Extreme nationalism and the security of contemporary society

Abstract

Ethnic groups are characterized by certain collective identity whose foundations are made of language, religion, race, and country of origin with its culture and customs. Since ethnic identities differ one from another, in multinational and multicultural societies there is a latent danger of having ideologies that advocate ethnic distancing, imposing a danger to the security of other ethnicities, the change of constitutional order, as well as separation of certain parts of sovereign states with the aim of creating new countries or accession to some other ones. Besides the fact that these phenomena cause collective discrimination and severe violation of human rights, they are also, very often, accompanied by individual and collective violence - terrorism, (civil) wars, genocide, war crimes and other forms of inter-ethnic violence. Alongside with the extreme intolerance, these ideologies also propagate particularization of a society by ethnic, religious and race criteria. Given the fact that their base is made of glorification of their own national identity and negation of other ones, it is reasonably justified for them to carry an epithet of extreme-nationalist. Regarding the mentioned, this paper gives a perspective on definition and typology of nationalism, its consequences for the security of contemporary society, as well as on contemporary social reaction to it.

Keywords

• ethnicity
• national identity
• extremism
• nationalism
• societal security