No Nationalism

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Nationalism ruins maps and makes them boring. What would be necessary to avoid the rise of nationalism in the 18th and 19th Centuries? If something needs to replace, what could it be? Maybe a sort of loyalty-to-the-Monarch? Or religion gets a renassiance?
 
I think you'd have to get rid of the modern age totally. To me nationalism always seemed like an off shoot of the ease of travel and communication that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries. Before that you had loyalty to your town, region, local area. With technology you came to see that your neighbors in the next county weren't the "other" since you spoke the same language and had the same culture. It was those strangers in the next land over that spoke a weird language and had weird customs that were the "other". Better to band together with your like thinking neighbors against them.

Honestly I don't think it's possible to nerf nationalism to any great extent.
 
Nationalism is more or less inevitable once you get a literate population and more and more of the peasantry goes to the metropole for industrial jobs. That destroys the peasant empires. Proletarianism causes peasants to question who rules them and puts them in contact with other peasants in the empire who don't speak the same language, and literacy introduces them to their own national culture. At that point, dividing people of the same empire/state into "us" and "not us" will happen.

There is a reason all the multi-ethnic empires started breaking down at the end of the 19th century. Communism was able to tamper down on that with an overarching philosophy, but it still required mass repression.

You need to eliminate the industrial revolution and mass literacy. If you keep the vast majority of people as poor farmers, you can do it.
 
Even in ancient times, there was something very much like nationalism. A Roman citizen might well be very proud to be Roman, even if he'd never actually been to Rome in his life.

Identifying with members of our "group" comes pretty naturally to humans, and it can have both positive and negative effects. Eliminating that is not a realistic option, and once technology progresses, it's a given that such ties will expand beyond the directly local community.
 
I've always seen it as an artificial construct created by romanticist literature that harped back to largely mythical past glories.

Sure a Serb could look back to glory days, but there were far more divided and conquered days, far more centuries of not being Serbia etc, and even the glory days would have been most glorious if they had held on to their Greek territories

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
While mass literacy and industrialization etc. are ingredients of nationalism, I don't agree that they have to lead to nationalism. People can possess other identities besides loyalty to a country/state - for example, loyalty to a religious whole, loyalty to a class, loyalty to a sub-region, etc.

Identification with the nation-state wasn't inevitable - even if it was perhaps the most likely, given the importance of nation-states and the frequency of European wars. Replacements would require pretty large PoDs, though - for a 'Christian-ism' to appear I guess first and foremost the reformation has to go, and for 'class-ism' to come first then a more vigorous industrialization has to emerge, and socialism also has to have greater resonance amongst the people than OTL.

The most likely alternative, actually, would probably be for people to identify with a state or a ruling house, not a 'nation'. Things like Habsburg-ism, Ottoman-ism, etc. This could happen if more European states were polyglot entities like the Habsburg Empire and you had a couple more 'Enlightened' monarchs around who were willing to harness the power of the people for military purposes.
 
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Public education be done in Latin and Greek because of their influence in both science and religion, and native languages regarded as "the language of peasants and bards"?
 
While mass literacy and industrialization etc. are ingredients of nationalism, I don't agree that they have to lead to nationalism. People can possess other identities besides loyalty to a country/state - for example, loyalty to a religious whole, loyalty to a class, loyalty to a sub-region, etc.

Indeed. The Ancient Greeks, for example, had quite a clear sense of nationhood by the 4th century BC, but this never translated into a desire for political unity.

In fact, I'm not entirely sure why modern nationalism started arising during this period. My best guess is that it has something to do with the rise of democratic theories of government, since you cannot after all have a democracy without a demos, and several nations which just so happen to be under the same monarch aren't really a demos; so, if you want democracy, you'll have to give them each their own government. Maybe a more oligarchic Enlightenment, emphasising the importance of having only the best citizens (like, say, educated philosophers) take part in government, or a more Hobbesian Enlightenment, would reduce this enough to stop political nationalism becoming a major force.
 

xsampa

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Alternative to Nationalism

The most common formats for political entities on AH.com are as follows:
1. multiethnic empire: one state, many nations
2. nation-state: one state, one nation
I'm considering an alternative to nationalism that would sidestep nations entirely: pro-sovereignty regionalism
To make up for the economic benefits of statehood, regions would join in supranational confederation.
 
It would be a pretty big POD, but I could see a reneissance/enlightenment that draws more influence from/evolves stoicism developing greater cosmopolitan trends.
 
Nationalism is essentially tribalism on a larger scale. I don't think you can realistically eliminate it. Group identity is always going to exist.

Note, though, that there are different forms of nationalism: some based on language, some based on religion, some on civic identity (think USA or France), some on history . . . you could perhaps see certain forms not come to rise.
 
The most common formats for political entities on AH.com are as follows:
1. multiethnic empire: one state, many nations
2. nation-state: one state, one nation
I'm considering an alternative to nationalism that would sidestep nations entirely: pro-sovereignty regionalism
To make up for the economic benefits of statehood, regions would join in supranational confederation.

Interesting. What would be the POD, or an example of such a system?
 
Nationalism is essentially tribalism on a larger scale. I don't think you can realistically eliminate it. Group identity is always going to exist.

Note, though, that there are different forms of nationalism: some based on language, some based on religion, some on civic identity (think USA or France), some on history . . . you could perhaps see certain forms not come to rise.

I agree that you can't get rid of nationalism (indeed unless we are mentioning modern nationalism specifically, philosophers going back to Ancient Greek were essentially anti-nationalist, implying a nationalist trend to the polis) but maybe we could make cosmopolitanism a higher ideal somehow?
 
Regionalism is just nationalism on a smaller scale. If Toulouse's attempt at independence during the French Revolution had succeeded, today we'd talk of separate French and Occitan nations, and say that obviously the nationalist outpouring in late 18c France led to the separation of the kingdom's biggest linguistic minority.

And as for doing education in Greek or Latin, that's pretty much ASB. Industrialization arose from the urban middle class and not from the aristocracy or the clergy, and the urban middle class didn't care much for Greek or Latin. Tellingly, traders in different parts of Europe did not speak Latin to each other, but Lingua Franca, or other lingua francas depending on regional needs. Similarly, traders in entirely Muslim regions outside the Middle East still did not use Arabic, but instead used Malay or Swahili.
 
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