It seems that nationalism was originally a radical ideology. For instance in the American revolution, French revolution, the Latin American wars of liberation and the revolutions of 1848 all were very forward thinking for their time or even radical. Nationalism as far as I can tell original had a more liberal and sometimes even proto socialist character. It was almost more like what we'd today call internationalism.
So how did it go from being a universalist, egalitarian, or even left wing thing to the calling card of the hard right?
It's not something I can find a clear answer on and I think it's an interesting subject.
I am also not taking a stance on this issue so please do not be offended. I am merely curious how things changed and why.
Thanks!
In any discussion like this, we should start by separating ideology from political tendency. Patriotism, for example, is just defined by pride in one's country, and doesn't always carry over to chauvinism, jingosim, nationalism, what have you.
Nationalism is also not a singular ideology, but one that has to build upon a national identity under a certain context.
Starting in the late 1700's, the American Revolution, Haitian Revolution, and the Latin American Wars of Independence all used national identity to break away from the British, French, and Spanish Empires. But of course, nationalism still exists in that anti-colonial context centuries later, and it's still an important part of modern independence movements—Look at the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence in 1945 for example.
If you're looking at an imperial context rather than a colonial context, that's when nationalism takes on more of a 'right wing' character, because it serves to protect and strengthen that Empire.
In the late 1800's, you saw European Empires become highly competitive and militarized, as the 2nd Industrial Revolution fueled New Imperialism. Look at the painting The Geography Lesson, or The Black Spot for example. The rise of the German Empire came at the expense of the 2nd French Empire, and that fighting over Alsace-Lorraine would carry over into World War I. The "Great War," as it was called by the Great Powers of Europe, was a great spectacle of nationalist bloodshed.
That's the obvious difference between the 'left' character of the Age of Revolutions and the 'right' character New Imperialism. From there, you might look for some continuity. What about American nationalism, or Serbian nationalism? Both started out in the Age of Revolutions, but changed across the 1800's.
In the Revolution and the War of 1812, America could still be seen as the underdog, fighting for Independence from the British Empire. But by the end of the century, we had also been through the 2nd Industrial Revolution, and we took up social Darwinism. Then, Americans were in a position to start their own American Empire—that's why we took over parts of the Spanish Empire in 1898.
How 'left' was American nationalism in 1812, if that led to the great democratization of the 1820's, but also the aggressive expansionism of Monroe and Manifest Destiny? Does nationalism turn into a 'right wing' thing as soon as it has power and leverage?
Likewise, how do you get from the Serbian Revolution, and all those nationalist independence movements within the Ottoman Empire, to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand?
My best answer for that is context. Nationalism can be a force of independence, separating colonies from their empires, or it can be a force of imperialism, that's scrambling to take over colonies so the other empires don't have any.
Living in a world shaped by centuries of European Empire has definitely warped our perception of it—today, we associate it more with the German Empire, Nazism, etc. But that's because the imperial context and all the leftover racial tension are more immediate to us than anticolonialism, (and of course, most of us never learned our lesson from World War I.)