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integrated into the new, socially emancipated international world
order. Consequently, Lenin was not interested in the life of various
communities as such, in this respect following Marx, whose pages on,
for example, India and China, or for that matter Ireland, expound no
specific lessons for their future.
This well-nigh universal Euro-centrism may at least in part
account for the fact that the vast explosion not only of anti–
imperialism but of nationalism in these continents remained so largely
unpredicted. Until the enormous impact of the Japanese victory over
Russia in 1904, no non-European people presented itself to the gaze of
western social or political theorists as, in the full sense of the word, a
nation whose intrinsic character, history, problems, potentialities for
the future, constituted a field of study of primary importance for
students of public affairs, history, and human development in general.
It is this, as much as anything else, that may help to explain this
strange lacuna in the fllturology of the past.
It
is instructive to bear in
mind that while the Russian Revolution was genuinely free of any
nationalist element, even after the Allied Intervention-indeed, it is
fair to describe it as wholly antinationalist in character-this did not
last. The concessions which Stalin had to make to national sentiment
before and during the invasion of Russia by Hitler, and the celebration
thereafter of the heroes of purely Russian history, indicate the degree to
which 'the mobilisation of this sentiment was required to promote the
ends of the Soviet state. And this holds no less of the vast majority of
states that have come into being since the end of the Second World
War.
It would not, I think,
be
an exaggeration to say that no political
movement today, at any rate outside the western world, seems likely to
succeed unless it allies itself to national sentiment. I must repeat that I
am not a historian or a political scientists and so do not claim to offer
an explanation of this phenomenon. I only wish to pose a question and
indicate the need for greater attention to this particular offshoot of the
romantic revolt, which has decisively affected our world.
