In Defense of Liberal Nationalism

Abstract

simple idea that every nation should have its own state?accompanied by the corollary that one ethnic or cultural group should not collectively rule over another?has been the most power ful political force of the past two hundred years. While particular nationalisms vary, this basic nationalist conception of an ideal world order has been remarkably unchanged for well over a century. The world should be split into as many states as humanity is divided into nations/' the Swiss international lawyer Johann Caspar Bluntschli wrote in 1870. Each nation a state, each state a national being. When he wrote, nationalism as a considered doctrine, with its roots in the thought of Rousseau, Herder, Fichte and Mazzini, was already generations old. National sentiments, of course, long predated the doctrine, despite recent attempts to claim that national feelings are purely modern fabrications. nationalist ideal has survived one universalist assault after another: the Concert of Europe, which Metternich saw as a way of repressing anti-dynastic nationalism and republicanism; Hitlers supranational racist imperialism; the doomed Soviet effort to replace national loyalties with commitment to socialist universalism. Even the failure of the European Community to become a genuine federal

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