| Summary/Abstract |
WHEN THE Cold War ended a generation ago, much of the Western foreign-policy elite asserted that nationalism was in decline. Old-fashioned national liberation movements were increasingly irrelevant; in a world with a single global economy, it didn’t really matter where borders were drawn. And if every country was going to be a liberal, individualistic democracy, whether the country’s population was dominated by a single ethnicity or made up of many different ethnic groups would not matter. The nation-state might not vanish entirely, but it would be largely dissolved by the two acids of economic globalism and liberal individualism. “Ever closer union” was expected to be the trend, not only in the European Union, but also in the world.
|