THE FUTURE
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a revival of cultural nationalism and parochialism. The long-run effect
may be to promote a series of catastrophes, for which each side will
then blame the other.
If
one ignores the immediate political perspectives and assumes the
long-run continuance of present trends, one must suppose that the
technological unification of the globe will at some stage give rise to a
kind of planetary organization which will do away with the unrestricted
sovereignty of the nation-state. This desirable goal is, however, unlikely
to be reached by the straight path of international agreement.
If
history
is any guide, the world will have to traverse an intermediate phase of
predominantly regional and continental organization. The racialist de–
formation of Chinese Communism is a danger sign. One sees here how
a universalist faith can be perverted at its very core by an upsurge of
primitive emotions stemming from an earlier cultural stratum. Of the
various African and Asian nationalisms it is unnecessary to speak. They
are both historically legitimate and intellectually sterile. Nations which
have the misfortune to arrive on the historical scene after the age of
nationalism is past cannot h elp presenting a tragi-comic spectacle, how–
ever well-founded their claims to sovereign independence. The delusions
of grandeur which are a necessary part of their mental equipmem–
indeed a condition of their emergence from the prehistoric stage-must
be shed before they can see themselves and the world in a true light.
This cancellation and destruction of self-generated illusions is the work
of history, which is no bed of roses but rather that slaughterhouse Hegel
described in terms which have recovered their meaning for our genera–
tion. We who during the Second World War saw entire nations hurled
from the Tarpeian Rock have acquired a better understanding of the
conception of history as a concrete totality determining, and being
determined by, the movement of its parts.
If
it is necessary to guard
against the temptation to treat history as an independent entity operating
"behind" the actual empirical process, it is no less important to grasp
the logic of the process, as it unfolds through its various local and
parochial manifestations. World history is not a suitable topic for
nominalists who deny the possibility of valid generalizations not verifiable
in private experience or controlled experiment. To the charge that such
statements are at best mere guesswork, and at worst poetic nonsense,
the answer must be that it is impossible in human affairs to dissociate
factual analysis from an imaginative grasp of the total situation in
which men are involved. In reality such an understanding is always
implicit, if only because we approach every problem with a theoretical
equipment which carries the burden of its own past. We cannot, in the
present instance, abstract from our concrete position as individuals who
