ABSTRACT
The impact of the Second World War on academic studies of nationalism was at least as significant as that of the first, if not more so. Once again the development of intellectual discourse was interrupted and diverted by seismic changes in world politics. As was the case in the 1920s, the late 1940s witnessed a flood of hastily constructed publications decrying the pernicious influence of nationalist doctrine and sentiment and calling for increased international understanding. The urgency of the perceived need for action to dampen the fires of nationalism was heightened by the fact that authors were now living in the atomic age. The Austrian exile and left-wing activist Julius Braunthal, for example, noted that ‘no serious contemplation of the consequences of the atomic bomb will fail to lead to the recognition that nothing short of the integration of the national States into a World State will save civilisation from
extinction’. Similarly, Sir Harold Butler, arguing for greater European integration, noted that no single nation could ensure its own defence in an age when ‘war can only be waged when it is backed by a huge industry capable of turning out anything from jet-planes to mammoth tanks and atom bombs’. Thus, he argued, the only solution was ‘working together, however strange and difficult it may look at first’.4
