East Asia—the area of the world I specialize in—is a powerful testament to the relevance of nationalism in world politics. National humiliation, historical amnesia, victimization narratives and the like normally grab today’s headlines, but it’s often forgotten that East Asia’s rapid modernization would have probably been less spectacular without well-rooted nationalism and powerful nation-states. Even Marxist historian Eric J. Hobsbawm, who made a name for himself for pointing out that nation-states and their paraphernalia were “invented traditions,” suggested that northeast Asia was made up of rare examples of ethnically homogenous proto-nation-states. Meiji Japan’s rapid industrialization for the sake of a “rich nation and a strong army” (fukoku kyōhei) was fed by economic nationalism. And the Japanese state has remained integral to capitalist development in the post-war years in no small part thanks to widespread top-down moral suasion campaigns embraced by grassroots movements. Japan’s neighbors would emulate its modernization blueprints, from South Korea’s Park Chung-hee’s October Restoration—explicitly named after the Meiji Restoration—all the way to late Qing China and Xi Jinping’s industrial policies aimed at “wealth and power” (fuqiang).

Nationalism has served well post-war East Asia’s catch-up under the U.S.-led multilateral economic order, which would include China by the late 1970s. But nationalism can be a double-edged sword, as economic pies shrink and great power rivalry resurfaces. The tides of globalization have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and torn down barriers among states, but these same tides have now stranded many members of the lower and middle classes in mature economies with sputtering growth and a small welfare state, thus feeding into a potentially destructive breed of economic nationalism. In many ways, the U.S.-China clash is premised on economic nationalism from both sides of the Pacific and, as tit-for-tat protectionism of the 1930s reminds us, nationalism can easily feed into a zero-sum spiral of distorted market and unfair trade practices met with import tariffs, beggar-thy-neighbor policies, and so on. And make no mistake: Calls for economic decoupling or self-reliance, like earlier ones for autarky and economic self-sufficiency, will make us all poorer and exacerbate the risks of war.

Benedict Anderson, in a fundamental text on nationalism, developed the concept of “imagined communities,” pointing our attention to the ways in which nationalism is a socially constructed idea often perpetuated via media technologies. Since his critique, and given how throughout contemporary history, nationalism has been used by political leaders to rally populations, often for war, confrontation, or the implementation of policies that restrict access to goods and opportunities for certain demographics, “nationalism” has been derided by scholars as a force of evil. In the quest to deconstruct nationalism, and later in the fervor to understand globalization, scholars began to pay less attention to the power of nationalism as a unifying force. That has been to our detriment, as we witness the rise of nationalism once again.

In the era of nation-states, is nationalism inevitable? I think that’s the big question, and I think the answer to whether it is inevitable is: yes. Anthropologists have shown how storytelling is at the crux of human societies. Nationalism, at its heart, is a story about the nation. It has been used for evil purposes, but scholars such as Jill Lepore have called on scholars to use a critical knowledge of history to construct more inclusive forms of nationalism. As she writes: “Writing national history creates plenty of problems. But not writing national history creates more problems, and these problems are worse.” It is incumbent upon us to grapple with this—otherwise, nationalism will predominantly be used as a tool to divide.