num_pages: 241
description: Since the American and French Revolutions, the nation-state has come to be considered the normal form of political organization. National self-determination was a key to the programs of the liberals who campaigned for constitutional government in the first half of the nineteenth century. Statesmen and political philosophers of the previous century championed the idea that a Europe constituted by sovereign nation-states was to become a nucleus of world peace. In 1945 the United Nations was established upon these principles. By and large, we still act upon them in international affairs. However, the older position which associated the national idea with a liberal political system based upon self-determination was gradually pushed into the background. Instead, almost from the start the various national groups tried to extend their sphere of control, and the boundaries of their nation-state, as far as possible; the liberal principle of respecting the legitimate interests of other ethnicities or national groups, fell into disregard. The popular enthusiasm for national self-determination was not so much concerned with the desire to create the essential political conditions for a free and unhindered enfolding of one's own national culture, but rather with the desire to be part of a strong national state capable of imposing the national will, if need be, upon other peoples. It was the hope of many that, since 1945, a metamorphosis of the nation-state was underway, with a return to a more modest, democratic notion of nation and nationality which has nothing in common with the aggressive varieties of the previous decades. Indeed, the export of the Western democratic notion of the nation-state was long considered an essential to modernization which Western social scientists and politicians recommended to the peoples in the Third World. Today many doubt whether the Western idea of nationality by the non-Western world was well-suited to the politics of these regions of the
language: English
title: Nationality, Patriotism and Nationalism
titlecomplete: Nationality, Patriotism and Nationalism (World Social Systems)
ratings_count: 1
publisher: Paragon House