This morning, just as I was about to hit the publish button, my Dell Inspiron shut off. There was no warning, no blue screen of death, just a complete and instant shut down. The post, quite possibly the best ever, could not be recovered.
In lieu of a post today, I would highly recommend you read the article which had stimulated the post. In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Jerry Z. Muller explores the persistence of ethnonationalism. Here is a taste to get you started: [HT: Siggy]
The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism
Summary: Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But in fact, it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, it is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.
JERRY Z. MULLER is Professor of History at the Catholic University of America. His most recent book is The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought.
Projecting their own experience onto the rest of the world, Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. After all, in the United States people of varying ethnic origins live cheek by jowl in relative peace. Within two or three generations of immigration, their ethnic identities are attenuated by cultural assimilation and intermarriage. Surely, things cannot be so different elsewhere.
Americans also find ethnonationalism discomfiting both intellectually and morally. Social scientists go to great lengths to demonstrate that it is a product not of nature but of culture, often deliberately constructed. And ethicists scorn value systems based on narrow group identities rather than cosmopolitanism.
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