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Political Theory in the Age of Nationalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Sanjay Seth
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Abstract

In this essay Seth argues that it is not the case that international relations theory has suffered because domestic theory has prospered, but rather that both bear the marks of a signal failure to grasp the implications of, and to theorize adequately about, nationalism. She argues further that this failure is partly rooted in the phenomenon of nationalism itself, for it encapsulates many of the tensions and contradictions of modern thought. Finally, she suggests that the transformation of the international system from a system of states to a system of nation-states has had profound consequences for international relations, consequences not fully grasped in international relations theory.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 7 , March 1993 , pp. 75 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1993

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References

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32 For my discussion of a rationalist and historicist nationalism's appeal to essentialism, see Seth, Sanjay, “Nationalism, National Identity and ‘History’: Nehru's Search for India,” Thesis Eleven 32 (1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Cited in Marx, Karl, The Revolutions of 1848, ed. Fernbach, David (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 78.Google Scholar Marx and Engels go on to say that “the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself as the nation,” although, they immediately add, “not in the bourgeois sense of the word” (p. 84).

34 Hobsbawm, Eric J., “Marx, Engels and Politics,” in Hobsbawm, Eric J., ed., The History of Marxism, Vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 249.Google Scholar For useful works on Marx and Engels's views on the national question, see Bloom, Solomon, A World of Nations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941Google Scholar); Cummins, Ian, Marx, Engels and National Movements (London: Croom Helm, 1980)Google Scholar; Davis, H.B., Nationalism and Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967)Google Scholar; and Rozdolsky, Roman, Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ People: The National Question in the Revolutions of 1848 (Glasgow: Critique, 1986Google Scholar).

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41 Luban views it as a conflict between universalism and particularism. He declares that what is “disturbing” about Walzer's argument “is its acceptance of the premises of nationalism”; in Luban's view, “Nationalism may have originated as ideology of liberation and tolerance; in our century it is drenched in blood. What Mazzini began, II Duce ended” (Ibid., 393).Google Scholar