The Triumph of Nationalism:

Abstract

Nationalism, the defining political force of the twentieth century, is likely to remain the most prominent feature in the political landscape of the twenty-first. From under the rubble of collapsed communism, old nations and old feuds are strug-gling back to life, while myriad tribal wars are being fought by peoples seeking a piece of land to call their own. All of this is the inevitable reaction against the artificial boundaries carved out in the aftermath of two world wars and held in place despite and not because of natural ties that create and bind a "people." What we are witnessing, then, is the triumph of the natural over the unnatural. Yet for author John Lukacs, veteran commentator on Europe's shifting sands, the natural is not automatically right or desirable. At best ambivalent, he is more often downright gloomy when contemplating the probable victory of resurgent nationalism. The book can be read as his own struggle to put the historical events he describes into a moral context. Lukacs argues that even the great historical forces generally thought to be driven by ideology are really expressions of national character. For example, he quickly dismisses the notion that the twentieth century has been dominated by the struggle between Democracy (U.S.A.) and Communism (U.S.S.R.). The Cold War was nothing but a "reciprocal misunderstanding": Stalin and his successors had such great difficulty absorbing Eastern Europe that the West mistook their digestive problems for hunger pangs, while the Soviet Union was deluded by the idea that the U.S. wanted to challenge its hegemony in Eastern Europe. Lukacs' repeated insistence that American patriotism has been identical to anti-Communism and is "the ideological cement that bound the American `conservative' movement and the Republican party together," will infuriate some, as will his belief that the Soviet Union was not pushed by the West, but fell naturally. This latter point bolsters Lukacs' arguments about national character — eventually the Russian people would cast off an alien ideology held in place by artificial political restraints. Lukacs well understands that "the character of a people molds their institutions" and not vice versa. No government can endure unless it recognizes that there is little difference between the cultural and the political, that is to say, when we speak of our country we are also speaking of our people. Yet, for a man who sees this, Lukacs often fails to understand those engaged in nationalist struggles. While he points out that if there were no Serbs in "Croatia," there would be no civil war in the former Yugoslavia, he later argues that the whole sorry mess came about "because of tales told by national idiots, full of sound and fury, fighting for an `independence' signifying nothing." When is a nationalist not a nationalist idiot? That is the question with which Lukacs wrestles for much of the book.