User:Antidiskriminator/Drafts of articles/Nationalistic myths

The National myths (sometimes referred to as Nationalistic myths or Nationalist myths) are myths created and propagated by national intellectuals who use them as instrument of political mobilization on the basis of ethnicity. Nationalist myths sometimes have a tendency to stimulate conflicts between the nations, to magnify distinctive characteristics of the national group and to overstate the threat to the nation posed by other groups propagating militant fulfilment of the their goals.

Social background
The concept of national identity is inescapably connected with myths. Complex of myths are the core of ethnic identity. Some scholars believe that national identities (equipped with invented histories) were constructed only after national movements and national ideologies emerged first.

All modern national identities were preceded by nationalist movements. Although the term "nation" was used in the Middle Ages, it had totally different meaning than in the age of nationalism, where it was linked to the efforts aimed to creation of the nation-states.

Psychological background
Besides their social background, nationalist myths have also a psychological explanation which is connected with nationalist myth of stable homeland community. The complexity of relations with the modern external world and incoherence of the inner psychological world can result with anxiety which is reduced by static self-labelling and self-construction and gaining an imaginary emotion of stability.

Primary myths
Two nationalism's primary myths are connected with beliefs in :
 * 1) community's permanence (the myth of the eternal nation), based on its national character, territory and institutions and on its continuity across many generations, and
 * 2) community's common ancestry (myth of the common ancestry).

The nationalist myths portray the nation like sleeping and waiting to be awakened, but scholarly discourse avoid such image because national identity either exists or not and can not be asleep and awakened.