The similarity of fate encourages the collective desire to establish themselves in one nation model or social ties layered with political sovereignty. The different bases of nationalism in various regions imply that nationalism is not stagnant. Nationalism is dynamic, which in the prism of Arjun Appadurai’s thought (1996), depends on ethnoscape, technoscape, financescape, mediascape, and Ideoscape.
Ethnoscape relates to the status, composition and demographic position of race, identity, religion, and ethnicity. Interaction with multiple identities stimulates a particular social concern, awareness and imagination. Technoscape concerns technology in facilitating speed across territorial boundaries. From that crossing emerged the exchange of information, identity, and even significant new experiences for the imagined form of kinship imagination.
Financescape deals with market mechanisms, commodity shifts and circulation, and the identity of economic drivers. Mediascape is the ability of electronic devices to facilitate the exchange of information in various forms. Finally, Ideoscape or state authority relates to ideology and varied movements that seek to seize part or all of state sovereignty.
For example, the experience of the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars in France were ideoscape and financescape factors for nationalism in France. Hundreds of years later, when Syria and several Middle Eastern countries experienced a humanitarian crisis, many European countries, including France, received refugees from there. The European ethnoscape is changing. Some political contestants play nativist nationalism as an electoral card and populist policy.
In America, where youth associations are cosmopolitanism and progressive movements like Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ activism are springing up, Donald Trump is ‘revitalizing’ old American values by using white, Anglo-Saxon racial sentiments. Protestant (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant/WASP). Another Trump strategy is the antagonism of Latinos and Negroes on charges of ‘criminals,’ ‘drug smugglers, ‘ and ‘rapists’.
Trump’s famous slogan, “Make America Great Again,” emerged as an accumulation of ethnoscape and ideoscape play to redefine American nationalism. However, the cases of France and America show that the meaning of nationalism can be changed by social dynamics and certain actors or intentions through one or more of its principal factors.
Pre-independence Indonesia got its nationalism from two directions. The first is from scholars. And second, from grassroots press activism. Study scholarships for the indigenous elite from the colonial government were originally directed for ethical and political purposes so that the indigenous elites side with the colonial government. However, elites such as Hatta and Sjahrir experienced inner turmoil in the Netherlands. So they settled about their identity, nationality, and social exclusion.