Calhoun Craig. Nationalism

Open University Press and the University of Minnesota Press, 1997.There was no first nationalist. Neither was there any single moment at which people who
previously had no idea of nation and no political aspirations or ideological preferences for their
own country suddenly began to think in nationalist terms. Rather, several different threads of
historical change came together to produce modern nationalism. It is a fruitless exercise to try to
explain nationalism (and cognate ideas like nation and national identity) by searching for the
first example and then studying the spread of terminology or practices. The term nation is old
(though nationalism is relatively new); but before the modern era, it meant only people linked
by place of birth and culture.
It signaled nothing about the relationship of such identity to larger or smaller groupings; neither did it carry clear political connotations.