ABSTRACT
Defence of individual rights and liberties and national independence marched together in the risorgimento-nationalism of the first half of the nineteenth century, against the reactionary Holy Alliance of the territorial states. Marxist classics did not formulate any systematic theory of the nation. Marxists supported particular national movements and nation-states tactically. The range of Marxist positions on the question of nation included the Austro-Marxists, who saw nations as communities of communication and destiny, shaped by history. The attempts to correct the assimilationist bias of early modernisation theories may be related to the appearance of national movements in seemingly consolidated nation-states of the West in the 1960s and 1970s. The achievement of mass democracy and the welfare state further consolidated the nation-state. Called sometimes regionalism, minority nationalism or neo-nationalism, contesting movements came to be seen as politically creative and anti-repressive. Nationalism was classified as the precondition for true internationalism.
