Abstract
This chapter argues that nationalism shapes international behavior in particular ways and its effects will be particularly obvious in periods of unipolarity. To illustrate this argument, it examines American nationalism and the tension between its liberal ideological and Anglo-conforming, racist commitments. This tension produces ongoing “organized hypocrisies” in both its internal and international politics and suggests that different unipoles would make alternative choices based on their own nationalist histories and normative tensions, even as behaviors remained within an operative nationalist bandwidth shared across the international system.
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Sterling-Folker, J. (2022). Unipolarity and Nationalism: The Racialized Legacies of an Anglo-Saxon Unipole. In: Græger, N., Heurlin, B., Wæver, O., Wivel, A. (eds) Polarity in International Relations. Governance, Security and Development. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05505-8_10
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