Talk:Revolutionary nationalism

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What is this article supposed to be about?[edit]

This article seems extremely confused and confusing. It presents "revolutionary nationalism" as if it were a single, identifiable political movement, but in fact it is a non-specific label used by a wide variety of sources for a wide variety of different things.

A search on Google scholar for "revolutionary nationalism" returns a paper on Amilcar Cabral as the first result, and further results include papers on the nationalism of the French Revolution, Irish republican nationalism, "the revolutionary nationalism of Sun Yat-sen", the Black Panther Party, "revolutionary nationalism in Bolivia, 1952–85", nationalism during the Mexican revolution, etc. etc. All of them seem to use the term "revolutionary nationalism" without any specific definition, to refer simply to the intersection of the concepts "nationalism" and "revolution". To the extent that any common theme emerges, "revolutionary nationalism" seems to be typically used to refer to Third World anti-colonial movements.

I also did a search on JStor, with similar results. The first few results I found were: a book chapter about Chinese immigrants in the early 20th century US and their relationship with nationalist movements in China, a book chapter called "Revolutionary nationalism in contemporary Russia" (from 2018), an article called "Revolutionary Nationalism in Jharkhand", a chapter from a book about a Puerto Rican movement in Chicago, another about Japan, etc. This time there is no obvious common theme at all. Again, "revolutionary nationalism" simply seems to mean the intersection of the concepts "nationalism" and "revolution".

The French Wikipedia article "Nationalisme révolutionnaire", linked in the "expand" template, refers to the movement that is covered by the English article Revolutionary Nationalist Groups. In other words, it's about a post-World War II Third Positionist movement.

So... What is revolutionary nationalism? Hard to say. But it's definitely not what this article pretends it is - a clearly defined term for the nationalism of Benito Mussolini and related groups in late 19th century / early 20th century Italy and Europe.

I intend to start checking the sources used in this article to see what they really say, but I doubt that will solve the problem. It's clear that the term "revolutionary nationalism" has no single meaning, and each source uses it to mean something different. What can we do in this situation? Should this article simply be a redirect back to nationalism? Should we restructure it to say, basically, "this author calls this thing revolutionary nationalism, this other author calls this other thing revolutionary nationalism, this third author..."? Tglat (talk) 06:06, 2 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I checked the sources that were used in the article, and the majority of them were not even talking about "revolutionary nationalism" at all, but rather simply about "nationalism" (in various contexts). Worst of all, the "definition" of revolutionary nationalism that was given at the top of the article was not used by the author in reference to "revolutionary nationalism" at all! The author says that the young Mussolini (not revolutionary nationalism or revolutionary nationalists) wanted to weld the Italians into a national community united by a shared sense of purpose and destiny. He does not make any broader statement about anyone else or about non-Italians who might share those views.

Seeing this, combined with what I mentioned two weeks ago above (the fact that "revolutionary nationalism" is a term used by many different authors to refer to many different things), I decided the only thing to do was to rewrite the article. So that's what I did. I went through the top results of my JStor and Scholar searches for "revolutionary nationalism", and rewrote the article based on those (while keeping the part of the old content that was based on a source actually talking about "revolutionary nationalism"). The result is as you can see. Most academic articles that use the term "revolutionary nationalism" are talking about anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements. But none of them give any definition of the term. As I said above, it really seems to be just the intersection of the concepts "nationalism" and "revolution". Tglat (talk) 16:06, 17 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]