The Tide of Nationalism: In Memory of John Stone

It feels surreal to write an essay in memory of a scholar who I knew would definitely be against anything in memory of him. After all, John Stone—my Ph.D. advisor and mentor—was never a fan of any formalities and always kept his achievements and contributions lowkey. He never forced me into reading any of his works or pushed me to follow his intellectual footsteps; instead, he gave me tremendous autonomy to explore my own research interests as a China scholar—from collectivist villages to social service organizations, from electric vehicles to day labourers. However, eventually I could not ignore the questions of race, ethnicity, and nationalism, as they so pertain to the economic development and social transformations in China. That led to our collaboration on The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia on Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism (Stone et al. 2016) and the ensuing Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism (Stone et al. 2020). I am forever indebted to him for including me in those projects and for the opportunity to work with highly regarded experts in those fields. With Trump's re-election and the barrage of executive orders within the first month of his inauguration that, to many, clearly challenge and undermine the foundations of American democracy, it is important to revisit Stone's co-authored article on ‘Nebulous Nationalism: Walker Connor in an Era of Rising Populism’. In the paper, Stone and Christodoulaki (2018) discuss Trump's surprising victory in the presidential election in 2016 and how it relates to the complex forms of nationalism in America with implications for the wider global trends. They highlight the weakened democratic institutions that allowed for the existence of de facto plutocracy and the rising domestic disparities that led to the disenchantment with the American Dream by people who previously would have bought into the Dream but increasingly felt insecure and alienated, such as Trump's white, working-class supporters. But more importantly, they point out the more complicated, mixed, and even contradictory nature of Trump's electoral base that stretched far beyond those who were mobilized through the ethnonationalist rhetoric built around white supremacy and xenophobia and those who felt left behind by neoliberal globalization and resonated with Trump's call for ‘America First’ and ‘Make America Great Again.’ Among the supporters were also people who do not fit the ethnic and religious criteria and those who have a more pragmatic, item-based agenda in relation to such issues as abortion and taxation. Built upon Connor's distinction between nation and state and between nationalism and patriotism, Stone and Christodoulaki (2018) explore the difficulty in attributing America's changing political landscape into either patriotism or nationalism or a blend of the two. Although at first glance, Trump's victory seems to fit ‘the model of patriotism that Connor suggested is the hallmark of American collective identity’ (p. 515), in other aspects, it ‘appears to lie somewhere along the continuum between state and nation rather than fitting neatly into one conceptual box or another’ (p. 518). The Trump phenomenon and the current development in American politics seem to reflect, in some regard, the long-standing history of competing, heterogeneous views of American nationhood that have, at various historical moments, resulted in conflicts, tensions, and even violence (Bonikowski 2019)—the concept of ‘American Exceptionalism’ for ‘a society comprising multiple immigrant, religious and racial groups and lacking the long-standing nations of many European societies’ (Stone and Christodoulaki 2018: 518). Nevertheless, Stone and Christodoulaki (2018) remind us of the importance of a historical and comparative lens and of the need for humbleness when scholars try to find a unified approach or develop any general social theory. For much of the Chinese Communist Party's history, for example, efforts have been made to conflate the idea of the Chinese nation with the Party-led state so that the love for one's country is equated with loyalty to the Communist Party (Hou 2020). In that regard, perhaps Trump is merely repeating the success stories of authoritarian governments and the kind of nebulous nationalism raised by Stone and Christodoulaki is meant as such so as to blur the boundary between nationalism and patriotism to secure political support and to effectively mobilize people into action. While the world is connected on an unprecedented scale with technological and economic development and new forms of alliance and organization, Stone and Christodoulaki (2018) point out that nationalism remains relevant as seen in the rise of populist nationalism by the second decade of the 21st century, interweaving both vertically between elites and ‘the people’ and horizontally ‘concerning who to include in the definition of “the people”’ (p. 513). Besides the unexpected rise of Trumpism, we can see similar contradictions take place in the recent COVID-19 pandemic as well. While the pandemic called for global actions and collaborations, it also led to rising nationalism surrounding things from vaccines to the origins of the virus and gave rise to a variety of conspiracy theories and exclusionary policies in the United States and across the globe (Bieber 2020; Bollyky and Bown 2020; Mylonas and Whalley 2022; Riaz et al. 2021; Rieger 2022; Zhang and Xu 2023; Zhang et al. 2023). Global connections and movements have not rendered nationalism obsolete but have at the same time generated resentment, division, and nationalist mobilization built as much around fear and insecurity as around pride. Trump is certainly not the only politician who succeeds in exploiting those sentiments. A reflexive scholarlike Stone always cautions us against making broad predictions of the future and invites us to step outside our comfortable intellectual zones. As Stone (2003) notes in his analysis of ethnonationalism in South Africa, prevailing theories at the time failed to predict, first, the start of the apartheid, then the persistence of the system, and finally, the sudden dissolution of the system and the rapid, peaceful transition towards democracy. This transition was accompanied by a genuine attempt to develop a national identity that transcends racial and class affiliations, an attempt which continues to this day. Historical development is the result of ‘complex processes, the understanding of which requires long and patient analysis’ and ‘the full impact of particular causal factors can rarely be appreciated until considerable time has elapsed’ (p. 114). If anything, Trump's re-election once again proves that nationalism is hardly about rational calculations of costs and benefits—after all, Trump's loyal supporters were also among those who suffered from the policies in his first term—but is deeply rooted in the critical psychological bond at the centre of Connor's arguments (p. 113). Trump's new alliance with tech giants like Elon Musk is but a step further in the American plutocracy. The battleground remains to be how to define American interests and who to include in ‘the people’, and nationalism and patriotism continue to be powerful tools to justify and mobilize people around policies and political agendas.