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TAMIL NATION LIBRARY: Nations & Nationalism

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Nations & States - Hugh Seton-WatsonFrom the Back Cover

National identities and state sovereignties are basic realities of past history and of today's politics ; but though they overlap and influence each other, they are different realities. It is one of the main aims of this book to clarify the distinction between 'nation' and 'state' whose confusion has been the cause of much political error.

Some reviews of the hardback edition :

'Nations and States is a tour de force, based upon an astonishing amount of reading and long reflection . . . (This) book is beautifully written in a style unencumbered by jargon or technical language. He is best perhaps on the subject which he has made so much his own � nationalism in central and eastern Europe � as he patiently unravels the complexities of those unhappy lands. No reader of Nations and States will ever again have any excuse for confusing Slovenes and Slovaks, Ruthenians and Rumanians.' The Times Educational Supplement

'Among contemporary British historians, Hugh Seton-Watson is uniquely qualified for the grand survey of the subject of "Nations and States" ... Aided by a facility for foreign tongues and an unfailing desire to see and hear for himself, Professor Seton-Watson is now able, as no one else could be, to offer a study that deals in almost equal depth and with almost equal authority, not only with Europe and its overseas offshoots but with Asia and Africa. It is not only in geographical scope but in historical perspective that Professor Seton-Watson's study is impressive ; one of the clearest lessons that emerges is that because of the dominance of language as a binding link, and next to it of history or myth, nations can exist over centuries during which their political expression as states is absent.' Daily Telegraph

'The book incorporates a great deal of specialized knowledge and deploys it with skill and perception to provide a sense of proportion and to support a series of sound judgements. It succeeds admirably in its aim "to provide some material and some guidance to those who intend to explore the phenomenon (of nationalist movements) in depth": The Times Higher Education Supplement

From Chapter 1 - Nations & Nationalism



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."


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