I have a theory about the “romantic nations”. Those were nations … dreamed into existence by philosophers and writers … and the long struggle for nationhood … promoted by the idea of a certain people and language having primacy, creating a home...
In all these cases, you can detect a cycle: the nation exists as a culture before it exists as a nation; as a nation, it increasingly legitimates itself by an appeal to the superiority of its people; and in the final phase, the nation as an entity actually attacks its culture and what it stood for.
Roger Gathman writes about the history of
self-determination, everyone's favourite stroke-word for ethnonationalism.