The rise
and fall of nationalism studies
What the
demise of a small department in an embattled university says about the future
of Europe and the world.
By EMILY
SCHULTHEIS
in Vienna
January
5, 2026 4:00 am CET
In early
2022, just days after Russia invaded Ukraine, around two dozen students in the
nationalism studies program at Central European University gathered in a
classroom on the top floor of its glassy, modernist main building in Vienna. I
was one of them.
The news
of Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine felt urgent and close by. As we quietly
nibbled sandwiches and sat in a circle of chairs facing the center of the room,
a small group of professors went around the room, asking one student after
another, particularly those from Ukraine and Russia, how they were reacting to
the invasion. Ukraine had spent three decades creating a nation out of what had
previously been one province in a vast superpower. Now Russia, the remaining
heart of the former Soviet Union, seemed to be trying to rebuild the empire at
the core of its own nationalist narrative by clawing it back with military
force.
What was
clear to me, and to everyone else in the room, was that the conflict playing
out a few hundred miles away wasn’t just about whether NATO wanted to expand
toward Russia or Ukraine wanted to join the European Union. It was a real-life
case study in what we were studying: nationalism, the idea of the “nation,” the
feelings it evokes in people and the way those feelings can be used and abused
by those in power. Looking at the situation through a nationalism lens, we
could see that one nation’s identity as an empire was pitted against another
nation’s identity as an independent culture and ethnicity — and that the two
national identities were fundamentally incompatible, regardless of the specific
grievances being alleged.
In other
words, we had an insight into the conflict that would take others years to
grasp.
A few
months later, I graduated from CEU with my degree in nationalism studies, and
since then I’ve watched as political leaders across Europe and the globe
increasingly wield nationalist narratives to win elections, justify war and
chip away at democratic institutions. But even as nationalism seems ever more
central to international politics, the university’s nationalism studies program
is on the verge of extinction. When classes began on CEU’s Vienna campus
earlier this fall, just seven students (plus three exchange students) remained
in the program that had three dozen students a few years ago. Next year, there
will be none at all.
The
developments come on the heels of turmoil not just for the Nationalism Studies
program, but for CEU itself, which was founded by billionaire philanthropist
George Soros in the early 1990s. As part of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor
Orbán’s protracted campaign against Soros, CEU was forced out of its longtime
home in Budapest and announced it would relocate all its degree programs to
Vienna in 2019 — a challenging and costly process that continues to put the
university’s finances under strain, and one that in some ways foreshadowed the
pressure U.S. President Donald Trump has put on American universities since
returning to the White House earlier this year.
The
reasons for the nationalism studies department’s closure are financial,
administrative and, CEU leaders insist, not in any way an indication the
university believes nationalism is unimportant. To the contrary, they argue,
the study of nationalism is so imbued in all CEU programs that a standalone
degree is hardly necessary.
So will
anything be lost if this small but scrappy program disappears? As nationalism
becomes the ascendant political force across the globe and real life provides
countless examples for students of the phenomenon, I can’t help but feel that
studying the world through the lens of the “nation” — what it means, who gets
to belong to it and what can be done in its name — is more important than ever.
Covering
far-right parties across Europe for nearly a decade, I’ve seen firsthand how
nationalist narratives lie at the core of their populist appeals to voters.
Their aim is to redefine who counts as the “us” of a national community and who
is relegated to the outsider “them”: to make pronouncements about who belongs
and who doesn’t; who is a true patriot and who isn’t; who deserves to live in a
given country and who doesn’t.
When
politicians from the Alternative for Germany party or the Austrian Freedom
Party talk about protecting the Heimat (“homeland”) from refugees and
foreigners, or U.S. Vice President JD Vance tells Western democracies (as he did in
Munich earlier this year) that their biggest security risk is a “threat from within,” they’re talking about a particular view of
national identity they believe is under attack from increasing migration and
multiculturalism. Naming those things, and understanding why they’re so effective with voters and
supporters, is crucial for understanding the state of global politics.
The
timing and symbolism of the demise of CEU’s nationalism studies program is
unfortunate, Rogers Brubaker, a professor of sociology at the University of
California, Los Angeles who helped establish the program in the 1990s, told me
this summer.
The
program “started at a moment of heightened nationalism and is ending at a
moment of heightened nationalism,” he said. “Not because people think we
shouldn’t study this stuff, but for other reasons.”
First
steps
In the
years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union,
Central Europe became emblematic of the hope for a new, democratic future
across the world — there was a belief that 1989 represented the “end of
history” and a break with the nationalist wars and tensions that had dominated
the 20th century.
It was in
that environment in 1991 that Soros, who was born and raised in Budapest before
emigrating to the United Kingdom after World War II, decided to found CEU, a
university dedicated to the liberal democratic ideals and rigorous education he
believed in and wanted to offer to students from the region who had previously
lacked access to them.
The
nationalism studies program began as a small center on the university’s Prague
campus in 1992 led by the British-Czech scholar Ernest Gellner. Gellner was a
key figure in the field, which explored the emergence of the modern
nation-states that define the geographical borders of our world today. Gellner
and others puzzled over why the concept of the “nation,” a political entity
made up of people with a shared history, culture or language, arose in a world
that had previously been dominated by feudal societies, city-states and
diffuse, monarch-led empires.
In
seminar rooms in Vienna, we learned about the concept of nations as “imagined
communities,” a theory developed by Benedict Anderson in the 1980s — a shared
identity that allows millions of disparate people to feel connected despite not
knowing each other personally. Creating those communities based on shared
traditions and national myths — the basis for a nation — became increasingly
possible during the Industrial Revolution and the advent of mass media.
Political leaders, who saw the value a unified population could have for
consolidating power, helped facilitate this process and brought about the
proliferation of the modern nation-state.
Nowhere
was that creation of a national myth and shared traditions and values more
powerful than in the United States, where a population without a common history
came together in the late 18th century under a new American identity to
overthrow British rule and found their own country. Many of the Americans in
the program, like me, hadn’t recognized the nationalistic purpose of many of
the traditions we grew up with, from the pledge of allegiance to the ubiquity
of American flags.
But
nationalism, in addition to being a powerful force in nation-building, has a
dark side. Scholars in the field have also looked at how nationalism, when
taken to extremes, led to fascism, totalitarianism and the conflicts that
shaped geopolitics throughout the 20th century. In 1930s Germany, the belief in
an ethnic German nation that extended far beyond the geographical boundaries of
1930s Germany — and the Nazis’ assertion that Jews were not and could not be
part of that German nation — plunged the world into war and served as the
rationale for the Holocaust.
These
were some of the big questions and developments Gellner hoped to explore with
his center in Prague. After his death in 1995, other scholars of nationalism
came together to establish a full-time degree program at CEU’s Budapest campus
to honor his work and his memory. “The idea wasn’t that we were only going to
study these classic works which are looking at these macro-historical, great
transformations,” Brubaker, one of those involved at the time, told me in his
office in Los Angeles this summer. “We have transformations happening right now
… and so it seemed like a very much alive question and a crucial question.”
Rather
than looking at nationalism as a historical phenomenon, the program wanted to
help students understand what present-day nationalism looked like. The fierce
conflicts that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which pitted
the predominantly Orthodox Christian Serbs against Muslims and Catholics in
Bosnia and Croatia in a years-long war that left tens of thousands dead, served
as a reminder to those studying the phenomenon that it was constantly evolving
and showing up in new places and contexts.
“There
was this hope that after the fall of the Iron Curtain, nationalism would not be
a big thing,” said Szabolcs Pogonyi, current director of the Nationalism
Studies Program, who joined the department a few years after its founding. With
more and more countries democratizing and more and more economies globalizing,
some thought that the era of nation-on-nation conflict was on the wane. “Then
you had nationalist wars raging very close to us in Yugoslavia … and since
then, we also see that it’s not going to go away.”
The
resurgence of populist far-right parties in recent years, particularly as a
backlash to increasing migration, is the latest iteration of nationalism.
Arguing they are the only ones capable of protecting national identities under
threat from new arrivals, they have tapped into insecurity and discontent in
countries across the West to win elections and play an increasingly prominent
role in setting the political agenda.
Closed
chapter
In the
years since its founding, CEU’s nationalism studies program has taught around
600 students from 60 countries around the globe. Where other attempts to
establish nationalism studies programs have waxed and waned, including at the
University of Edinburgh, CEU’s program endured. And even when CEU became the
target of a nationalist leader itself, with Orbán ejecting it from Hungary in
2019, the program found a new home on CEU’s new campus in Vienna.
But last
fall, department faculty got word that the university’s Senate was planning to
discontinue the program and would stop it from accepting new students after the
2024-25 academic year. Those who had already matriculated for the program’s
one- and two-year master’s programs could continue, but no new students would
be allowed to join.
University
administrators insist that they are not bowing to political pressure and say
the decision was the result of declining application numbers in recent years.
That, combined with the department’s small size — it has just three full-time
faculty members and has relied on visiting professors to teach many of its
courses — made it untenable financially at a time when the university was
searching for ways to tighten its belt. (One other small program, they note,
Cultural Heritage Studies, met a similar fate.)
“We are a
private university,” Eva Fodor, a member of CEU’s senior leadership team who
serves as pro-rector for teaching and learning, told me. “We have to consider
the attractiveness of our programs to students.”
That
argument was unconvincing to those involved in or close to the program, who
argue nationalism studies was a drop in the bucket of the university’s broader
financial struggles and remains symbolically important even if it’s small.
“This is
an extremely small program, and not an expensive one compared to the magnitude
of the challenges the CEU faces,” Brubaker said. “I think the decision was
taken because a small entity is easier to abolish than a large entity for
political reasons — low-hanging fruit, a symbolic thing to be able to tell to
the trustees, ‘Look, we abolished a program.’ These are not compelling
intellectual reasons.”
The
program may live on, in diminished form, even if the Nationalism Studies
Department no longer exists: CEU’s History Department is considering hosting a
version of degree, if it gets approval from the CEU Senate.
In an
interview, Fodor pushed back strongly against the idea that shutting down the
Nationalism Studies Department is an indication CEU no longer believes the
study of nationalism is important. To the contrary, she told me, nationalism is
so integral to the ethos of CEU that it hardly needs its own department.
“Every
single department at CEU is teaching courses on nationalism,” she said. “By
suspending the program, we are not actually eliminating the study of
nationalism.”
Global
ties
Even if
the program’s impending demise isn’t directly due to the rise of nationalism,
the development could hardly come at a worse time for those hoping to better
make sense of nationalist successes around Europe and the world.
Four
years ago, when I started my master’s program at CEU, my goal was exactly that:
to better understand why nationalism was on the rise in Europe and elsewhere.
While covering the rise of far-right populist movements across Europe as a
journalist based in Berlin, I discovered the program when I wrote a story about
the university’s move to Vienna and decided to apply.
Studying
nationalism from a theoretical perspective — whether it was understanding how
national identities are formed, what processes contribute to ethnic prejudice,
or the ways citizenship policy can be wielded — turned out to be helpful when I
went back to being a reporter.
Writing
about the global ties between nationalist, far-right political parties, I
understood the ways these parties learned from each other’s messaging and
framed outside influences (whether via migration or alleged efforts to sway
national elections) as an attack on national sovereignty. In exploring the
political activism of Los Angeles’ Iranian American diaspora, I drew on what
I’d learned about the complicated relationships political diasporas can have
with their home countries and the ways that identity impacts their civic
involvement in their new countries. And when I covered the victims of racist
violence in Germany, it was with an understanding I’d gotten at CEU about how
ethnic prejudices are formed (and reinforced) by the way we’re socialized.
After
graduation, my colleagues returned to their respective countries, which these
days read like a list of successes for nationalist political parties. One went
home to Romania, where a hard-right nationalist came within striking distance
of winning the presidency earlier this year; another returned to Serbia, home
of the right-wing leader Aleksandar Vučić. I went back to Germany, where the
far-right Alternative for Germany party is leading the national polls; some
remained in Austria, where the far-right Freedom Party came in first with 29
percent of the vote last year and nearly installed the first far-right
chancellor since the end of World War II. My former classmates are now
journalists, election observers, academics and political activists, all of whom
approach their work armed with the knowledge of how these parties operate and
appeal to their local electorates.
“Nationalism
studies provides the understanding of these complex developments. One should
understand what’s happening, why it’s happening and what such developments
might lead to,” said Ruth Wodak, a professor of linguistics and expert on
far-right rhetoric who has taught as a guest lecturer in CEU’s program (and
served as my thesis adviser). Ethnically based nationalism “can lead to
polarized societies, and sometimes, polarized societies can also become
dangerous and violent.”
Those
still involved in the nationalism studies program say they’re choosing to view
this moment as a potential opportunity for the program to adapt: To an era when
interest in studying humanities and social sciences is losing out to more
professionally focused degrees, disciplines are increasingly intertwined and
nationalism has evolved again to propel a new generation of illiberal leaders
like Trump, Orbán and others into office.
“What
would it look like if we were to establish this department today?” asked
Michael Miller, a professor in the department who teaches (among others) its
course on diaspora studies, when we spoke this summer. “Of course, we would
deal with questions of identity, national identity and ethnic identity, but
also questions of migration and diaspora in general, and the role of the state,
the role of non-state bodies.”
“In the
optimistic reading of this, it’s a blessing in disguise, because it gives us a
chance to revitalize this field of study,” he added.
But it’s
not yet clear whether that will happen. CEU’s Senate is in the process of
considering whether to accept a proposal from the department’s faculty on
reestablishing the program in CEU’s History department.
Studying
nationalism means understanding the ways in which far-right nationalist
parties’ fundamental pitches to voters play on deep-seated questions of
identity, and the interplay between how someone views themself and how they fit
within a broader group.
And that
will remain relevant no matter what.
“If the
study of nationalism … is broadly interpreted to refer to any way of invoking
national community whether or not you use the word ‘nation,’” Brubaker told me,
“then it is ubiquitous. Not only in political rhetoric, but also in the
feelings and speech of ordinary citizens.”
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