Conclusion: Does Nationalism matter?

Abstract

Asking whether nationalism matters often strikes people in the real world as a typically academic quibble. Obviously, they feel, it does. It has not only outlasted communism; it helped to bring it down, insofar as resentment at Soviet (or, in fact, Russian) domination was one of the central motives for the rebellions that swept eastern and central Europe in the late 1980s. It continues to frustrate any tendency there might be in capitalism towards a truly world economy, as distinct from a system of interlinked national economies, one in which - moreover - the national interests of the richer countries tend to be aggressively in charge: 'globalisation' and 'internationalisation' arc not the same thing (Hirst and Thompson 1996). And nationalism of a particularly nasty sort continues to face minority peoples everywhere - Blacks and Asians in Britain, Turks in Germany, Hutus or Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi.