What are nationalists actually nostalgic for?
Written by Nina Toruniewska
Every nationalist movement tells a story about the past, but not every one of these stories claims to be recoverable. There is a difference between mourning what’s gone and insisting it can be rebuilt – between a glance backward and a political program aimed at reconstruction. Some are overwhelmed by the constant changes. Some are unsure about the future awaiting them, whether it’s because of the state of the economy, the sociopolitical shifts, or the prospect of a military conflict. That is the ideal environment for nationalist and radical movements – currently flourishing also on the European political scene. But where do their leaders draw the idea for their own program from? As it turns out, it is extremely easy to convert nostalgia as personal sentiment to nostalgia as political program.
To understand that a little more I will mention the concept of restorative nostalgia, first introduced by Svetlana Boym in her cultural study The Future of Nostalgia. The difference between the aforementioned term and the “standard” reflective nostalgia is the fact that restorative nostalgia puts an emphasis on rebuilding what is lost and recreating the past in the present exactly how it used to be. It does not accept that it is most likely not feasible and, what is more harmful, it does not take into account the flaws of the previous system. Thus, restorative nostalgics make sure that the customs of the past are recovered and proposed once again as rigid and immutable, cloaked in a higher degree of symbolic formalisation.
The aim of all this is to prevent their ideology from being contaminated by others either by an actualisation or by giving it a necessary context. This complicating of the past leads to making it even more conservative and just unreal. Restorative nostalgics fight for their vision in a sense that the past is incomplete, that it didn’t get a proper ending or it should not have ended at all. The “golden age” is rarely a faithful account of any actual historical period – it’s a retrospective construction assembled to solve present anxieties. Whereas, reflective nostalgics can enjoy the aesthetic distance that makes memories foggy as they were reminiscing them through a captivating book or a good movie.
Nation-building requires a specific origin myth shared by the majority of the population – restorative nostalgia supplies one. It converts loss (of empire, status, identity, etc.) into a mobilising grievance. Moreover, the simple, linear narrative (golden age, then betrayal, then restoration) maps neatly onto “us vs. them”, eventually leading to division of the society and stigmatisation of some circles. It often appears alongside lies and conspiracy theories. However, they are not here to offer a whole alternative reality – just an explanation that would be much less harsh and complex than the truth. When it comes to right-wing politicians, their narrative imposes that the nation is no longer great because someone (or something) deliberately caused this and significantly diminished its standing. They try to show the people that their lives are less comfortable solely because of that factor, so that the public will also become involved in counteracting it. Nationalists choose to use this mechanism to gain power, popularity, to be seen as “restorers” rather than innovators, and to finally carry out reforms allegedly meant to restore the state to its former self. The result? Partial cutting off of the country from the surrounding geopolitical reality, radicalisation, weakening of objectively valuable alliances… In the worst-case scenario, closer cooperation with autocracies.
Keeping all this information in mind, a textbook example of restorative nostalgia in politics is the Make America Great Again movement in the United States. How long ago exactly was the US so fabulous? Was it when Donald Trump won the election for the first time? I guess we will never know. But what is “certain” is that the country has to face problems caused by immigrants and the liberals. That it has to be more independent and self-sufficient, as if it were not the largest economy in the world. That it is so important to unlawfully invade Venezuela or Iran and invest extreme amounts of money in these military operations, as if American citizens could easily afford basic healthcare and not be in debt because they had to be hospitalised once. This is the American reality, yet many people still do not acknowledge that the real danger might be coming from their own government. What they see is impressive rallies, firm statements, and the world-famous slogan.
Then, in the East, there is Russian imperial nostalgia. Official rhetoric has framed the Soviet collapse not as liberation for the peoples who left the USSR earlier, but as a historical rupture that needs to be reversed. This selectively fuses two contradictory pasts: Tsarist imperial expansion and Soviet superpower status. This results in a single continuous narrative of greatness, which most of the population accepts. The invented continuity extends further back still, denying Ukraine’s distinct national history and casting it instead as an integral, temporarily separated part of Russia. This claim is obviously contested by most historians of the region, who emphasize centuries of distinct development, national consciousness, and different culture. As with other cases of restorative nostalgia, the function isn’t really historical accuracy but mobilisation, meaning territorial and political assertiveness not as expansion but as restoration of a rightful order that was unjustly broken.
“This would never happen here” – some Europeans may think, peacefully observing Trump’s administration impose new tariffs while negotiating with Putin. But we have our own nostalgics, who unsurprisingly are gaining strength. Germany has Alternative für Deutschland focusing on strong anti-immigration, Euroscepticism, and national conservatism. In Poland there is their almost equivalent – Konfederacja. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni resorts to an instrumental use of religion, reduced to an identity factor, even by nationalising the saints, to bring together her voters.
However, there is an interesting event we could witness this year – the end of the populist Fidesz party’s rule in Hungary. This autocratic government created a whole new system, destroying the country from within over 16 years. I mention this, because after the elections we were able to notice all the damage that has been done – both economically and constitutionally – as well as the party’s leaders’ reactions, as they were trying to keep their profits. Hungary was where all the fatal factors, such as xenophobia or nationalism, met. And they did not, in fact, make Hungary great.
The thing with making nations great again is that maybe they have not been great at all back then. Restorative nostalgia operates with selective memory, so the ideologists decide what specifically they want us to remember. Episodes that flatter the desired national identity get foregrounded and often exaggerated – a period of military glory, a “pure” ethnic composition. These get detached from their original context and turned into symbols (a flag, a costume, an architectural style) that can be redeployed in the present. Anything that could complicate the story is erased or minimised. So every conflict in which the state was in the wrong is forgotten. The remains of a story are then arranged so that they create a vision of a past era. Because it is displayed as recovered fact and not a constructive narrative, disagreement about it is treated as an attack, rather than historical debate. Complexity is more than just unwelcome, it’s read as evidence of the very corruption the movement claims to be fighting.
Restorative nostalgia isn’t confined only to the far-right. It shows up in left nationalist and postcolonial contexts too (a “return” to pre-colonial purity carries the same structural risks as a “return” to imperial greatness). Naming this keeps the piece from reading as a partisan takedown rather than an analytical tool. What is more, not all nostalgia is restorative, and not all appeals to tradition are nationalist pathology. The framework is for identifying a specific pattern, not for treating all sentimentality about the past as suspect.
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