ABSTRACT
The problem of nationalism and the existence of nations leads, in general, to great unease among today’s liberal thinkers. On the one hand, they acknowledge that nationalism has played a healthy leading role, creating a favourable atmosphere for the fall of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and opposing, on many historical occasions, interventionist and centralizing statism. Moreover, important European liberal leaders have recently defended the role of the nation as an irreplaceable element of equilibrium to combat the interventionist and centralizing trends which, for example, are becoming evident in the process of European unification. Finally, it may be observed how, in many specific circumstances, nationalist decentralization brings a process of spontaneous competition into operation in order to reduce the regulatory and interventionist measures the majority of which originate from the central bodies of state power.3
