ABSTRACT
The purpose of the book has been to unravel nationalism by isolating and examining its ideological components. It has been suggested that it was the intertwining of the civic and ethnocultural visions of nationalism which facilitated the rise of the modern nation-state, and that it is their unravelling which has engendered the emergence of the multicultural nationalist vision, and thence the potential contention between the three strands of nationalist ideology. Some states are indeed managing, with varying degrees of success, to resolve, defuse or diffuse the resultant political tensions. But the widespread incidence of nationalist conflict is evidence of the difficulties of reintwining threads which have unravelled. The politics of nationalist contention is a politics of ideological confrontation which is inherently resistant to management and compromise. The purpose in this concluding chapter is to briefly summarise the argument of the book, and then to illustrate the ideological power of contending nationalisms by offering four brief essays: on nationalist conflicts in Australia, Northern Ireland, Rwanda and Kosovo.
