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determinalion, a stage of human progress due to the working of
impersonal forces and the ideologies thereby generated by them. On the
nature of these forces, theorists were not agreed, but for the most part
they supposed that the phenomenon of nationalism itself would
disappear with its causes, which in their turn would be destroyed by the
irresistible advance of enlightenment, whether conceived in moral or
technological terms-the victory of reason or of material progress or of
both-identified with changes in the forces and relations of produc–
tion, or with the struggle for social equality, economic and political
democracy and the just distribution of the fruits of the earth; with the
destruction of national barriers by world trade or by the triumphs of
science, and of a morality founded on rational principles, and so the
full realisation of human potentialities which sooner or later would be
universally achieved.
In the face of all this, the claims and ideals of mere national
groups would tend to lose importance, and would join other relics of
human immaturity in ethnological museums. As for the nationalists
among peoples who had achieved independence and self-government,
they were written off as irrationalists, cases of regression or arrested
developments-and, with Nietzscheans, Sorelians, neoromantics, out
of account.
It
became more difficult to ignore mounting nationalism
after national unity had been largely achieved-for instance, German
chauvinism after 1871, or French integralism, or Italian
sacro egoismo
or the rise of racial theories and other anticipations of fascism. None of
these, however accounted for, were, so far as I know, regarded by the
futurologists of the late nineteenth century or the early years of our
own as harbingers of a new phase of human history; and this seems
equally true of conservatives, liberals and Marxists. The age of
Kriege,
Krisen, Katastrophen,
which, for instance,
Karl
Kautsky predicted, he
attributed to causes, and described in terms, in which nationalism, if it
appears at all, figures only as a by-product, an element in the "super–
structure." No one, so far as I know, so much as hinted that national–
ism might dominate the last third of our own century
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such a degree
that few movements or revolutions would have any chance of success
unless they came arm in arm with it, or at any rate not in opposition
to
it. This curious failure of vision on the part of otherwise acute social
thinkers seems to me a fact in need of explanation, or,
to
say the least,
of wider discussion than it has so far obtained. I am neither a historian
nor a social psychologist, and do not volunteer an explanalion of it: I
should merely like
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throw out a suggestion which may cast some
light on this odd phenomenon.
