ABSTRACT
In each West European country, the nationalistic attitude toward other West European countries is in a phase of erosion in the sense that it no longer appears as a basic characteristic of the civic culture. Nationalism is the most significant basic political value in the contemporary world, but not in Western Europe. The concept of nationalism is not the most appropriate for characterizing such movements. In 1938, among the twenty-two countries of Western and Central Europe, eleven were dictatorships and most of the others witnessed the development of significant nationalistic parties. In terms of national military experience and national collective memory, there is an essential difference between the prewar generation and the post-war generation. Nationalism is declining in Western Europe because a supranational consciousness is rising out of a progressive interaction at several levels: economic, military, social, cultural, and political.
