Since the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in the late summer of 1968 hopes for détente between East and West have ebbed. The ruthless suppression of internal political autonomy in that often overrun nation seems to have given the lie to all those who have asserted that under the common pressures of modern industrialized society the social systems of the United States and the Soviet Union were becoming more and more alike. The use of the naked force of the Red Army to destroy the Czech road to socialism has left in ruin not only immediate aspirations for a reduction of international tensions in Central Europe but the broader faith in a future peace based on a convergence of the democratic and the Communist ways of life.

Nationalism is of course a state of mind. It is a way of thinking which seizes a rather large group of people, usually all living in the same area, and causes them to consider themselves a nation; that is, as an actual or potential governing organization to which they give their loyalty. We continue to live in an era of nation-states. To give one's primary political loyalty to a sub-national group is to be provincial, to give it to another nation is to skirt being subversive, and to give it to a group of nations is to espouse supranationalism. In this context, what docs it mean to speak of “the new nationalism“?

There are many surprises in the use of the term “new nationalism.” It sometimes refers to nationalism typical of a new nation.

Pain and tragedy often teach men, and sometimes nations. Comfort mothers conceit more surely than necessity does invention, and torment accompanies die birth of thought as it does that of men. Even in Vietnam there is that much hope; national anguish may lead us. to a new and better understanding of the world and of our role in it, and to a foreign policy which avoids the grim and needless alternatives that have confronted us in Southeast Asia.

The hope, however, is ambiguous. Pain should stimulate the search for causes and cures, but it may produce no more than flight. In intellectual as well as physical matters, there are hurts so great as to be “blinding.”