Beyond reason: The nature of the ethnonational bond

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Abstract
By and large, both statesmen and scholars have failed to comprehend the non‐rational, emotional well‐springs of ethnonationalism and, consequently, have tended to underestimate its capacity for influencing group behaviour. By contrast, those who have successfully appealed to ethnonationalism have understood that at the core of ethnopsychology is a conviction that members of the nation are all ancestrally related, and they have not hesitated to appeal to this sense of kinship. A broad review of the speeches and proclamations of those who have successfully appealed to ethnonational sentiments demonstrates a remarkable uniformity in the use of phraseology. This near universality with which certain images and phrases appear ‐ blood, family, brothers, sisters, mothers, forefathers, home ‐ and the proven success of such evocations in eliciting massive, popular responses tell us much about the nature and potency of ethnonationalism and suggest possible avenues of future research.

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