Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, racial, religious or national group that has brought many losses for human population through the whole history of the world. First cases of genocide had such reasons as territorial, competing and religious arguments. For instance, one of the first genocides is thought to be the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE that occurred due to religious reason and the competitiveness of these two superpowers.
The history has seen many cases of genocide, but this social problem especially spread worldwide during the twentieth century which was even claimed to be the “century of genocide”. The number of such events outnumbered 20 and the number of people killed was nearly 160 million. In the history of the 20th century with its Nazism, ethnic cleansing, deportations, clash of empires, wars in Yugoslavia and Post-Soviet territories, violence that touched upon even Africa and Asia – it is nationalism to be blamed to be the reason of all this cruelty that existed globally in the 1900s. However, does nationalism always lead to genocide? In this essay, I would try to give an answer to this question and prove my opinion that nationalism in practice frequently leads to genocide, analyzing theory and history of the twentieth century particularly. I would try to shortly explain how nationalism is understood by different sociologists and historians, what was naturally meant by nationalism and what it became in practice,