PARIS - One hundred years ago, the flamboyant, rabble-rousing Italian poet and playwright Gabriele D'Annunzio marched into the disputed city of Fiume on the Adriatic with 2,000 squadristi and set up a farcical Italian regency, appointing himself Duce.
For 15 months, D'Annunzio rehearsed rituals that later would be imitated to tragic effect by Benito Mussolini — the stiff-armed Roman salute, balcony speeches punctuated by Achilles' war cry from Homer's epic , rhetorical dialogues with adoring crowds. The grandiose D'Annunzio electrified his supporters as he practiced politics in the grand style and promoted the idea of an expanded Mother Italy.
Ignominiously, the vainglorious poet-hero fled Fiume when the first shots were fired by the Italian navy. Nonetheless, D'Annunzio's ethno-nationalist adventure foreshadowed the era of the demagogues — nationalists who initially attracted the support of angry misfits, but soon channeled the broader disaffection of those who had been left behind as a maturing industrial revolution upended lives and dislocated traditional forms of political order.
A century later, nationalism is on the rise again, threatening to unpick maps that were mainly drawn up by Western nations at the height of their military and economic power.
Nationalist stirrings are being felt across the globe.
In Europe, where leftist Catalan secessionists are threatening to break with Spain, and where Germany last month saw far-right nationalists enter the Bundestag for the first time since the Nazi era. In Africa, where 56 years after British Cameroon and French Cameroon united following a referendum, the marriage seems to be heading for divorce. And in the Middle East, where Iraq's Kurds voted overwhelmingly last month to set up their own national homeland.
War in Syria has opened up the possibility that the country's destiny is to be split into three among Shiites, Sunni and Kurds.
For scholars like Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra, there are similarities between the so-called gilded age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the globalization and rapid technological change the world is experiencing now.
The gilding of the late 19th and early 20th centuries benefited some greatly, but masked serious social problems for large swathes of people, building up a widespread sense of resentment that sought refuge in the great 'isms' of the time — fascism, communism, anarchism and nationalism.
Writing in his book , Mishra argues "much in our experience resonates with that of people in the nineteenth century."
Now as then, many people feel powerless, have lost faith in traditional political authorities to protect them and to restore predictability, and resent unequal distributions of wealth and power. But, he notes, we are witnessing economic-fostered shocks of even greater magnitude than that experienced when D'Annunzio marched into Fiume with "dangers more diffuse and less predictable."
Communism and fascism appear busted — ideologies which are unlikely to recover from their history of bloodlust. In Russia, the Kremlin is making patriotic loyalty to the state, not communism, the bedrock of its efforts to engineer the resurgence of Russia as a great power.
As frustration builds over marginalization and social injustice, and as expectations about the benefits of material well-being are dashed, nationalism appears increasingly to be the political beneficiary. In Poland and Hungary, nationalist governments are in power, defying the European Union on burden-sharing when it comes to the influx of refugees and asylum-seekers from the Middle East and sub-Sahara Africa.
Ethno-nationalist movements can be seen developing across the globe, challenging globalization and immigration. In Europe, many have been around for some time, but have gained traction through digitally-savvy campaigning, mobilizing political support by blending ethnic-centric memes of shared ancestry, religion and language with populist attacks on corrupt elites' accused of selling out their countries for their own benefit.
When it comes to Europe and America, what's changed according to Bart Bonikowski, a Harvard professor of sociology who studies populist and nationalist movements, is how nationalist-populist ideas appear as salient to more and more people.