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Nationalism has long been viewed as a "romantic" ethos, though this description has meant many things. It has functioned as a strong evaluation--with the "romantic" operating as a term of both abuse and approval--but it has also served in a more technical capacity, playing a key part in a broader explanation of nationalism.1So the origins of the credo, or at least a strand of it, are traced to a romantic period or ideology or some combination of these. The term "romantic nationalism" is thus ubiquitous in modern scholarship.2The category usually stands for a subset of nationalism, although it can also function as a tautology, since all nationalisms have been presented as instances of "political romanticism."3However, this essay questions the usefulness of "romanticism" as an explanatory concept in the context of nationalism--in particular, Irish nationalism. The evaluative properties of the term--the "romantic" has signified the atavistic, the emotive and the fanciful since the eighteenth century--can certainly be summoned to describe advocates of nationalism or, indeed, enthusiasts of any political position.4But these are coarse evaluations at best and do little to account for the content or basic intentionality of nationalist belief. The use of "romanticism"--as an ideological matrix or looser collection of vocabularies--to map the provenance or conceptual shape of such belief has fared little better. Cast through a romantic prism, nationalism, I argue, loses its political intelligibility and becomes oddly divorced from questions about sovereignty, democratic legitimacy and the nature of modern citizenship.
This transcendence of politics partly stems from the fact that romanticism is usually deemed to be a cultural formation--one, moreover, in which the aesthetic is sometimes judged to reign supreme over all other values.5If this appears to make political commitments secondary, then nationalism--that is to say, "political romanticism"--is a curiously self-contradictory form of politics.6The insistent twinning of romanticism and nationalism also rests on perceptions of both as species of irrationalism.7Over recent decades scholars have produced much more sophisticated accounts of each phenomenon; nonetheless, even in the most current scholarship, both appear as forms of Counter-Enlightenment, deeply suspicious if not hostile to reason.8The standards of rationality that have traditionally shaped these evaluations are rarely made explicit. It...