Is nation-building an effective new technique for maintaining stability international politics? After the last war nationalism appeared to be decline. The resurgence of the two superpowers and the accompanying decrease of importance of the European states (for long, the nation states of the modern world), led many, particularly the West, to believe that the end of nationalism was at hand. There was also moral revulsion against the nation state, which was credited with an essentially evil character responsible, it was supposed, for two world wars and bound to cause more. As a more viable alternative to the post-war polarization of power, which had been reflected such alliances as nato and the Warsaw Pact, it was thought that the number of states should best be reduced so as to form larger units, i.e. regional rather than national groupings. The European Economic Community (EEC) was a striking expression of this sort of thinking.l The United Nations somewhat mitigated such general denigration of the nation state. The Charter, for example, Articles 39 (Chapter VII) and 99 (Chapter XV) seems to assume that all the world's populated territories are (or will come to be) divided amongst sovereign nation states.2 Moreover, as Hammarskjold pointed out, it lays down some basic rules of international ethics by which all Member States have committed themselves to be guided. In this sense, according to Hammarskjold, the Charter takes a first step in the direction of an