ASEN president Jonathan Hearn sits down with Eric Storm to discuss his new book, Nationalism: A World History for our first event of 2025. We’ll be live on 15th January from 1630UTC (check this time in your city) on Facebook and YouTube, and members will receive an invitation to join the Zoom call.

About the book

In Nationalism, historian Eric Storm sheds light on contemporary nationalist movements by exploring the global evolution of nationalism, beginning with the rise of the nation-state in the eighteenth century through the revival of nationalist ideas in the present day. Storm traces the emergence of the unitary nation-state—which brought citizenship rights to some while excluding a multitude of “others”—and the pervasive spread of nationalist ideas through politics and culture.

Storm shows how nationalism influences the arts and humanities, mapping its dissemination through newspapers, television, and social media. Sports and tourism, too, have helped fashion a world of discrete nations, each with its own character, heroes, and highlights. Nationalism saturates the physical environment, not only in the form of national museums and patriotic statues but also in efforts to preserve cultural heritage, create national parks, invent ethnic dishes and beverages, promote traditional building practices, and cultivate native plants. Nationalism has even been used for selling cars, furniture, and fashion.

By tracing these tendencies across countries, Storm shows that nationalism’s watershed moments were global. He argues that the rise of new nation-states was largely determined by shifts in the international context, that the relationships between nation-states and their citizens largely developed according to global patterns, and that worldwide intellectual trends influenced the nationalization of both culture and environment. Over the centuries, nationalism has transformed both geopolitics and the everyday life of ordinary people.

About Eric Storm

Eric Storm is associate professor of general history at Leiden University. He has been a visiting scholar at the University Complutense of Madrid, Oxford University, and the Free University in Berlin. He is the author of The Culture of Regionalism and The Discovery of El Greco and the coeditor of Writing the History of Nationalism, Colonial Soldiers in Europe, Regionalism in Modern Europe, and World Fairs and the Global Moulding of National Identities.