Internationalism is the ethical belief or scientific approach in which peoples of different nations are held to be or assumed to be equal. Internationalism is opposed to racism and national chauvinism.

We Maoists believe the nationalism of nations experiencing oppression from other nations is "applied internationalism."

"I must argue, not from the point of view of 'my' country (for that is the argument of a wretched, stupid, petty-bourgeois nationalist who does not realize that he is only a plaything in the hands of the imperialist bourgeoisie), but from the point of view of my share in the preparation, in the propaganda, and in the acceleration of the world proletarian revolution. That is what internationalism means, and that is the duty of the internationalist, of the revolutionary worker, of the genuine Socialist."

V. I. Lenin, "What Is Internationalism?" The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1965), p. 80.