"The object of this book is to examine the
processes by which nations have been formed, the types of
political movements which have sought to achieve what has been
considered to be the national purpose, and the ways in which
such movements have influenced and been influenced by the
internal policies of states and the relations of states with
each other.
The distinction between states and nations is fundamental to
my whole theme. States can exist without a nation, or with
several nations, among their subjects; and a nation can be
coterminous with the population of one state, or be included
together with other nations within one state, or be divided
between several states. There were states long before there were
nations, and there are some nations that are much older than
most states which exist today. The belief that every state is a
nation, or that all sovereign states are national states, has
done much to obfuscate human understanding of political
realities. A state is a legal and political organisation, with
the power to require obedience and loyalty from its citizens. A
nation is a community of people, whose members are bound
together by a sense of solidarity, a common culture, a national
consciousness. Yet in the common usage of English and of other
modern languages these two distinct relationships are frequently
confused.
In the United States the expression 'throughout the nation'
simply means 'throughout the country'. In the main European
languages the words 'international relations' and their
equivalent are used to denote the relations between states. The
organisation set up at the end of the Second World War with the
hope of preventing war and promoting peace between states was
called 'United Nations', and its predecessor had been called
'League of Nations'. But membership of both these organisations
was confined in fact to governments of states. It was assumed in
the age of President Wilson that states would embody nations;
that the people of every state would form a nation; and that
eventually, in the golden age of self-determination which was
dawning, every nation would have its state. There were of course
in 1918 many such states: the expression 'nation-state' in such
cases reflected a reality. There were, however, many others,
some of which became members of the
League of Nations, of which this was not true. The rhetoric of
Wilson was still used in the age of Roosevelt (a founding father
of the United Nations, though he did not live to see it
function). Many of the original members, and many who later
joined it, were nation-states, but many of each category were
not. The United Nations in fact has proved to be little more
than a meeting place for representatives of Disunited States.
The frequently heard cliche that 'we live in an age of
nation-states' is at most a half-truth. What is arguably true is
that we live in an age of sovereign states. Many people believe
that state sovereignty is a major cause of international
tension, and a potential cause of future wars; and that steps
should be taken to diminish it. It is also often asserted that
'the age of the nation-state is coming to an end'. The truth is
less simple; the problems of sovereignty and of nationalism, of
states and of nations, are not the same. There have been times
when the existence of state sovereignty has been a cause of war,
and others when the aspirations of nations have led to war.
There have been examples in recent times of diminution of state
sovereignty, and it is quite possible that there will be a
growing trend in this direction. But the disappearance of state
sovereignties has not caused the disappearance of nations, any
more than the creation of new state sovereignties has sufficed
to create new nations. Whether nations can be destroyed is a
subject for dispute.
Even more confusion commonly attaches to the word
'nationalism'. It is often used to denote any form of collective
selfishness or aggressiveness of which the writer or speaker
disapproves. It has become a pejorative term, used in contrast
to the respectable word 'patriotism'. In fact, 'I am a patriot:
you are a nationalist'.
Governments are often said to have 'nationalist' policies if
they pursue their own interests at the expense of other
governments. 'Economic nationalism' is the pursuit of the
supposed economic interests of the people of one country,
without regard for those of other peoples in other countries.
Yet selfish regard for their own interests has been a feature of
the policies of countless governments throughout history, long
before nationalism or nations were heard of. Another misuse of
the words 'national' and `nationalism' relates to the
collectivist policies of the governments of states. In the
course of the last half-century governments, whether as a result
of military or financial pressures or of the ideological
convictions of their politicians, have intervened more and more
in the economic activities and private lives of their citizens,
have mobilised more and more their persons and their
possessions. This trend was described in the French language by
the useful word etatisme, which has no satisfactory equivalent
in English. Seizure of property or of business enterprises by
the state (etatisation) has been misleadingly rendered in
English as 'nationalisation', and this word has also passed into
French and other languages. It is misleading because the seized
properties are in reality placed at the disposal not of the
nation but of a dominant bureaucratic
caste.
This book is concerned with nations and states, and only to a
lesser extent with nationalism. Nevertheless the word and the
phenomenon of 'nationalism' will frequently occur in the
following pages, and it is necessary at the outset at least to
give some indication of what I mean by it. As I see it, the word
'nationalism' has two basic meanings. It would greatly improve
the clarity of individual and public thinking if the word could
be shorn of all accretion, and confined to these two. One of
these meanings is a doctrine about the character, interests,
rights and duties of nations. The second meaning is an organised
political movement, designed to further the alleged aims and
interests of nations.
The two most generally sought aims of such movements have
been independence (the creation of a sovereign state in which
the nation is dominant), and national unity (the incorporation
within the frontiers of this state of all groups which are
considered, by themselves, or by those who claim to speak for
them, to belong to the nation). In the case of many, though not
of all, nations there has been a further task for nationalists:
to build a nation within an independent state, by extending down
to the population as a whole the belief in the existence of the
nation, which, before independence was won, was held only by a
minority.
I shall be concerned in this book overwhelmingly with the
movements. I shall not rigidly limit discussion of movements to
the pursuit of the three aims of independence, unity and
nation-building, but they will occupy most of my attention. With
the doctrine, or ideology, this book is hardly concerned at all.
There are already many good books, both old and new, on this
subject. As a doctrine, it is not very interesting, being
essentially a variant of eighteenth century doctrines of popular
sovereignty, with half-digested chunks of socialism added to the
broth in the course of time. It has inspired immense outputs of
rhetoric, and each brand has its own peculiarities, some of
which must be admitted to be picturesque, though literary
distinction and beauty are qualities which I should hesitate to
attribute to them. The preparation of an anthology of
nationalist rhetoric has not been part of the task which I have
undertaken; but such anthologies exist, some with penetrating
commentaries,' and readers whose main interest lies in that
field would do well to study them.
All that has been said above assumes the use of the word
'nation', and this is much more difficult to explain. Many
attempts have been made to define nations, and none have been
successful. The most widely known without doubt is that of the
late Joseph Stalin, whose work Marxism and the National
Question, based on an article which he wrote at the request of
Lenin in 1913, was later diffused in scores of languages in
scores of millions of copies. All that Stalin could say was that
a nation must have four characteristics:
a common language, a common territory, a common economic life
and a common mental make-up. No group which did not possess all
four was entitled to be considered a nation. The fourth of these
characteristics is of course vague. One may indeed strongly
argue that vagueness is inherent in the phenomenon itself. But
that is not an argument used by Stalin; on the contrary, he
seems to have believed, and it was certainly claimed on his
behalf by his disciples, that his four points provided a fully
scientific definition. Stalin mentioned neither religion nor
historical tradition. The truth is that Stalin's article was
written not as a piece of social-political analysis, but as a
polemic�arising out of the conditions of 1913, against the
Jewish socialist movement, the Bund intended to prove that the
Jews were not a nation.
Most definitions have in fact been designed to prove that, in
contrast to the community to which the definer belonged, some
other group was not entitled to be called a nation. The
distinction between 'cultural nation' (a community united by
language or religion or historical mythology or other cultural
bonds) and 'political nation' (a community which in addition to
cultural bonds also possesses a legal state structure) has at
times been useful, but it too has often been misused for the
purpose noted above.
In nineteenth century Central Europe a distinction was made
between `nations' and 'nationalities', the former being the
superior category. 'My community is a nation: yours is a
nationality'. Whole theories were based on this distinction, the
purpose of which was to deny the status of nation to others. In
later chapters I shall discuss the distinction at greater
length. Apart from the sense mentioned, the word 'nationality'
has, in the English language (more frequently in its British
than in its American variant), the meaning of 'state
citizenship' (Staatsangehorigkeit is the more precise German
term). When I have occasion, in the following pages, to refer to
this legal category, I shall use the unambiguous word
'citizenship'. There is, however, a third sense in which
'nationality' can be used: as a neutral and abstract word,
meaning the quality of belonging to a nation. This is at times a
useful concept, and it is the only sense in which I shall use
it, without quotation marks, in the following pages.
Another distinction seems at first sight to have much to
commend it: the distinction between 'nation' and 'tribe'. The
word 'tribe' has usually been applied to comparatively small
groups of people, with a rather low level of culture. Such were
the tribes which the Romans met in Gaul and Germany (there was
no Gaulish or Germanic 'nation), or the groups, following
various leaders, who spoke various Baltic or Slavonic or Turkic
languages, and came into conflict with the Holy Roman, Byzantine
and Abbasid empires. Other examples can be found among the
various land invaders of India and China. The Scottish clans,
and the septs into which they were divided, might also be
considered to be `tribes'; and something of the samesort could
be found also in Ireland. In the nineteenth century European
explorers, and the European administrators who followed in their
steps, made frequent use of the word 'tribe' for African
peoples. Most of these Communities, scattered across the globe
and the centuries, shared a fierce loyalty both to their chiefs
and to fellow-members of the community. The difficulty is to
decide at what point 'tribal consciousness' becomes 'national
Consciousness'. Those who use the word 'tribe' of others are
usually convinced that they themselves belong to a higher
culture and are looking at persons of a lower culture. Such was
certainly the view of Romans and Chinese, and in modern times of
European colonial officials. Yet arbitrary differentiation
between 'nation' and 'tribe' closely resembles the
differentiation between 'nation' and 'nationality' discussed
above, and amounts to no more than that between 'my group' and
'your group'. In the independent new states of Africa,
'tribalism' has become a blanket term to cover, and to condemn,
any sort of movement for autonomy, let alone separate statehood.
Nevertheless, great differences in cultural level have existed,
do exist, and are recognisable. Should one say that in 1900 the
Yorubas were a nation, and the Dinkas a tribe? How can
differences in the level of culture be measured, and who is an
impartial judge? Because there are no clear answers to these
questions, one has to be very cautious in the use of the words
'nation' and `tribe'; yet the difference does exist, just as the
difference in the spectrum between blue and green exists, though
the colours merge in the human eye which beholds the rainbow.
Thus I am driven to the conclusion that no 'scientific
definition' of a nation can be devised; yet the phenomenon has
existed and exists. All that I can find to say is that a nation
exists when a significant number of people in a community
consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they
formed one. It is not necessary that the whole of the population
should so feel, or so behave, and it is not possible to lay down
dogmatically a minimum percentage of a population which must be
so affected. When a significant group holds this belief, it
possesses 'national consciousness'. Common sense suggests that
if this group is exceedingly small (let us say, less than one
percent of the population), and does not possess great skill in
propaganda, or a strong disciplined army to maintain it until it
has been able to spread national consciousness down into much
broader strata of the population, then the nationally conscious
elite will not succeed in creating a nation, and is unlikely to
be able to indefinitely remain in power on the basis of a
fictitious nation.
It is hoped that these introductory remarks have served to
indicate the nature of my subject; and that this will become
clearer in the course of later chapters.
The doctrine of nationalism dates from the age of the French
Revolution, but nations existed before the doctrine was
formulated. Once the doctrine had been formulated, it was used
as a justification for creating nationalist movements, and then
sovereign states to encompass the lands in which it was claimed
that nations lived.
The French revolutionaries, and their disciples outside
France, zealously spread oversimplified versions of some of the
ideas of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. In the
revolutionary era a man who had a little education, setting him
above the majority, felt himself both qualified and morally
bound to translate his principles into political action.
Government must now be based, not on the accidents of history
and privilege, on institutions and hierarchies which had grown
up in the past, but on rational principles, worked out in
programmes and blueprints. Nationalism as a doctrine was derived
from the eighteenth century notion of popular sovereignty. In
France, when the hated old regime had been overthrown, power
belonged to the nation, or to those who claimed to speak for it.
It was obvious who were the French nation: France was populated
by Frenchmen, and Frenchmen were not to be found outside France,
though there were some thousands of people of French speech on
the borders of Switzerland and Belgium. Beyond the Rhine and the
Alps things were not so clear. The enemy, the old regime, was
easily identifiable, but it was not obvious what should be the
units in which popular sovereignty should be exercised. The
answer increasingly given by the local converts to the new ideas
was the German nation, or the Italian nation�not just the people
of Hesse-Kassel or of Lucca.
Nationalist doctrine, as it developed in the Napoleonic era,
had also another source, the cult of individuality, both
personal and cultural. The German philosophers Fichte and Herder
stressed the importance of language as the basis of nationality.
Herder emphasised the divine diversity of the family of nations,
the unique quality of each culture. His enthusiasm was by no
means confined to the Germans: in a famous chapter on 'the
Slays' he idealised their moral and cultural qualities. Herder's
ideas spread to the few educated persons among the smaller and
more backward peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. Each group
in turn felt more strongly that the community with which it
identified itself was, or ought to be made into, a nation.
I shall make no attempt to summarise the ideas of the
founding fathers of nationalist doctrine, or to trace their
philosophic origins. This has been done by many writers, and
perhaps best of all in a recent short masterpiece.3 It is,
however, important to distinguish between two categories of
nations, which we will call the old and the new. The old are
those which had acquired national
identity or national consciousness before the formulation of the
doctrine of nationalism. The new are those for whom two
processes developed simultaneously: the formation of national
consciousness and the creation of nationalist movements. Both
processes were the work of small educated political elites.
The old nations of Europe in 1789 were
the English, Scots, French, Dutch, Castilians and Portuguese in
the west; the Danes and Swedes in the north; and the Hungarians,
Poles and Russians in the east. Of these, all but three lived in
states ruled by persons of their nationality, and therefore
needed no national independence movement; though this of course
does not mean that these peoples did not suffer from various
degrees of political or social oppression, and so, in the
opinion of radicals and revolutionaries, `needed' liberation.
The three exceptions were the Scots, who since 1707 had shared a
single state with the English and the Welsh, while preserving
important institutions of their own; and the Hungarians and
Poles, who were simply subjected to foreign rule. The Hungarians
had at one time been divided between three states (the Habsburg
Monarchy, the Ottoman empire and the principality of
Transylvania), but at the end of the eighteenth century were all
subject to the Habsburg Monarchy; whereas the Poles had been
divided since 1795 between the kingdom of Prussia, the Russian
empire and the Habsburg Monarchy. Thus, though Poles and
Hungarians had a continuous national consciousness going back
for several centuries, the continuity of the Polish and
Hungarian sovereign states had been broken.
There were also at this time other communities in which there
was, in the educated class, undoubted awareness of a cultural
community and a long history, but in which the formation of
national consciousness even in the elite was incomplete. Such
were the Germans and Italians; perhaps also the Irish. Catalans
and Norwegians.
In the rest of Europe there was little sign of national
consciousness. In these lands, new nations were formed in the
course of the following Century, and this process was then
extended, by educated elites influenced by European ideas, into
the Muslim lands, southern and eastern Asia and sub-Saharan
Africa. Nations of European origin also emerged in the colonies
of settlement in America, South Africa and Australia.
The distinction between old and new nations
seems more relevant than that between 'historical' and
'unhistorical', which came into use in Central Europe in the
late nineteenth century. All nations have a history. Some of the
communities in which, in 1789, national consciousness did not
exist, or was still weak, had had long and brilliant
histories�not only the Italians and Germans, but the Greeks and
Bohemians and Serbs. However, continuity had been broken by
conquest. The basic difference, then, is
between old continuous nations and new nations; and it is of
some importance for our theme.
The process of formation of national identity and national
consciousness among the old nations was slow and obscure. It was
a spontaneous process, not willed by any one, though there were
great events which in certain cases clearly accelerated it.
In medieval Europe the word natio was in legal use, but it
did not mean the same thing as the modern 'nation'. Many
medieval universities attracted many students from other lands
beside their own. These were placed in nationes, named after the
territories from which the largest number of each originated,
but including also persons from other countries.4
In Transylvania in the fifteenth century there were three
nationes recognised by law, who were represented in the
Transylvanian Diet: Hungarian, Szekely and Saxon.5 The Hungarian
natio was confined to persons of noble status, but not to those
of Hungarian speech. The Szekely and Saxons, in contrast to the
Hungarians, had no serfs in their community, and the whole
population was to some extent represented.
Though the word natio thus varied in meaning, it and its
derivatives in modern languages essentially comprised restricted
categories. Separate words existed to describe the whole
population: populus, peuple, people, popolo and pueblo. In the
lands further east, however, as the ideas of the Enlightenment
began to spread, this distinction became blurred. Volk in
German, and narod in the Slav languages, soon came to combine
the meanings of natio and populus, and such adaptations as
Nation and natsiya were little used.
In the case of those which I have called the 'old nations' a
process took place of which it is difficult to pinpoint the
stages, but of which the result is unmistakable. For example, in
1200 neither a French nor an English nation existed, but in 1600
both were important realities. At the first of these quite
arbitrarily chosen dates, the countries now known as France and
England were ruled by monarchs and noblemen who spoke the same
language, had much the same outlook, and fought wars against
each other because of conflicting claims to the territory, or
joined each other in fighting the Muslims in the Crusades. Their
subjects were mostly serfs, who had no part in public affairs,
spoke in both countries a variety of languages, and were bound
by duties toward their feudal superiors and the church. At the
second date these traditional obligations had not disappeared,
but the differences between the peoples of the two countries had
enormously increased, while within both countries there was a
much stronger and wider sense of community. Englishmen and
Frenchmen recognised themselves as such; accepted obligations to
the sovereign; and admitted the claim of the sovereign on their
loyalty at least in part because the sovereign symbolised the
community as a whole, stood for France, or for England. There
were ofcourse exceptions to this statement. There were still
regions and social strata which had hardly been affected, yet
the trend was unquestionable. During the intervening centuries
larger sections of the population had been drawn upwards into
public life, and the awareness of forming a community had spread
downwards into the population. This was largely a matter of
economic and social development, of growing trade, specialised
manufactures, the rise of cities and the enrichment of
merchants. Schools and learning began to flourish (though formal
education still only affected a small minority), and the French
and English languages became fixed by a growing literature, both
religious and secular. This was, to use a modern term, a growth
of communication, albeit restricted in scope. In this process
geography, economics, language, religion, and the power of the
state all played their part. The last was, on balance, the most
important, for it was the growth of the monarchical power�of its
military, fiscal and bureaucratic controls�which determined the
boundaries within which the sense of community should develop.
In the case of the new nations the process is easier to
grasp, for it took place over a much shorter period and is well
documented. The leaders of national movements since the French
Revolution have been by definition articulate persons, and their
propaganda among their own populations, designed to implant in
them a national consciousness and a desire for political action,
though largely conducted by word of mouth, was also put in
writing at the time. The growth of new modern means of
communication still further accelerated the process in the
twentieth century in comparison with the nineteenth. In the case
of the new nations of nineteenth and early twentieth century
Europe, the main factor in the creation of national
consciousness was language. In the formation of the overseas
nations of European origin, economic and geographical causes
were the most important. In colonial Africa, state boundaries
arbitrarily fixed by imperial governments largely determined the
units within which the attempt was made to create modern
nations. In India and China the attempt to build modern national
movements was superimposed on ancient civilisations to which the
European categories of nationality had only limited relevance.
A fundamental feature of all these movements is that the
nationalist elites were only able to mobilise support from
peasants, merchants, artisans or factory workers because many
persons in these various classes were discontented with
political and social conditions. One may plausibly argue that
the foundations of their discontent were economic. Nevertheless
the discontent was directed by the nationalist elites into
nationalist movements rather than towards economic change. Where
this happened, one may say that the masses accepted nationalist
rather than social
revolutionary leadership. As this book is concerned with
nationalist movements, attention will be concentrated inevitably
on the activities, political aims and social composition of the
nationalist elites rather than on the nature of their followers'
economic grievances. Without the discontents there would have
been no movements; but without the nationalist elites the
movements would not have been nationalist.
I shall be obliged from time to time to mention widely
divergent religious and secular cultures, economic problems,
forms of government, foreign policies and diplomatic and
military events; but these are essentially peripheral to my
subject. The peripheral subjects are of vast importance in
themselves, but they are not my theme.
In the process of formation of national consciousness, and in
movements for national independence and unity, there has been in
each case a different combination of certain constantly
recurring forces: state power, religion, language, social
discontents and economic pressures. Where political and social
power are concentrated in a group who differ in both religion
and language from the majority of the population among whom they
dwell, and an educated elite is emerging from that population,
then the optimum conditions are given for the rapid growth of a
nationalist movement. Where several small elites of different
languages are emerging within the same state, or where the
population shares either the religion or the language of its
rulers but not both, a more complex situation arises, and the
tasks of nationalist leaders are more difficult.
My first intention was to make a rough typology of
nationalist movements by grouping cases according to the
relative importance, in the formation of national consciousness
among their people, of the main forces listed above, in
particular of the state, religion and language. Thus, one can
say without much hesitation that the French nation grew up
together with the French monarchy; that religion played a
decisive role in the making of the Irish nation; and that Slovak
and Ukrainian national consciousnesses were based on language.
However, I found so many cases in which it was impossible to
give a definite priority to one factor over the others, that I
decided instead to arrange my material according to conventional
regional divisions. This does not mean that comparison of the
operation of these main forces is neglected: on the contrary,
these factors are constantly emphasised, and similarities or
differences are pointed out, though I have also assumed that my
readers are capable of discovering patterns for themselves.
Each case has been taken historically. I feel no need to
apologise for the element of chronological narrative which this
must imply. A serious student of nationalist movements can no
more ignore their past than a doctor can ignore the medical
history of his patients. I have tried to pick those moments in
time which seem to me to have been decisive for theformation of
national consciousness, and for the struggles for independence
and unity. In the case of 'new' nations these processes are well
documented, and the task�not always easy or simple in practice
though obvious in principle�is to make the essential landmarks
and trends stand out from the chronological detail. In the case
of 'old' nations the task is much more difficult, for the
historical record from which one must select or discard is much
longer and richer, and leads back to ancient cultures whose
essence could not be briefly expounded in a work of this kind,
even if per impossible there existed in this world a person
capable of grasping the essence of all these cultures. A second
formidable difficulty is that, during the stages of their
history in which the national identity and self-consciousness of
these 'old' nations were formed, the concepts of 'national
consciousness' and the modern concept of 'nation' did not exist.
The leaders had no idea that they were engaged in forming
nations. This is the basic difference between the 'old' nations
and the post-1789 'new' nations: in the case of the latter, the
leaders knew perfectly well what it was that they were trying to
do�which does not, of course, mean that what they achieved in
fact was what they had set out to achieve.
There is an inherent and inescapable anachronism in the
application to the past of the 'old' nations of the categories
derived from the history of the 'new'. Yet this has to be done,
and aspects of the earlier cultures and institutions, and events
from medieval or even ancient times which seem relevant to the
formation of national consciousness, have to be mentioned. It
may seem odd to the reader that within a few pages I refer to
the examination system of the Sung dynasty, the T'aiping
Rebellion and Mao Tse-tung; or to the replacement of Pictish by
Irish Gaelic in Scotland, the tall into disuse of literary
Lowland Scots after the court of James VI adopted southern
English, and the discovery of oil off the North Sea coast of
Scotland. Yet further reflection may induce the reader to share
my conviction that juxtaposition of this sort cannot be avoided.
I have given a good deal of space to the growth and the
reform of languages. I have had to rely on the work of
historians of language, but have been able to supplement this by
my own knowledge of spoken and written languages, amateurish and
non-technical though this may be. Just because history of
language is usually in our time kept so rigidly apart from
conventional political, economic and social history, it has
seemed to me desirable to bring it together with these, even at
the cost of less expertise.
Three chapters are concerned with Europe: the second with the
continuous nations, the third with movements for national unity,
and the fourth with 'new' nations arising within multinational
states. It has sometimes been difficult to decide in which
category to place certain cases. The Poles could have been
treated as an old continuous nation, or the Serbs and Croats as
new nations arising within the Ottoman and Habsburg empires.
However, the aspect of the Polish case which seemed to me of
greatest interest for the theme of this book was the movement to
reunite a nation already divided between three empires; and of
the Serbian and Croatian cases the movement to create a common
Yugoslav state and nation, and the obstacles which it
encountered.
The fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth chapters are concerned
with movements for independence by the peoples of colonial
empires, the consequent emergence of new states, the attempts to
create new nations within them, and the one case where all such
efforts have been suppressed the Soviet Russian empire. The
regions in which these problems are considered in turn are the
lands of European settlement overseas, the western part of the
Muslim world, East Asia and Africa. The subject of the ninth
chapter is the relationship between racialism (white, black and
red) and nationalist movements in the Americas and South Africa.
The tenth chapter considers diaspora nations, that is, nations
which have a large number of their members scattered in
communities over great distances. The most obvious case is the
Jews, but overseas Chinese and Indians are two others.
The role of different social classes in national movements,
and especially in the leadership of these movements, is of great
interest and importance. The eleventh chapter is devoted to this
subject. The twelfth chapter is concerned with the relationship
of other major political movements, based on ideologies, to
nationalism, and the extent to which they have influenced each
other. No attempt is made at philosophical analysis, or
model-building, nor is any systematic summary of these
ideologies given: all these things can easily be found in an
abundant (though contradictory, and not always intelligible)
literature. My concern is to show not whether the ideas are
valid, or logically coherent, but whether and how they have
influenced each other, and whether and to what extent those who
profess one ideology have in practice followed another. This has
of course made it necessary from time to time to discuss some of
the ideas; but my concern has been with liberal, socialist,
fascist and communist movements as political realities and
historical case-studies (from which some tentative
generalisations can be risked), rather than with abstract
propositions.
Nationalist doctrines will no more stand up to critical
analysis than any other ideologies, yet this has not prevented
them from capturing men's minds. Nationalism has been
responsible for floods of rhetoric and for the debasement of
human language. Nationalists have shown ignorant contempt for
institutions, customs and beliefs which had proved their worth
for centuries, and have replaced them with fragile structures
and empty slogans. Extreme nationalism has been a crude
substitute religion, replacing withered faith by fanatical
hatreds. Too often its leaders have been frustrated social
misfits and self-important semi-intellectuals. At its worst,
extreme nationalism has led to massacres and forcible expulsions
ofmillions of mainly innocent people.
Nevertheless, the nation is something which has been formed,
at least in many lands, by long historical processes, which it
is foolish, as well as arrogant, to despise. In the years after
1789 the problem of finding a unit for the exercise of popular
sovereignty was a real problem, and the nation, based usually on
language, was the only answer which could have been given at
that time. The intolerance and the illusions of nationalism are
part of the intolerance and the illusions of democracy. If the
doctrine of nationalism can be torn to pieces by analysis, so
can the doctrine of popular sovereignty. It is arguable, and it
certainly cannot be irrefutably disproved, That men were happier
under the great despotic empires or the petty feudal
sovereignties than under modern mass democracies or nation
states, even though these more primitive regimes lacked
television sets and computers. Yct this is useless wisdom in a
world which has become divided into mass societies, in which
sovereign states have become firmly rooted, and in hich there is
no prospect of a return to the past.
"
From
the Back Cover