There are two popular myths concerning the relationship between communism and nationalism. The first is that nationalism and communism are wholly antagonistic and mutually exclusive. The second is the assertion that in communist Eastern Europe nationalism was oppressed before 1989, to emerge triumphant after the Berlin Wall came down. Reality was different. Certainly from 1945 onwards, communist parties presented themselves as heirs to national traditions and guardians of national interests. The communist states of Central and Eastern Europe constructed “socialist patriotism,” a form of loyalty to their own state of workers and peasants. Up to 1989, communists in Eastern Europe sang the national anthem, and waved the national flag next to the red banner. The use of national images was not the exception, but the rule. From Cuba to Korea, all communist parties attempted to gain national legitimacy. This was not incidental or a deviation from Marxist orthodoxy, but ingrained in the theory and practice of the communist movement since its inception.

A small advertisement in the first issue of España Popular, a weekly journal begun in February 1940 and edited by Spanish communists in exile, announced that it would be publishing chapters of The Terror of 1824. This 1877 novel by Benito Pérez Galdós (1843–1920) was part of the second series of his National Episodes and served as a literary standard for reinforcing the master narrative of Spanish liberal nationalism at the turn of the century. Spanish communists considered The Terror of 1824 a representative work of common patriotic heritage that should be preserved and publicized among their followers. Built around the absolutist repression of liberals after the anti-Napoleonic War in Spain, the novel was given an updated political meaning. An implicit parallel was traced between the fate of nineteenth-century liberals and the recent exile of Spanish communists, with the former cast as the progressive forerunners of the twentieth-century freedom fighters in Spain. This was coherent with the Republican and socialist interpretation of the Spanish history of that period.

During the early post-war years (1944–1948), the newly established communist regimes in Eastern Europe followed the Soviet example. They honoured figures and events from their respective national pasts, and celebrated holidays dedicated to anti-fascist resistance and popular uprisings, which they presented as forerunners of the new, bright and prosperous “democratic” era. Hungarian communists celebrated 15 March and commemorated 6 October, both recalling the national struggle for independence in 1848; they celebrated a martyr cult of fallen communists presented as national heroes, and “nationalized” socialist holidays, such as May Day. In the centenary of 1848 they linked national with social demands. In the “struggle for the soul of the nation,” Czech communists also extensively celebrated anniversaries and centenaries, especially in 1948, which saw the 600th anniversary of the founding of Prague's Charles University, the 100th anniversaries of the first All-Slav Congress (held in Prague) and the revolution of 1848, the 30th anniversary of the founding of an independent Czechoslovakia, and the 10th anniversary of the Munich Accords. National holidays related to anti-fascist resistance movements were celebrated in Croatia, Slovenia, and Macedonia; dates related to the overthrow of fascism, implying the transition to the new era, were celebrated in Romania, Albania, and Bulgaria.

In 1944 Poland was re-established for the second time in the twentieth century. Between the Lublin manifesto of 22 July 1944 and the Potsdam conference of summer 1945 a communist-dominated regime had formed, which was had little in common with the Second Republic that had been founded between the declaration of independence on 9 November 1918 and the peace of Riga with Bolshevik Russia signed in March 1921. Post-war Poland was significantly smaller, geographically further to the west, and ethnically more homogeneous. The Holocaust had destroyed Europe's most sizeable Jewish population, the loss of the kresy (eastern borderlands) to the USSR had reduced the size of eastern-Slavic minorities and the expulsion of the Germans from East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia further helped to create an ethnically homogeneous country. For the first time in her history, Poland had the structure of a nation-state. Through the destruction and catastrophe of Nazi occupation and genocide the goal of firebrand Polish nationalists such as Roman Dmowski had been achieved: a Poland inhabited by ethnic Poles. Still, the new Poland was less independent than its predecessor; from 1944 onwards it was part of the emerging post-war Soviet Empire. Polish sovereignty had fallen victim to Stalin's “revolutionary-imperial paradigm.” Expansion of Moscow's power was as much a priority of the Soviet leadership as the export of Bolshevik revolution.

In May 1951, students at the District Party School of the Socialist Union Party of Germany (SED) in the southern Thuringian city of Suhl evaluated the agitation and propaganda assignments that they had recently completed. Such assignments were a regular exercise in the instruction of future cadres. From these discussions, the difficulties that traditional German nationalism posed to the SED become clear. One student cited words of a party comrade he had talked to on the question of befriending the Polish and the Czechoslovak peoples. Instead of sticking to the official ideological line that rejected chauvinist ideas, this comrade had responded: “[…] I will never make friends with the Czech people. To me they are not human beings.” This anger directed against the Czechs by a German communist may have arisen from the frequently brutal deportation of Germans from Czechoslovakia after 1945: the Czechs had not made exceptions for German anti-fascists. It could also be explained by continued anti-Slav sentiment dating from the Nazi years. The file does not elaborate how the incident was resolved. Nevertheless, it demonstrates that nationalist sentiments had survived the collapse of Nazism even with members of the SED. How did the SED counter this heavy national mortgage?

At the beginning of the 1930s, Portuguese political elites were committed to the recovery of the “lost glory” of the era of the so-called Portuguese Discoveries, a past age which was (and still is) often considered as the golden period of Portuguese history. The new Portuguese political regime, an outcome of a right-wing military coup d'etat in 1926, and its opposition on the left were united in arguing in favour of a Portuguese Empire. In 1934, during Portugal's I Exposição Colonial (1st Colonial Expo), the oppositionist newspaper O Diabo frequently praised the Portuguese Empire, setting the tone for the rest of the decade. In the second half of the 1930s, the glorification of the Empire by oppositionists became even more prominent, as exemplified by Portugal's Frente Popular's (Popular Front) programme, a political document that was the result of a convergence between Portuguese communists, socialists and republicans. Written in 1936, the programme is critical of “colonial imperialism's policy,” but not really of colonialism in general. According to Frente Popular, colonialism was morally acceptable because it can aid “other less civilized peoples, so that they can gradually join international life, until they reach the final stage of their complete autonomy.”

Caught between political allegiance to the Soviet Union and a shared history with West Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) occupied an awkward position in Cold War Europe. While other countries in the Eastern Bloc already existed as nation-states before coming under Soviet control, the GDR was the product of Germany's arbitrary division. There was no specifically East German culture in 1945—only a German culture. When it came to matters of national identity, officials in the GDR's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) could not posit a unique quality of “East Germanness,” but could only highlight East Germany's difference from its western neighbor. This difference did not stem from the language and culture of the past, but the politics and ideology of the present: East Germany was socialist Germany.

When approaching the issue of Romanian national-communism, it is Nicolae Ceauşescu's flamboyant display of chauvinistic nationalism that comes immediately to mind. Thus, it may come as a surprise for many to learn that it was in fact Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the Stalinist leader of the Romanian Workers’ Party (RWP) and Ceauşescu's predecessor, who initiated in the mid-1950s a return to the local traditions and subsequently to an ethnic understanding of the Romanian nation. True, under the reign of Ceauşescu, the communist regime engaged in sustained policies aimed at reinforcing the ethnic ties among the Romanian majority and assimilating the historic ethnic minorities. But, in the case of Romanian communism, a nationalistic turn had already been initiated during the year 1956, under the rule of Gheorghiu-Dej. At the same time, it took a rather long period, i.e. 1956–1968, for Romanian national-communism to mature.