Abstract:

It was in a freshman history course shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War that I was formally introduced to the concept of nationalism. The war, the professor informed us, was the last gasp of nationalism, nationalism in its death throes. Nationalism had been a nineteenth-century phenomenon, the romantic by-product of the nation-state in its prime. It had barely survived the first World War and the second would surely bring it to an end, together with those other obsolete institutions, the nation-state and capitalism. The professor, a scholar of much distinction, spoke with great authority, for he had personal as well as professional knowledge of his subject; as a recent German émigré, he had intimate, tragic experience of that anachronism known as nationalism.

Read on Jstor: The Dark and Bloody Crossroads: Where Nationalism and Religion Meet