ISAIAH BERLIN
341
nary
Gemeinschaft
in the past-systems for the most part today justly
forgotten. In all this great array of elaborate, statistically-supported
mass of futurology and fantasy, there is one peculiar lacuna. There was
one movement which dominated much of the nineteenth century in
Europe and was so pervasive, so familiar, that it is only by a conscious
effort of the imagination that one can conceive a world in which it
played no part: it had its partisans and its enemies, its democratic,
aristocratic and monarchist wings, it inspired men of action and artists,
intellectual elites and the masses: but, oddly enough, no significant
thinkers known to me predicted for it a future in which it would play
an even more dominant role. Yet it would, perhaps, be no overstate–
ment to say that it is one of the most powerful, in some regions the
most powerful, single movement at work in the world today; and that
some of those who failed to foresee this development have paid for it
with their liberty, indeed, with their lives. This movement is national–
ism. No influential thinker, to the best of my knowledge, foresaw its
future-at any rate, no one clearly foretold it. The only exception
known to me is the underrated Moses Hess, who, in 1862, in his book
Rome and Jerusalem,
affirmed that the Jews had the historic mission
of uniting communism and nationality. But this was exhortation
rather than prophecy, and the book remained virtually unread save by
Zionists of a later day.
There is no need to emphasise the obvious fact that the great
majority of the sovereign states represented at the Assembly of the
United Nations today are actuated in a good deal of their behaviour by
strong nationalist passions, even more than their predecessors of the
League of Nations. Yet I suspect that this fact would have surprised
most of the prophets of the nineteenth century, no matter how
intelligent and politically intuitive. This is so because most social and
political observers of that time, whether or not they were themselves
nationalists, tended in general to anticipate the decline of this senti–
ment. Nationalism was, by and large, regarded in Europe as a passing
phase. The desire on the part of most men
to
be citizens of a state
coterminous with the nation which they regarded as their own was
considered to be natural or, at any rate, brought about by a historical–
political development of which the growth of national consciousness
was at once the cause and the effect, at any rate in the west. Nationalism
as a sentiment and an ideology was not (in my opinion, rightly)
equated with national consciousness.
The need to belong to an easily identifiable group had been
regarded, at any rate since Aristotle, as a natural requirement on the
