ABSTRACT
For all its limitations and problems, nationalism has proved to be the most successful political doctrine ever promoted. At the time of the French Revolution, there were only about twenty of what we would now recognize as national states, the rest of the world consisting of sprawling empires, unexplored territories and a host of tiny independent principalities. Now the entire inhabitable surface of the globe is divided into 175 national (or supposedly national) states, each of them legally sovereign within its territory. Only a handful of tiny colonies, like Gibraltar and New Caledonia, remain of the empires; only Antarctica remains free of state sovereignty; and Monaco is the sole principality to retain, under French protection, the semblance of independence. The transformation has occurred in only two centuries.
