The seduction of belonging

Nationalism offers belonging when everything else has been taken away. It tells the man with no house that he still has a home - and that someone else is to blame.

Nationalism is seductive because it feels true. It tells the poor man he has a country, even if he has no house, no savings, no pension, no job security. It tells him who he is and whose fault it is. That’s the magic trick: it takes something abstract – a flag, a border, a song – and turns it into meaning. And meaning is a rare commodity when everything else has been privatised.

You can sneer at it, if you like. You can call it irrational, regressive, dangerous. You can point out that it divides, that it’s built on myth, that it usually ends badly. All true. But none of that makes it less powerful. Nationalism doesn’t live in the head – it lives in the gut. It’s a feeling before it’s an idea, and it thrives precisely because it feels intuitive. It doesn’t need to be explained. It just needs to be felt.

Benedict Anderson called nations ‘imagined communities,’ not because they’re fake, but because they exist only through imagination. You’ll never meet most of your fellow citizens, but you’ll feel connected to them through language, symbols, and ritual. You’ll mourn their deaths at war. You’ll celebrate their victories at football. You’ll feel that invisible thread – something eternal, something ours – and you’ll mistake it for nature.

That’s the trick of nationalism: it makes the arbitrary feel ancient. Anderson notes that nations perform the same role that religion once did. When faith collapsed, nationalism filled the void. The tomb of the Unknown Soldier, he wrote, is a modern altar – sacred precisely because it’s empty. You don’t need to know who lies there; it’s enough to know they died “for us.” The nation becomes immortal. You become part of something that transcends you. It promises continuity, destiny, and purpose. It gives death meaning, and life a flag to wave over it.

Even the name “United Kingdom” carries the residue of a bygone empire – a dynastic rather than a democratic idea of belonging. You’re not Scottish or English in its legal language, you’re a subject of a union, a subject of sovereignty. It’s not so different, Anderson reminds us, from the old multi-ethnic empires of Europe – Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman realm, Tsarist Russia – each pretending to be external while rotting from within. But the form survives, because the longing does.

If Anderson gave nationalism its poetry, Ernest Gellner gave it its sociology. He saw nationalism as the product of industrial modernity. When people were uprooted from their villages, when craft and kinship were replaced by factory whistles and standardised clocks, they needed new stories to tell themselves who they were. Nationalism provided that story. It standardised language, education, and history to give strangers a shared identity. It made the modern world feel coherent.

But the same conditions that created nationalism have now been reversed. Deindustrialisation, automation, and the gig economy have torn communities apart again – only this time there’s no collective myth of progress to hold it together. The market doesn’t offer belonging. Bureaucracy doesn’t offer dignity. Politics doesn’t offer meaning. So the nation returns as the emotional welfare state of neoliberalism. It offers identity where the economy has stripped everything else away.

Nationalism is capitalism’s most successful consolation prize. It tells the worker that even if he owns nothing, he still belongs to something. It translates exploitation into pride: you may have lost your factory, your union, your hope of security – but you still have a flag. You still have enemies to blame. It tells you that your suffering isn’t structural, it’s personal – the fault of migrants, bureaucrats, or ‘cosmopolitans.’ It gives clarity where class analysis gives complexity. And clarity is addictive.

This is where nationalism mutates into its most dangerous form – ethnic nationalism. The ‘we’ becomes a bloodline, the border becomes skin, and poverty finds a scapegoat. What began as a story of belonging curdles into a story of exclusion. Every social failure – housing, healthcare, jobs – gets recast as an invasion. Every neighbour becomes a threat.

The clarity, of course, doesn’t come from nowhere. It’s manufactured. Nationalism doesn’t simply arise out of despair – it’s weaponised to manage it. Politicians and media outlets know the alchemy well. Create economic precarity through decades of austerity and privatisation; then, when people can’t afford homes, food, or hope, tell them it’s because the country is ‘full.’ Because of the boats. Because of the Others. The same ministers who gutted welfare now speak gravely about ‘social cohesion.’ The same tabloids that cheered deregulation now run daily stories about ‘migrant hotels’ and ‘benefit tourists.’ It’s not a misunderstanding; it’s a strategy.

Stuart Hall wrote that nations are not just political constructs but cultural codes. And these codes are racialised. The ‘nation’ is imagined as white, Christian, heterosexual, respectable. Its borders are moral as much as territorial. When new groups arrive – immigrants, refugees, people who don’t fit the mould – they expose the myth that the nation was ever homogenous. That’s when nationalism becomes defensive, paranoid, nostalgic. It insists on protecting something that never really existed.

But nationalism doesn’t perform this defence on its own. It’s activated – by the Home Office, by politicians who need someone to blame, by media machines that know outrage sells. Every “Stop the Boats” headline, every “take back control” slogan, every whispered panic about ‘culture’ and ‘values’ is part of that choreography. It’s not ideology as much as maintenance – maintaining power through managed paranoia.

“Nationalism tells the man with no house that he has a home.”

And that paranoia feeds downward. Online, the performance has gone rogue. I’ve seen it myself: young men trading memes about “defending civilisation,” swapping Nazi symbols in group chats, glorifying the cruelty of Polish border guards or cheering the idea that refugees should be left to drown. They share clips about ‘inbreeding,’ ‘crime,’ ‘illegals,’ convinced they’re speaking hard truths. But what they’re really consuming is a script – one written by older men in suits who built the very system that broke them.

Da Empoli calls populism “political theatre,” and nationalism is its most popular show. Online, costume is digital: flags in bios, crusader avatars, hashtags as hymns. It’s a drama of grievance and identity. For alienated young men, nationalism offers a role – hero, protector, patriot – in a world that otherwise gives them none. It’s not just hate. It’s yearning – for agency, community, dignity. Nationalism gives them those things cheaply, instantly, falsely. It turns despair into destiny. It tells them: you are the real people. The others are invaders.

And for a generation raised in economic precarity and cultural fragmentation, that’s intoxicating.

The left’s mistake has been to treat nationalism as a pathology rather than a symptom. We call it irrational, reactionary, backward. We tell people to be internationalists, to rise above borders, to reject flags. But we offer them very little to belong to in return. You can’t replace emotional truth with a policy paper.

Anderson was right: nationalism answers the need for continuity in a world of contingency. Gellner was right: it gives structure to chaos. And Hall was right: it disguises hierarchy as identity. If you strip all that away without building anything to replace it, the vacuum will always be filled by those who promise belonging – however poisonous that belonging may be.

Nationalism tells people that they are something, while the market tells them that they are nothing. Until the left can make people feel seen, valued, and secure, nationalism will keep winning. Because it doesn’t need to be true. It only needs to be felt.

The Common Weal version of this argument is to cut to class. What nationalism does is transform the social question into a cultural one. Instead of asking “Who owns what?” it asks “Who belongs here?” It replaces solidarity with suspicion. It turns the working class from an economic category into an ethnic one. It tells them that their poverty is caused not by wealth hoarding, but by migration. It’s a neat sleight of hand – and it works every time.

The antidote isn’t liberal scolding or cosmopolitan detachment. It’s material solidarity. People will always need belonging – the question is what kind. Either they’ll find it in the flag, or they’ll find it in the community. Either they’ll believe in blood, or they’ll believe in bread. We can’t abolish the need; we can only redirect it.

That’s why Scotland’s own relationship with nationalism is so fraught. Our civic nationalism prides itself on inclusion – on being open, democratic, and progressive. But it, too, can slip into myth. The idea of the ‘good Scot’ versus the ‘bad Brit,’ the moral nation versus the corrupt state, the pure people versus the elite – these are familiar tropes. They can mobilise, but they can also deceive. And across the border, that same instinct hardens into ethnic nationalism – the fantasy of an indigenous people besieged by outsiders, the myth of purity reclaimed. The task isn’t to renounce nationalism altogether, but to strip it of mysticism – to make belonging mean something material again.

Nationalism tells the man with no house that he has a home. It gives him enemies where there should be employers. It replaces solidarity with identity, history with nostalgia, politics with theatre. It promises immortality through the flag. That’s its genius – and its poison.

The real challenge for any movement that calls itself progressive is to offer something that feels just as real, but is actually true. A politics that says: you belong not because of who you exclude, but because of who you care for. You matter not because of where you were born, but because you are human and you are not alone.

Until we build that, nationalism will always win. Because it tells a story that feels like home. And home, even a fake one, is hard to give up.