ABSTRACT
The nationalist principle, according to which all states should correspond to a nation and all nations should become states, fell into disrepute in the aftermath of the Second World War. It was vehemently denounced as passe and harmful to the new world society recovering from the war. It was invariably regarded as a manifestation of man's darker side, as the hallmark of prejudice and ethnocentrism that breeds intolerance and aggression. The new panacea pervading the literature of the 1950s and 1960s was none other than integration - integration within and between states - an idea incidentally that had also surfaced, though with less confidence, in the aftermath of the First World War (mainly among the so-called idealists). By the late 1950s it was assumed that there was a dynamic towards assimilation, an incessant trend heralding a new era of progress and prosperity across the world.
