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Regional and National Polarities
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15442 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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Date : |
12 / 1989 |
3,793 Words |
| Author
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Michael E. Lind
Michael E. Lind, a visiting fellow in foreign policy at the
Heritage Foundation, has a master's degree in international
relations from Yale University. He is currently editing a book
on State Department reforms for the Heritage Foundation. |
Nineteenth-century Europe engendered two ideas that have transformed world politics in the twentieth century: nationalism and socialism. A third of mankind lives in autocracies that claim a nineteenth-century German intellectual, Karl Marx, as their prophet. Today, the model socialist state, the Soviet Union, is threatened by a revival of nationalism within its imperial borders. Outside the communist bloc, the formation of more than a hundred new states from the remnants of all the European empires except the Russian has created conditions in which nationalist ideologies flourish, sometimes in forms quite alien to Westerners.
The importance of nationalism in the so-called Third World makes it easy to forget that nationalism was born in Western and Central Europe. Is it dead there? If so, good riddance, some European scholars have suggested. "Nationalism, it seems to me, is a phenomenon of a certain stage in human history," suggested Hugh Seton-Watson in 1965, expressing a sentiment previously aired by another British historian, G.D.H. Cole, who believed, "The idea of nationality as a basis of independent statehood is obsolete."
Until recently, nationalism seemed obsolete indeed in Western Europe. To be sure, Irish and Basque separatists have continued their violent agitation for ethnic homelands (Scottish nationalism, on the other hand, has been nonviolent in the past two decades and is motivated largely by the prospect of greater benefits from North Sea oil), and British and French concerns for sovereignty have impeded the greater military and political integration of NATO and the European Community. Even so, Western Europe, a U.S. protectorate for two generations now, has been surprisingly untroubled by nationalist movements seeking to redraw political lines. The West Germans, whose "national revolution" helped destroy European world power and bring about the division of Germany itself, have been conscientious in proving that they are now "good Europeans."
What Nationalism Is Not--Patriotism And Exemplarism
Recent events suggest that announcements of the death of nationalism in Western Europe may have been premature. Even a as major new steps toward consolidation of a single European market are scheduled to take effect by 1992, Western Europeans from across the political spectrum have begun to manifest particularist concerns and passions that might be channeled into nationalist politics. Most significantly, the Germans have begun to bitterly debate the nature of their national identity. As in the past, German nationalism
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