ABSTRACT
In his 1986 lectures entitled Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History, the great world historian William H.McNeill argued that nations and nationalism are phenomena peculiar to a particular period of history, the age of Western modernity, and that just as in pre-modern ages nations and nationalism were unknown, so in the future we shall witness the demise of the nation and the withering away of nationalism. It was only in a short, but vividly documented period of modern European history, from about 1789 to 1945, that the ideal of national unity held sway, and the nation-state became accepted as the political norm. Before and after, the norm was not national unity, but polyethnic hierarchy.
