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Introduction: Ethnic Nationalism And Europe
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15440 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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12 / 1989 |
883 Words |
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The articles on European nationalism featured in this month's Currents in Modern Thought take a contemporary view of the subject. They also look beyond the continent's borders to the effects of Europe's nationalist legacy on the rest of today's world.
Europe's many Greco-Roman renaissances invariably pointed it away from the nation-state. The ancient Greeks never worked toward a politically unified national existence. They viewed their subnational political autonomy as being worth the price of virtually incessant wars among their own kind. Still, they proudly acknowledged their ethnic identity. All of Hellas, Herodotus tells in Book 8 of his "researches" on the Persian Wars, makes up a single "community" of blood and language, of religion and manners, or life-style. And Aristotle, in a famous passage of his Politics, notes that if Sparta and Athens, together with their Greek allies, could have brought themselves together to constitute a single Greek nation-state, they would probably have been able to rule the entire world--not only the servile peoples of the East (shortly after subjugated by Aristotle's pupil, Alexander the Great) but perhaps also the northwest Europeans who, in those days seemed altogether ungovernable.
Michael Lind reminds us that in the nineteenth century, nationalism was engendered together with socialism in the nineteenth century, and that the two, whether in association or in opposition, have certainly "transformed world politics in the twentieth century." Lind distinguishes nationalism from patriotism, which he defines as "loyalty to the customs and institutions of one's people and place," and also from what he calls exemplarism--the claim that a state is either the "purest form" of what a state ought to be, or is best suited to "defend an entire civilization against heretics or infidels."
Both patriotism and exemplarism, as Lind defines them, are much older than nationalism, which, in his words, is a "distinctly modern and European invention." But, according to Lind, by the time it took full flower in Bismarck's Germany, it had become a suicidal Samson. After precipitating two world wars, such nationalism, he explains, had "only cleared the way for the division of the continent between two extra-European superpowers," apparently "destroying itself in destroying its enemies." Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s, had argued, on the contrary, that the Americans and the Russians as the world's great equalizers seemed even then "marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe." Nationalism may not have much of a future in the new world of superpowers; still, Lind concludes,
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