ABSTRACT
In keeping with the apercus, after some theoretical work, this chapter looks at the promise of cosmopolitanism and citizenship, the nature of the state, and the horror of war. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles concluded the First World War. The victorious powers regarded national self-determination as the best route to peace, along with open markets and a system of international governance that would control the warlike tendencies of the vanquished and others. Meanwhile, the ideology of nationalism, always close to doctrines of autochthony, autarky, and autarchy, was used by emergent great powers to justify political or racial superiority in much the same way as French and British imperialists. Alongside the emergence of fascist nationalism, it produced the conditions of possibility for the Second World War. In general, however, nationalism is rightly damned for its maleness, brutality, warmongering, and other failings: Luxemburg spoke for many when she denounced ‘the empty wordiness of nationalism as an instrument of bourgeois domination.’.
