Introduction

However we may wish to describe or define, praise, glorify or condemn nationalism, we cannot but be impressed by its ability to continue to be the single most widespread and most powerful force propelling social and political change in the modern world. Just when we assume that it has spent its enormous store of energy, is being bypassed or transformed, nationalist sentiments or aspirations may emerge or re-awaken, heralding new departures, reasserting past or reaffirming present modes of social and political behaviour. Sometimes progressive, sometimes reactionary in its teachings and actions, nearly always disruptive, nationalism is today constantly throwing up problems which contain new opportunities and challenges. This is true for all kinds of societies, irrespective of the polarities which may distinguish them. In the industrial and affluent North as well as in the underdeveloped and poverty-stricken South, in both the Eastern and Western blocs, in open market capitalist as well as closed communist systems, nationalist upheavals are becoming once again commonplace.

For example, in the newer and less settled states of the post-colonial world in Africa and Asia, new groups constantly emerge to make demands which sound very much like those made forty, thirty or even as recently as twenty or ten years ago by nationalist leaders fighting for freedom from alien imperial powers. In Africa the decade of independence (the 1960s) was hardly over before new wars of independence commenced.