THE PROBLEM OF NATIONALISM A dialogue （民族主义的对话的问题）.pdf

The Isaiah Berlin Virtual Library THE PROBLEM OF NATIONALISM A dialogue with Stuart Hampshire, chaired by Bryan Magee The text that follows is based on a transcript, supplied by Thames Television, from a recording that no longer exists. It has been lightly edited to eliminate obvious errors (so far as this is possible in the circumstances) but no attempt has been made to bring it to a fully publishable form. This version is posted here for the convenience of scholars. BRYAN MAGEE Is nationalist feeling – to put the question at its most simplistic – a good thing or a bad thing? Why did scarcely anyone foresee, even very recently, its almost overwhelming importance as a force in the modern world? Why does it persist in having this importance? Must we expect it to continue far into the future? The founders of the United Nations a generation ago com- pletely failed to foresee this. Since then, throughout Africa and the Middle East, the forms of government left behind by the colonial powers have been swept aside by revolutionary movements, but not the national frontiers which those same colonial powers laid down quite arbitrarily only a hundred years ago or less. On the contrary, most of the new governments are highly nationalistic. For generations, socialists of every kind, and Communists, believed that nationalism was a form of false consciousness, exploited by the bourgeoisie in each of those countries to secure the allegiance of the workers, and to blind the workers to their true interests, which were class interests. Yet today the Communist world itself is irrevocably split along precisely nationalist boundary-lines, and some of the most divisive forces within individual Communist