Who We Are: A History of Popular Nationalism.

• Author: Lind, Michael
• Position: Nationalism and its Discontents: In the wake of Osama bin Laden's global religious terrorism, old-fashioned nationalism is looking better and better

WHO WE ARE: A History of Popular Nationalism

by Robert H. Wiebe Princeton University Press, $24.95

"HOW DID EDUCATED WESTERNERS come to make enemies of an inspiration that has changed the lives of billions of people?" Robert H. Wiebe writes at the beginning of his eloquent and profound new study of the phenomenon of nationalism, Who We Are. During World War I, American progressives like Woodrow Wilson viewed national self-determination as one of the building blocks of a new, more humane global order. "But disillusionment after the First World War turned to revulsion after the Second, and at mid-century Western intellectuals dug in to battle the nationalist spirit."

Following the Cold War, the conventional wisdom on any the North Atlantic democracies held that there was a new struggle between the enlightened, progressive forces of internationalism -- symbolized by the global market and/or supranational regional blocs like the European Union--and nationalists, who were dismissed contemptuously as racists, xenophobes, and protectionists who failed to understand economics. Murderous Serb chauvinists intent on ethnic cleansing, not the peaceful, enlightened nationalists of the Baltic republics who initiated the overthrow of the Soviet empire, were treated as the archetypal representatives of nationalism. The bloodless divorce of the Czech and Slovak republics was ignored by statesmen and pundits who claimed that national secession invariably produced wars and spasms of ethnic cleansing such as those that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia. Although scholars like Walker Connor and Anthony D. Smith insisted on the deep roots and persisting power of national sentiment, they tended to be drowned out by critics of nationalism like Orientalist Elie Kedourie and the Marxist Eric Hobsbawm, who unwisely predicted in the 1980s that nationalism was about to fade away. In most elite circles, one who had anything favorable to say about nationalism met with suspicion or contempt.

September 11 ended the era of post national liberal utopianism that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Today, talk of a Manichaean struggle between the forces of enlightened globalization--represented, depending on your politics, by multinational corporations or nongovernmental organizations--and reactionary nationalism seems archaic. Now, the greatest threat to liberal civilization seems to come not from secular nationalism, but from transnational religious fundamentalism. International banking, instead of promoting western values, has been manipulated by anti-Western terrorists. The military and the police, those instrumentalities of the allegedly obsolete nation-state, suddenly seem more important to world order than footloose corporations, international investors, and transcontinental lobbies for human rights and the...