IN DEFENCE OF NATIONALISM AND THE NATION STATE

Abstract

Nationalism had a remarkably bad press in the latter part of the twentieth century and continues so to do. This is partly due to semantic and conceptual confusion. Semantically, racism, fascism even good old religious warfare, as in the case of Northern Ireland, can be referred to – and in the mass media often are – as nationalism. I have even heard the fighting between the Hutu and Tutu tribes in Africa described as nationalist. Yugoslavia is deemed to have exploded because of nationalism. Latterly, however, thoughtful theorists have developed a neologism to describe this form of almost internecine slaughter as ethno-nationalism.

References

1. 1 E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, Cambridge University Press, 1992.
2. 2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso, London & New York, 2000.
3. 3 Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, Blackwell, London, 1993.
4. 4 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Hackett, London, 1982.
5. 5 Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Hackett, London, 1993.
6. 6 Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1964.
7. 7 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Blackwell, Oxford, 1983.
8. 8 Ernest Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism, Blackwell, Oxford 1994

9. 9 Ernest Gellner, Nationalism, Phoenix, London, 1997.
10. 10 Ernest Gellner, Encounters with Nationalism, op. cit. p. 115.
11. 11 Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, although the same terms are to be found in Thought and Change.
12. 12 The most factual and therefore believable analysis of the post-Becsenyei nationalisation programme is to be found in C.A Macartney’s, Hungary and Her Successors, Oxford University Press, 1965. For the real story of voluntary assimilation see Tibor Frank, ‘Hungary and the Dual Monarchy’ in Petr Sugar, et al. (eds.), A History of Hungary, Indiana University Press, 1994.
13. 13 Gellner notes this particular point somewhat gleefully in Encounters with Nationalism.