'Nationalism' is a slippery word, but in the contemporary Western imagination it has come to signify something quite specific. It often denotes an exclusionary politics obsessed with immigration and cultural purity. Often, the defence of an imagined past.

The far right in most countries in Europe and North America has turned nationalism into a rallying cry against multiculturalism, secular liberalism, and the very idea of a pluralist civic order. From fears of demographic change to hostility toward international institutions, Western right-wing nationalism thrives on anxiety about losing cultural authority and borders. It also draws on fears of losing a “mythical” national essence.

This understanding of nationalism is now exported, uncritically, across the world. Too often, commentators collapse every project that speaks in the language of nationhood into the same category. If nationalism in France, Austria, Germany, or the United States is right-wing, then Bangladeshi nationalism, Indian nationalism, or any form of post-colonial nationalism must be right-wing by analogy.

It is a convenient but profoundly misleading story, one that strips colonised societies of their historical experience and flattens their political imagination into a Western template that never fit them in the first place.

The origins of nationalism in the post-colonial world lie in a struggle for freedom—most definitely not in racial exclusion. Colonised peoples were not defending privilege or seeking cultural homogeneity; they were fighting for sovereignty, independence, dignity, and the right to define themselves against an external power that denied them political and human equality.

Anti-colonial nationalism was of course not a reaction to immigration or cultural “degeneracy”. It was a demand for political existence. Indeed, in much of Asia and Africa the colonial state itself had denied the colonised the basic status of political subjects, turning nationalism into the language through which equality could be asserted.

Movements for independence—from India’s mass civil resistance to Algeria’s armed struggle and Ghana’s constitutional mobilisation—illustrate how nationalism functioned as a claim to self-determination rather than as a doctrine of ethnic exclusion. The moral vocabulary of these movements was shaped by demands for political and cultural sovereignty, citizenship, proper representation in policy-making circle, and dignity rather than by anxieties about cultural dilution.

Understanding nuances

As scholars such as Partha Chatterjee have long argued, nationalisms in Asia, Africa, and Latin America were not derivatives of European nationalism but creative political projects that reclaimed modernity on their own terms. These movements embraced ideas—secularism, rationality, social reform, constitutionalism—that the contemporary Western far right now positions itself against.

Other scholars such as Benedict Anderson and Frantz Fanon similarly emphasised that anti-colonial nationalism was both an imaginative and emancipatory act. It created a political community among people who had previously been divided by colonial administrative structures, linguistic hierarchies, and economic exploitation. In this sense, nationalism became a framework for solidarity rather than exclusion, binding together peasants, workers, intellectuals, and minority communities in a shared project of liberation.

This divergence becomes clearest when we compare what the two nationalisms oppose. The Western far right mobilises against immigration, liberal internationalism, multiculturalism, feminist, and queer movements, and virtually any progressive social reform. Its rhetoric transforms economic inequality into cultural resentment, turning structural anxieties into identity politics.

But in the Global South, these elements—secularism, multicultural nationhood, women’s education, welfare, and egalitarian reform—were integral to nationalist aspirations.

Nehru’s India took secular democracy and welfare socialism as non-negotiable. Egypt’s Nasser expanded women’s access to education and viewed social redistribution as essential to modern nationhood. Indonesia’s Sukarno embraced pluralism as a founding principle. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman envisioned Bangladesh as a secular and culturally inclusive republic.

Where the far right in the West sees multiculturalism as a threat, post-colonial nationalists often saw it as the only viable foundation for a new state. In many cases this inclusiveness was not merely ideological but practical. Colonial borders had created states containing multiple languages, religions, and ethnic communities. For leaders of independence movements, the survival of the new nation depended on building a civic identity that could accommodate diversity rather than suppress it.

The constitutional commitments to secularism in India, Pancasila pluralism in Indonesia, and the early principles of Bangladeshi nationalism all reflected this recognition that unity had to be constructed through inclusion rather than enforced through homogeneity.

Now to call these movements right-wing by analogy to the West is to misunderstand their purpose. They were not mobilised to exclude minorities or resurrect an ethnically “pure” past. They were mobilised to overthrow empires, reform society, assert economic independence and build states that could survive in a world structured against them.

The necessary distinction

Anti-colonial nationalism was therefore inseparable from projects of modernisation—land reform, public education, industrialisation, and welfare. These policies were intended not simply to assert sovereignty but to repair the economic distortions left behind by colonial extraction. The nationalist state, in many cases, was imagined as an instrument of collective uplift.

Even where these projects faltered—and many did, sometimes sliding into authoritarianism—their animating purpose was reconstruction, not reaction. And that distinction matters a lot.

One should also acknowledge that post-colonial nationalisms were not flawless. Some regimes centralised power excessively; others failed to deliver on egalitarian promises. Leaders such as Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt built modern states but often at the cost of political pluralism. Sheikh Mujib’s own rule in 1974 showed the fragility of a project that must balance justice and democratic openness.

Yet even these failures do not make post-colonial nationalism comparable to the Western far right. They reflect the difficulties of state-building in societies fractured by colonialism and global inequality.

Many newly independent states inherited weak institutions, artificial borders, and economies designed for extraction rather than development. Under such constraints, the pressures toward centralisation and strong leadership were often responses to instability rather than ideological commitments to exclusion. The mistake, then, lies in treating nationalism as a single ideological species.

Nationalism is a political tool. It is not inherently reactionary. In the West today, it may be wielded by the far right to exclude, but in much of the Global South it emerged to liberate—to dismantle an unjust world order and to imagine a future where dignity did not depend on the permission of colonisers.

When one conflates these radically different histories, one erases the moral content of anti-colonial struggle and the progressive aspirations embedded within it.

If nationalism in colonised societies often carried the promise of emancipation, nationalism in the contemporary West often carries the fear of loss. That alone should warn us against the lazy equivalence that treats them as ideological twins. Understanding this difference is a matter of political honesty.

Faisal Mahmud is a Dhaka-based journalist and analyst

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