The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Fury of Nationalism.

• Author: Kurth, James

WILLIAM PFAFF is an American who has lived for years in France, regularly writing for the New Yorker and the International Herald Tribune and periodically publishing books that provide perceptive and sophisticated interpretations of the large issues of the day in international affairs. His new book, The Wrath of Nations, is probably his best. It is also the one that most conveys the sensibility and understanding of a European.

Pfaff's observations on nationalism will seem original to many Americans, but conventional, almost commonplace, to Europeans. Likewise, his critiques of the American version of nationalism and of liberal internationalism will offend many Americans, but Europeans will find them sensible and realistic. Some Americans may think that they need not learn anything from a European perspective. After all, Europe has hardly been distinguished by its wisdom in international affairs in this century. But since the problem of nationalism is once again a European one, and the way Europeans think about it is once again an important reality, an American will be wiser after reading this book.

Pfaff presents a grand review of the vast variety of nations and nationalisms. His survey ranges from Europe to American to Asia to Africa. What he has to say about Asia and Africa is sound enough but also familiar and unremarkable. What he has to say about America is also sound but, since he views America from a European perspective, insightful and unconventional. But it has not been the recent events in Asia, Africa, and America that have caused political commentators like Pfaff to focus on "the wrath of nations." It has been the events in the continent where nations and nationalism were first invented and where they seem to be returning with a vengeance, Europe itself. It is in his account of Europe that Pfaff is most eloquent and most relevant.

Western and Eastern Nationalisms

PFAFF FOCUSES on a distinction--one which in the last three years has again become important and salient--between the nations and nationalisms of Western Europe and those of Eastern Europe (and also much of Central Europe). In the West, the state existed before the nation, and it brought the nation into being over the course of several centuries. This meant that the state combined several pre-national ethnic communities into one national society based upon some common denominator (and dominator). In the East, the nation existed before the state, and it brought the state into being largely in the course of one century, the nineteenth. This meant that the state was the creature of one newly-national ethnic community. The Western conception of nationality is civic--defined by legal status and citizenship conferred by the state. The Eastern conception of nationality is ethnic--defined by genealogical history and membership inherited at birth.

Since in the East the nation that created the state was a particular ethnic community, the state was created in the image of that ethnic group. Any state would fit very well the particular community which created it (as interwar Yugoslavia fit the Serbs and interwar Czechoslovakia fit the Czechs), but it would fit very imperfectly some other ethnic community that happened to be contained with the state (e.g. the Croats and the Slovenes in Yugoslavia and the Slovaks and the Germans in Czechoslovakia).

These Eastern conceptions of nations and nationalism did not just characterize the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the region, however. They are present there even today. Indeed, they have reappeared with particular strength in the ruins of communist internationalism.

Pfaff knows and shows that nationalism has always been in tension with internationalism. His book is as much a review of the various--and now failed--internationalisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as it is of the various--and now resurgent--nationalisms.

Two of these were what Pfaff calls Habsburg internationalism and Ottoman internationalism. Although the conflict between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans was the central reality of Central and Eastern Europe for almost five centuries, these two great multinational empires had much in common. Their long decline in the nineteenth century and their final collapse in the First World War brought into being more than a dozen new states to correspond to the multiplicity of nations that had recently developed...