The rise and fall of nationalism studies

What the demise of a small department in an embattled university says about the future of Europe and the world. 

By EMILY SCHULTHEIS
in Vienna

^{Illustration by Karolis Strautniekas for POLITICO}

In early 2022, just days after Russia invaded Ukraine, around two dozen students in the nationalism studies program at Central European University gathered in a classroom on the top floor of its glassy, modernist main building in Vienna. I was one of them.  

The news of Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine felt urgent and close by. As we quietly nibbled sandwiches and sat in a circle of chairs facing the center of the room, a small group of professors went around the room, asking one student after another, particularly those from Ukraine and Russia, how they were reacting to the invasion. Ukraine had spent three decades creating a nation out of what had previously been one province in a vast superpower. Now Russia, the remaining heart of the former Soviet Union, seemed to be trying to rebuild the empire at the core of its own nationalist narrative by clawing it back with military force. 

What was clear to me, and to everyone else in the room, was that the conflict playing out a few hundred miles away wasn’t just about whether NATO wanted to expand toward Russia or Ukraine wanted to join the European Union. It was a real-life case study in what we were studying: nationalism, the idea of the “nation,” the feelings it evokes in people and the way those feelings can be used and abused by those in power. Looking at the situation through a nationalism lens, we could see that one nation’s identity as an empire was pitted against another nation’s identity as an independent culture and ethnicity — and that the two national identities were fundamentally incompatible, regardless of the specific grievances being alleged.  

In other words, we had an insight into the conflict that would take others years to grasp. 

A few months later, I graduated from CEU with my degree in nationalism studies, and since then I’ve watched as political leaders across Europe and the globe increasingly wield nationalist narratives to win elections, justify war and chip away at democratic institutions. But even as nationalism seems ever more central to international politics, the university’s nationalism studies program is on the verge of extinction. When classes began on CEU’s Vienna campus earlier this fall, just seven students (plus three exchange students) remained in the program that had three dozen students a few years ago. Next year, there will be none at all.  

The developments come on the heels of turmoil not just for the Nationalism Studies program, but for CEU itself, which was founded by billionaire philanthropist George Soros in the early 1990s. As part of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s protracted campaign against Soros, CEU was forced out of its longtime home in Budapest and announced it would relocate all its degree programs to Vienna in 2019 — a challenging and costly process that continues to put the university’s finances under strain, and one that in some ways foreshadowed the pressure U.S. President Donald Trump has put on American universities since returning to the White House earlier this year. 

The reasons for the nationalism studies department’s closure are financial, administrative and, CEU leaders insist, not in any way an indication the university believes nationalism is unimportant. To the contrary, they argue, the study of nationalism is so imbued in all CEU programs that a standalone degree is hardly necessary.  

So will anything be lost if this small but scrappy program disappears? As nationalism becomes the ascendant political force across the globe and real life provides countless examples for students of the phenomenon, I can’t help but feel that studying the world through the lens of the “nation” — what it means, who gets to belong to it and what can be done in its name — is more important than ever.  

Covering far-right parties across Europe for nearly a decade, I’ve seen firsthand how nationalist narratives lie at the core of their populist appeals to voters. Their aim is to redefine who counts as the “us” of a national community and who is relegated to the outsider “them”: to make pronouncements about who belongs and who doesn’t; who is a true patriot and who isn’t; who deserves to live in a given country and who doesn’t. 

When politicians from the Alternative for Germany party or the Austrian Freedom Party talk about protecting the Heimat (“homeland”) from refugees and foreigners, or U.S. Vice President JD Vance tells  Western democracies (as he did in Munich earlier this year) that their biggest security risk is a “threat from within,” they’re talking about a particular view of national identity they believe is under attack from increasing migration and multiculturalism. Naming those things, and understanding why they’re so effective with voters and supporters, is crucial for understanding the state of global politics. 

The timing and symbolism of the demise of CEU’s nationalism studies program is unfortunate, Rogers Brubaker, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles who helped establish the program in the 1990s, told me this summer. 

The program “started at a moment of heightened nationalism and is ending at a moment of heightened nationalism,” he said. “Not because people think we shouldn’t study this stuff, but for other reasons.” 

First steps

In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Central Europe became emblematic of the hope for a new, democratic future across the world — there was a belief that 1989 represented the “end of history” and a break with the nationalist wars and tensions that had dominated the 20th century.  

It was in that environment in 1991 that Soros, who was born and raised in Budapest before emigrating to the United Kingdom after World War II, decided to found CEU, a university dedicated to the liberal democratic ideals and rigorous education he believed in and wanted to offer to students from the region who had previously lacked access to them. 

The nationalism studies program began as a small center on the university’s Prague campus in 1992 led by the British-Czech scholar Ernest Gellner. Gellner was a key figure in the field, which explored the emergence of the modern nation-states that define the geographical borders of our world today. Gellner and others puzzled over why the concept of the “nation,” a political entity made up of people with a shared history, culture or language, arose in a world that had previously been dominated by feudal societies, city-states and diffuse, monarch-led empires. 

In seminar rooms in Vienna, we learned about the concept of nations as “imagined communities,” a theory developed by Benedict Anderson in the 1980s — a shared identity that allows millions of disparate people to feel connected despite not knowing each other personally. Creating those communities based on shared traditions and national myths — the basis for a nation — became increasingly possible during the Industrial Revolution and the advent of mass media. Political leaders, who saw the value a unified population could have for consolidating power, helped facilitate this process and brought about the proliferation of the modern nation-state. 

Nowhere was that creation of a national myth and shared traditions and values more powerful than in the United States, where a population without a common history came together in the late 18th century under a new American identity to overthrow British rule and found their own country. Many of the Americans in the program, like me, hadn’t recognized the nationalistic purpose of many of the traditions we grew up with, from the pledge of allegiance to the ubiquity of American flags. 

But nationalism, in addition to being a powerful force in nation-building, has a dark side. Scholars in the field have also looked at how nationalism, when taken to extremes, led to fascism, totalitarianism and the conflicts that shaped geopolitics throughout the 20th century. In 1930s Germany, the belief in an ethnic German nation that extended far beyond the geographical boundaries of 1930s Germany — and the Nazis’ assertion that Jews were not and could not be part of that German nation — plunged the world into war and served as the rationale for the Holocaust. 

These were some of the big questions and developments Gellner hoped to explore with his center in Prague. After his death in 1995, other scholars of nationalism came together to establish a full-time degree program at CEU’s Budapest campus to honor his work and his memory. “The idea wasn’t that we were only going to study these classic works which are looking at these macro-historical, great transformations,” Brubaker, one of those involved at the time, told me in his office in Los Angeles this summer. “We have transformations happening right now … and so it seemed like a very much alive question and a crucial question.” 

Rather than looking at nationalism as a historical phenomenon, the program wanted to help students understand what present-day nationalism looked like. The fierce conflicts that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which pitted the predominantly Orthodox Christian Serbs against Muslims and Catholics in Bosnia and Croatia in a years-long war that left tens of thousands dead, served as a reminder to those studying the phenomenon that it was constantly evolving and showing up in new places and contexts. 

“There was this hope that after the fall of the Iron Curtain, nationalism would not be a big thing,” said Szabolcs Pogonyi, current director of the Nationalism Studies Program, who joined the department a few years after its founding. With more and more countries democratizing and more and more economies globalizing, some thought that the era of nation-on-nation conflict was on the wane. “Then you had nationalist wars raging very close to us in Yugoslavia … and since then, we also see that it’s not going to go away.” 

The resurgence of populist far-right parties in recent years, particularly as a backlash to increasing migration, is the latest iteration of nationalism. Arguing they are the only ones capable of protecting national identities under threat from new arrivals, they have tapped into insecurity and discontent in countries across the West to win elections and play an increasingly prominent role in setting the political agenda. 

Closed chapter

In the years since its founding, CEU’s nationalism studies program has taught around 600 students from 60 countries around the globe. Where other attempts to establish nationalism studies programs have waxed and waned, including at the University of Edinburgh, CEU’s program endured. And even when CEU became the target of a nationalist leader itself, with Orbán ejecting it from Hungary in 2019, the program found a new home on CEU’s new campus in Vienna. 

But last fall, department faculty got word that the university’s Senate was planning to discontinue the program and would stop it from accepting new students after the 2024-25 academic year. Those who had already matriculated for the program’s one- and two-year master’s programs could continue, but no new students would be allowed to join. 

University administrators insist that they are not bowing to political pressure and say the decision was the result of declining application numbers in recent years. That, combined with the department’s small size — it has just three full-time faculty members and has relied on visiting professors to teach many of its courses — made it untenable financially at a time when the university was searching for ways to tighten its belt. (One other small program, they note, Cultural Heritage Studies, met a similar fate.) 

“We are a private university,” Eva Fodor, a member of CEU’s senior leadership team who serves as pro-rector for teaching and learning, told me. “We have to consider the attractiveness of our programs to students.” 

That argument was unconvincing to those involved in or close to the program, who argue nationalism studies was a drop in the bucket of the university’s broader financial struggles and remains symbolically important even if it’s small. 

“This is an extremely small program, and not an expensive one compared to the magnitude of the challenges the CEU faces,” Brubaker said. “I think the decision was taken because a small entity is easier to abolish than a large entity for political reasons — low-hanging fruit, a symbolic thing to be able to tell to the trustees, ‘Look, we abolished a program.’ These are not compelling intellectual reasons.” 

The program may live on, in diminished form, even if the Nationalism Studies Department no longer exists: CEU’s History Department is considering hosting a version of degree, if it gets approval from the CEU Senate. 

In an interview, Fodor pushed back strongly against the idea that shutting down the Nationalism Studies Department is an indication CEU no longer believes the study of nationalism is important. To the contrary, she told me, nationalism is so integral to the ethos of CEU that it hardly needs its own department.  

“Every single department at CEU is teaching courses on nationalism,” she said. “By suspending the program, we are not actually eliminating the study of nationalism.” 

Global ties

Even if the program’s impending demise isn’t directly due to the rise of nationalism, the development could hardly come at a worse time for those hoping to better make sense of nationalist successes around Europe and the world. 

Four years ago, when I started my master’s program at CEU, my goal was exactly that: to better understand why nationalism was on the rise in Europe and elsewhere. While covering the rise of far-right populist movements across Europe as a journalist based in Berlin, I discovered the program when I wrote a story about the university’s move to Vienna and decided to apply. 

Studying nationalism from a theoretical perspective — whether it was understanding how national identities are formed, what processes contribute to ethnic prejudice, or the ways citizenship policy can be wielded — turned out to be helpful when I went back to being a reporter.  

Writing about the global ties between nationalist, far-right political parties, I understood the ways these parties learned from each other’s messaging and framed outside influences (whether via migration or alleged efforts to sway national elections) as an attack on national sovereignty. In exploring the political activism of Los Angeles’ Iranian American diaspora, I drew on what I’d learned about the complicated relationships political diasporas can have with their home countries and the ways that identity impacts their civic involvement in their new countries. And when I covered the victims of racist violence in Germany, it was with an understanding I’d gotten at CEU about how ethnic prejudices are formed (and reinforced) by the way we’re socialized. 

After graduation, my colleagues returned to their respective countries, which these days read like a list of successes for nationalist political parties. One went home to Romania, where a hard-right nationalist came within striking distance of winning the presidency earlier this year; another returned to Serbia, home of the right-wing leader Aleksandar Vučić. I went back to Germany, where the far-right Alternative for Germany party is leading the national polls; some remained in Austria, where the far-right Freedom Party came in first with 29 percent of the vote last year and nearly installed the first far-right chancellor since the end of World War II. My former classmates are now journalists, election observers, academics and political activists, all of whom approach their work armed with the knowledge of how these parties operate and appeal to their local electorates. 

“Nationalism studies provides the understanding of these complex developments. One should understand what’s happening, why it’s happening and what such developments might lead to,” said Ruth Wodak, a professor of linguistics and expert on far-right rhetoric who has taught as a guest lecturer in CEU’s program (and served as my thesis adviser). Ethnically based nationalism “can lead to polarized societies, and sometimes, polarized societies can also become dangerous and violent.” 

Those still involved in the nationalism studies program say they’re choosing to view this moment as a potential opportunity for the program to adapt: To an era when interest in studying humanities and social sciences is losing out to more professionally focused degrees, disciplines are increasingly intertwined and nationalism has evolved again to propel a new generation of illiberal leaders like Trump, Orbán and others into office.  

“What would it look like if we were to establish this department today?” asked Michael Miller, a professor in the department who teaches (among others) its course on diaspora studies, when we spoke this summer. “Of course, we would deal with questions of identity, national identity and ethnic identity, but also questions of migration and diaspora in general, and the role of the state, the role of non-state bodies.”  

“In the optimistic reading of this, it’s a blessing in disguise, because it gives us a chance to revitalize this field of study,” he added.  

But it’s not yet clear whether that will happen. CEU’s Senate is in the process of considering whether to accept a proposal from the department’s faculty on reestablishing the program in CEU’s History department. 

Studying nationalism means understanding the ways in which far-right nationalist parties’ fundamental pitches to voters play on deep-seated questions of identity, and the interplay between how someone views themself and how they fit within a broader group.  

And that will remain relevant no matter what.  

“If the study of nationalism … is broadly interpreted to refer to any way of invoking national community whether or not you use the word ‘nation,’” Brubaker told me, “then it is ubiquitous. Not only in political rhetoric, but also in the feelings and speech of ordinary citizens.”