nationalism that followed the Second World War. Across all these cases, the common thread is that nationalism is a political response organised around the structure of state power.

Anthony Giddens: the nation-state as the container of modern society 🔗

Anthony Giddens, the British sociologist and former director of the London School of Economics, approaches the question from the angle of social theory. In The Nation-State and Violence (1985), he offers a sociological analysis of the modern nation-state and its connection to the means of waging war. For Giddens, you cannot understand national identity without understanding the institutional power of the state that produces it.

The nation-state as a “power container” 🔗

Giddens treats the nation-state not merely as one institution among many but as the defining and integrating institution of modern societies. The modern state developed unprecedented capacities that earlier political units lacked. Two are especially important in his account. The state achieved administrative control over a clearly bounded territory, made possible by surveillance, record-keeping, and communication. It also claimed a monopoly over the means of violence within that territory, building professional armies and police forces.

These capacities allowed the state to penetrate the everyday lives of its population far more deeply than any pre-modern ruler could. As the state defined borders, standardised administration, and tracked its citizens, it simultaneously created the bounded “society” that people came to imagine as their nation. National identity, in this view, is closely tied to the rise of the bureaucratic and military machinery of the modern state.

Surveillance, citizenship, and belonging 🔗

An important consequence follows. As the state extended citizenship rights, it also drew sharper lines between insiders and outsiders. To be a citizen was to belong to the nation; to belong was to be governed, counted, and protected by the state. National identity thus becomes inseparable from the administrative reach of the state. Giddens connects this development to capitalism and industrialism, arguing that the modern nation-state emerged through the same historical processes that reshaped the economy.

Paul Brass: elites, instruments, and the politics of identity 🔗

Paul Brass brings this political approach directly into the study of South Asia, which makes his work especially relevant for understanding nationalism in the subcontinent. Brass is the leading voice of the “instrumentalist” approach to ethnic and national identity, which he developed in his landmark 1974 study Language, Religion and Politics in North India.

Identity as a political resource 🔗

Instrumentalism treats ethnic and national identity as a resource that leaders use to pursue concrete goals such as power, jobs, resources, and recognition. Brass argued that the consolidation of ethnic identities resulted from communal elites successfully mobilising their communities around carefully selected cultural markers, whether language, religion, or shared history. Identity here is not a fixed inheritance. It is something that elites emphasise, downplay, or reshape depending on what serves their interests in a given political moment.

Why only some identities become political 🔗

One of Brass’s most useful questions was about variation. India contains hundreds of potential ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups, yet only some of them have successfully demanded a separate state, reservations, or official status for their language. His answer was that mobilisation depends on elite competition. He argued that ethnic conflict occurs only when there is competition either between indigenous and external elites or between rival indigenous elites. Where elites find it advantageous to mobilise a community, identity becomes politicised; where they do not, it stays dormant.

The role of the centralising state 🔗

Brass also stressed that ethnicity and nationalism are social and political constructions tied to the activities of a centralising state rather than reflections of primordial identity. National and ethnic movements emerge from the interactions between the leadership of a centralising state and the elites of non-dominant groups, often on the peripheries. His famous debate with Francis Robinson over Muslim separatism in northern India captured this divide: Brass took the instrumentalist position that identities are mobilised for political ends, while Robinson defended a more primordial reading. The disagreement remains a classic in the study of identity politics.

Symbols, rituals, and the manufacture of unity 🔗

A common thread running through these theories is the emphasis on symbols and rituals as tools of nation-building. If national identity is constructed, then states and elites need practical means to make it feel real and shared. This is where the idea of “invented traditions,” associated with historian Eric Hobsbawm, becomes important. Invented traditions are ritualistic or symbolic practices that imply continuity with the past but are in fact recent and deliberately constructed, designed to instil values and foster unity through repetition.

Flags, national anthems, public holidays, monuments, school curricula, and official ceremonies all perform this work. They take an abstract idea, the nation, and give it visible, repeatable, emotional form. A child saluting the flag every morning is being gently enrolled into a national community. The point is not that these symbols are fake, but that they are produced, and that they serve a political function of binding diverse people together under a single identity.

The connection to economic and political interests 🔗

Why go to all this trouble? Political ideological theories answer that national unity serves real interests. A unified national market needs a standardised language and mobile, literate workers, which is why industrial states invested heavily in mass education and common languages. A government needs legitimacy, so it presents itself as the natural representative of “the people.” Elites competing for power need a loyal base, so they craft narratives of belonging and grievance. National identity, in short, is shaped to serve the political and economic projects of those who build it.

Applying these theories to nationalism in the subcontinent 🔗

These ideas are especially illuminating for understanding nationalism here. The freedom movement did not simply awaken an ancient, ready-made nation. Leaders consciously created new symbols and narratives capable of uniting an extraordinarily diverse population. The spinning wheel, the tricolour, and the slogan of “unity in diversity” were modern constructions that helped forge a shared national consciousness across regions, languages, and religions. The spread of link languages and a common system of administration, much of it inherited from colonial structures, gave that consciousness institutional weight.

Brass’s work on language and religion shows the same logic operating after independence, as movements for linguistic states and the politics around community identity reflected elites mobilising cultural markers within a centralising democratic state. Giddens helps explain how the post-colonial state’s administrative reach, its censuses, borders, and bureaucracy, shaped who counted as belonging. Breuilly reminds us that all of this was, at bottom, a contest over the structure and direction of state power.

Strengths and limits of the political approach 🔗

The great strength of these theories is that they take power seriously. They explain why national identities are mobilised at particular moments, why some identities become politically explosive while others remain quiet, and why states invest so heavily in symbols and education. They also account for change, showing how identities can be reshaped over time rather than remaining frozen.

The approach has limits too. Critics argue that it can underplay the genuine emotional depth of national attachment, treating ordinary people as too easily manipulated by elites. Ethno-symbolist scholars, for instance, counter that successful nations usually draw on real pre-existing ethnic and cultural resources, not pure invention. The most balanced position recognises that national identity is both constructed by political actors and rooted in materials that already carry meaning for people. The construction works precisely because it builds on something familiar.

What do you think? If national identity is largely shaped by states and elites to serve their interests, does that make our sense of national belonging any less genuine or meaningful? And when you look at the symbols and rituals of nationhood around you, can you tell which traditions are genuinely ancient and which were invented to serve a modern political purpose?

References

1. https://kpu.pressbooks.pub/political-ideologies/chapter/6-1-1-modernist-and-ethnosymbolic-theories-the-consolidation-of-nationalism-studies/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Breuilly
3. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo3619074.html
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8. https://macmillan.yale.edu/news/paul-brass-scholarship-indias-religious-linguistic-politics-made-invaluable-contributions
9. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Paul+R.+Brass.+Ethnicity+and+Nationalism:+Theory+and+Comparison.-a0182200187
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_tradition