An article in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, the influentual US magazine, examines how "ethnic nationalism" in Europe - arguably the root cause of countless conflicts over the past century - is far from dead.
Indeed, Jerry Z Muller, the article's author, warns his US readers against assuming that Europe's relative peace over the last 50 years is the result of Europeans abandoning their nationalist outlooks. Instead, he argues, the post-1945 creation of ethnically-homogenous nation-states has simply entrenched nationalism while also allowing Europeans to deny that such primal feelings exist:
"Contemporary social scientists who write about nationalism tend to stress the contingent elements of group identity -- the extent to which national consciousness is culturally and politically manufactured by ideologists and politicians. They regularly invoke Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined communities," as if demonstrating that nationalism is constructed will rob the concept of its power.
"It is true, of course, that ethnonational identity is never as natural or ineluctable as nationalists claim. Yet it would be a mistake to think that because nationalism is partly constructed it is therefore fragile or infinitely malleable.
"Ethnonationalism was not a chance detour in European history: it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit that are heightened by the process of modern state creation, it is a crucial source of both solidarity and enmity, and in one form or another, it will remain for many generations to come."
Such analysis makes for a thought-provoking article which is well-worth reading in its entirety.
