ISAIAH BERLIN
343
was believed, nationalism, which was a pathological inflammation of
wounded national consciousness would abate: it was caused by oppres–
sion and would vanish with it. This seemed
to
be taking longer than
the optimists anticipated, but by 1919 the basic principle of the right to
national self-government seemed universally accepted. The Treaty of
Versailles, recognising the right to national independence, whatever
else it might fail
to
achieve, would at any rate solve the so-called
national question. There was, of course, the question of the rights of
various national minorities in the new national states, but these could
be guaranteed by the new League of Nations-surely if there was
anything these states could be expected to understand, if only from
their own historical experience, it was the need to satisfy the craving for
autonomy on the part of ethnic or cultural groups within their borders.
Other problems might still rack mankind-colonial exploitation,
social and political inequality, ignorance, poverty, injustice, hunger,
disease, corruption, privilege; but most enlightened liberals, and,
indeed, socialists, assumed that nationalism would decline, since the
deepest wounds inflicted upon nations were on the way to being
healed.
Marxists and other radical socialists went further. For them,
national sentiment itself was a form of false consciousness, an ideology
generated, consciously or not, by the economic domination of a
particular class, the bourgeoisie, in alliance with what was left of the
old aristocracy, used as a weapon in the retention and promotion of the
class control of society, which,· in its turn, rested on the exploitation of
the labour power of the proletariat. In the fullness of time, the workers,
whom the process of production itself would inevitably organise into a
disciplined force of ever-increasing size, political awareness and power,
would overthrow their capitalist oppressors, enfeebled as they would be
by the cutthroat competition among themselves that would undermine
their capacity for organised resistance. The expropriators would be
expropriated, the knell of capitalism would sound, and with it of the
entire ideology of which national sentiment, with religion and parlia–
mentary democracy, were so many particular aspects. National differ–
ences might remain, but they would, like local and ethnic characteris–
tics, be unimportant in comparison with the solidarity of the workers
of the world, associated producers freely cooperating in the rational
harnessing of the forces of nature in the interests of all mankind.
What these views had in common was the belief that nationalism
was the ephemeral product of the frustration of human craving for self-
