Forging a Common Identity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2010
Summary
A Dangerous Turn
Even after two centuries of a blood-soaked history of chaos and disruption, “nationalism,” declared the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., shortly before the breakup of the Soviet Union, “remains the most vital political emotion in the world – far more vital than social ideologies such as communism or fascism or even democracy.” Nationalism, he went on,
continues to thrive because it taps potent emotions of history and locality to give individual lives meaning in an increasingly baffling universe. Today the nationalist fever encircles the globe. In the West the contagion convulses Ireland and Israel, divides Belgium, Cyprus, and Canada, arouses Brittany, Corsica, and the Basque country. Nationalism broke up the Soviet empire and now threatens to break up the Soviet Union itself. In the third world, nationalism, having overthrown Western colonialism, launches a horde of new states, large and micro, often at each other's throats in reenacting ancient quarrels of history. Within nation-states, nationalism takes the form of ethnicity or tribalism. In country after country across the third world – India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Iraq, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Angola, Trinidad, Guyana – ethnic groups struggle for power and, in desperate cases, for survival. The ethnic upsurge in America, far from being unique, partakes of the global fever.
The end result of this ethnic and nationalist upsurge, Schlesinger warned, can only be – as the title of his 1991 book proclaimed – The Disuniting of America: “The cult of ethnicity,” he wrote, “exaggerates differences, intensifies resentments and antagonisms, [and] drives ever deeper the awful wedges between races and nationalities.
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- Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America , pp. 3 - 84Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003