Volume 41, Number 10 · May 26, 1994
The New Old Nationalism
By Tony Judt
BOOKS REVIEWED IN THIS ESSAY
The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism
by William Pfaff
Simon and Schuster, 256 pp., $22.00
Ethnonationalism: The Quest for Understanding
by Walker Connor
Princeton University Press, 234 pp., $14.95 (paper)
Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity
by Liah Greenfeld
Harvard University Press, 581 pp., $19.95 (paper)
Elusive Prophet: Ahad Ha'am and the Origins of Zionism
by Steven J. Zipperstein
University of California Press, 386 pp., $35.00
Liberal Nationalism
by Yael Tamir
Princeton University Press, 194 pp., $24.95
Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism
by Michael Ignatieff
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 263 pp., $21.00
'For a long time we did not understand the revolution we are witnessing,' wrote Joseph de Maistre in 1794. 'For a long time we took it for a mere event. We were wrong: it is an epoch, and woe to those generations present at the epochs of the world!' De Maistre, of course, had in mind the great French Revolution of 1789, but his gloomy reflections are pertinent to Europe today, in the wake of the revolutions of 1989. The ancien régime of post–World War Two Europe now seems far away—Who now believes in the idyllic prospect held out before our eyes in the late 1980s, the dream of a prosperous, united (Western) Europe, shorn of frontiers, passports, and conflicts? Or in the distinctly less plausible but no less widely touted promise of 'real' socialism in Europe's eastern half? It too offered a solution to national conflict, civic inequality, and small-state irridentism. And what of the even more recent hopes of the domestic champions of democracy in that same Eastern region, with their schemes for a 'return to Europe' to bury their countries' troubled pasts and fragile international standing in the warm embrace of the old continent's better self?
Review, 8636 words
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