in them. Fascism utilizes their authoritarian leadership to provide the means, the revolutionary fervor, to incite liberation and to give shape to the masses who are “shapeless, never amounting to anything until shaped by the elite and given a will” (Rauschning)Nationalism, in a similar way, unites human beings together in commonality and defines the bound community of individuals in terms of the loyalty of the individual to the community. The ideology is defined by Hugh Seton-Watson to be “a policy of creating national consciousness within a politically unconscious population.” It is the unification of a people through a factor which is stronger than political affiliation, something as binding as nationality. Nationalism utilizes the combination of both state and nationality, hence the name the nation-state, to harness the political power of a people. The unity within nationalism is based on objective and subjective factors, which provide for the creation of a common purpose. The objective factors consist of: religion, language, race, ethnicity, common past, and geography / a common territory. The subjective factors are elements of will and purpose which contribute to the formation of a state. Nationalism then becomes not only an ideology, but a movement. The only demand that is made by a nationality in this process is that the people express self-determination. This self-determination of a people is a key aspect in nationalism. It decided the conflict between Germany and France over the provinces of Alsace, where the Germans asserted their claims in terms of objective factors, their historical right to the provinces, saying , “We desire, even against their will, to restore them to themselves.” It became a doctrine when Woodrow Wilson included it in his famous Fourteen Points, declaring that “self-determination is an imperative principle of action...”, expressing that it was ...
