| Abstract: | Two ideals have dominated world politics for two hundred years. In one, conveniently called liberal, there are no real differences among peoples, and that they speak different languages and have different religions should not be allowed to affect their collaboration in a national state; the United States with its multiethnic, multinational composition has been the concrete expression of this. The opposite ideal, here called nationalist or reactionary, was that language and religion do matter and that people ought to be able to live in a political community whose boundaries reflect that; Iran is an extreme case of this. If the liberal ideal goes back to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, nationalism was given its impetus in nineteenth-century Romanticism. Nationalism has dissolved successively the British, Dutch, and French empires, and then gone on toward breaking down the constituents into which these separated. Despite attempted suppression of breakaway movements by better armed forces of existing states, the number of states in the world has more than doubled since the end of World War II. Only recognized governments can become members of official international bodies. Despite a lack of legitimacy, no right to speak in the councils of the United Nations, and no legal access to arms, the forces of separation seem on the rise, those of union of multicultural nations, on the decline. It is too early to predict ultimate victory for one ideal or the other. |
