Review of The Nationalist Revival: Trade, Immigration, and the Revolt Against Globalization by John B. Judis

*The Nationalist Revival* by John B. Judis (2018). Published by Columbia Global Reports.

One of the more interesting classes I’m taking this semester is Nationalism, which is a graduate level seminar where we basically sit down and try to chart down the origins of nationalism in multiple different contexts.

Our reading list for the semester is pretty loaded, and the professor is an experienced one who looks specifically at nationalism, so I thought that this would be an interesting course to add to my belt when it comes to trying to understand the world more.

Naturally, though, only five of us signed for the class so we ended up with a small half circle to discuss our readings.

Anyways, the first book we read this semester was The Nationalist Revival. I think this selection was a good one to start out with because of how it circles over subjects we’re familiar with in an American context, but digging deeper to make the claim that nationalism arises out of the commonalities of a unique identity.

Judis is making a solid argument throughout that touches on mob mentality and social psychology, but I think with our other readings in the course, other arguments he’s making can be contested.

Let’s get into the review, shall we?

The rise of nationalism across the Western world and its impacts.

This book reads like an essay that’s just really long, and I don’t typically see the point of summarizing certain books like these down to the nitty gritty details. Judis essentially is starting us off with information we already know: with the rise of people like Trump in the world, a lot of countries are going through a period of very fervent nationalism.

He describes how this word evokes very specific feelings that are negative, as it’s typically likened to what the Nazis did during the thirties and forties. One of the more interesting arguments for me throughout this book was how Judis describes left-wingers can be nationalist too—it’s just not often associated with them.

One of the bigger points throughout this book is that Judis is going back in time to trace the origins of the current forms of nationalism. While this is a mainly Western-leaning book that’s looking at the richer European countries and the United States, the origins of these forms of nationalism in recent years begin to stem after the events of World War II.

We also get a glimpse into how the fall of the USSR opened up a new can of warms, as the early nineties were another changing point for globalization.

Globalization comes up a lot in this one, especially in the American context. Judis explains that a lot of American factory workers resent globalization because they lost their factory jobs for those overseas, which something we discussed in class was how a lot of Americans actually benefitted from globalization because of that as well (i.e. affordable clothing).

This later became the platform for politicians like Donald Trump, who said he was going to bring American manufacturing back.

Another key concept that’s introduced around the halfway mark is that Judis believes the European Union is starting to fail. With the economic crises hitting the countries that aren’t doing so well, people no longer want to support those that they see as outside of their identity.

For example, the wealthier country of Germany wouldn’t want to support the Greeks, who aren’t doing so hot economically in this point of time, because they don’t see themselves as Greek.

This then leads into his discussion on how the EU is going to fail because of this. It tries to create something that has no borders between the countries of Europe, but it’s an experiment at the end of the day.

It’s destined to fail because its people cannot overcome these identity politics sorting them into an “us” vs. “them” mentality, which means that it’s contributing to the rise of nationalism as well.

Overall Thoughts

I think this is a good book for starting off a course like this, or if you’re just starting to dig your heels deeper into these concepts and what nationalism could inherently mean in the long run.

If I was reading this on its own, though, I don’t think I would’ve liked this as much because he doesn’t dig deeper. It’s more of a beginner primer on what’s going on in the world and Judis’ argument for why it’s happening, which is fine, but I would want more from it.

But for my general purposes, it did its job just fine.

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