ABSTRACT
Nationalist ideology has had a tortured and complex relationship with twentiethcentury politics and still appears as a crucial driving force into the twenty-first century. However, in discussing it, in retrospective terms, at the dawn of a new century, it is important to realize that the legacy of nationalist ideology constitutes a continuous strained debate and practice from the early nineteenth century. The twentieth-century experience of nationalism is thus partly configured in the nineteenth century. In assessing nationalism, we ignore this longer-term history at our cost. Most of the nationalist controversies and political practices which have figured during the late twentieth century, have been echoes of those from the nineteenth century. Many contemporary nationalist movements have not outgrown the powerful myths and aspirations of the earlier nineteenthcentury debates. The fierce nationalist myths, fantasies and aspirations — lovingly embodied in lexicography, historical writing, painting, poetry, literature and monuments during the nineteenth century — which then boiled over, in many cases, in the conflagration of the First World War, arose once again, phoenixlike, from the flames (literal flames in many cases) in the closing decades of the twentieth century. Old agendas were still very much the present realities of the 1980s and 1990s. Old national battles of the nineteenth and early twentieth century were being refought with rekindled hatreds.
