Introductory Note

Authors: Shlomo Avineri

Publish Date: 2011/03/29

Volume: 24, Issue: 1-2, Pages: 1-4

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Abstract

The collection of articles presented here is based on papers delivered at the 5th Galilee Colloquium on Social Moral and Legal Philosophy held at Kibbutz Kfar Blum in northern Israel and dedicated to the subject of The End of the NationState Theoretical Dimensions and Historical RealitiesThe reasons for choosing the subject of the nationstate were motivated by a number of considerations in which the development of research has been intertwined with the onslaught of recent historical developments the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the democratic transitions in Eastern Central Europe as well as the emergence of the European Union aiming at constructing a supranational political entity—both on the background of the complex processes of globalization That processes of democratization went sometimes hand in hand with the emergence or reemergence of nationalist/ethnic phenomena—not only in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia but also in Spain suggested a complex relationship between the two developments which has not always been adequately dealt with in the research literatureIn this context it was also noted that prior to 1989 the study of nationalism had not been at the center of either historical or social science research and hence the resurgence of national sentiments sometimes—as in the former Yugoslavia leading to a series of violent wars—came as a surprise both to many scholars as well as statesmen Awareness of the role nationalist ideologies had played in the movements leading to the horrors of World War II gave rise to an understandable reluctance in the post1945 scholarly literature to endow nationalism with an intellectual cache reserved to the main nineteenth and twentieth century ideas of liberalism socialism or conservatism Sometimes the very term of ‘nationalism’ was accompanied by a whiff of illegitimacy undermining what was frequently conceived as the predetermined universalism telos of historical development as perceived by the EnlightenmentConsequently post1945 studies tended to view nationalism in mainly instrumentalist terms while few of these studies could directly be classified as Marxist many of them tended to view nationalism as being akin to what could be called “superstructural” or to use a different terminology as being merely epiphenomenal Not only a Marxist scholar like Hobsbawm presented nationalism as an outcome of modern capitalist developments but to mention just a few Gellner Deutsch Greenfield and Anderson also linked albeit in different ways the emergence of nationalism to its function within the processes of modernization as accompanying industrialization urbanization and the rise of the bourgeoisie in its different forms1 A conservative writer like Kedourie on the other hand viewed it as the brainchild of arrogant and sometimes utopian and alienated intellectuals2 The work done by Anthony Smith stood out as being out of tune with this instrumentalist approach by trying to link modern intellectual and spiritual expression of nationalism with historical memories and consciousness and anchor them in a web of nuanced continuities rather than seeing them as the exclusive outcome of modernization and secularization3

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