Refers to a fundamentally antagonistic political ideology of recent origin in terms of human history. It arose in its current form in Europe and it conflates one’s personal identity with a political identity that is based, on one hand, in the belief that loyalty to the nation-state (a territory-bounded political entity commonly known as “country”) transcends loyalty to everything else—including one’s family, clan, tribe, ethnicity, class, gender, religion, and even such matters as truth and justice—and on the other, in the misguided belief that one’s nation-state is superior to all others. In contexts of imperialism, however, nationalism may also arise among the subordinated peoples as a necessary prelude to their anti-imperialist struggles for freedom, in which case one may legitimately consider it as defensive nationalism. It should be noted that in capitalist-democracies, the nationalist “project” is also a capitalist “project” in that it is deployed to disguise class-divisions and class struggles. Nationalism in this context becomes part of that basket of distractions (subjective interests) that the bourgeoisie has so successfully managed to get the working classes in capitalist societies all across the world to pursue in place of pursuing their real interests (objective interests), of which defense against the class warfare of the bourgeoisie is salient. Further, nationalism, when unchecked, can mutate through demagoguery into jingoism, which is an extremely chauvinistic version of nationalism often characterized by xenophobia and/or racism and belligerence toward other peoples. (See also Fascism.)