ABSTRACT
Loyalty to a common physical homeland and its ruler, and a sense of solidarity between those who share a religious faith or a language, are as old as recorded human history. Nationalism is more recent. It derives from the word nation, which was made familiar throughout the world by the French Revolution. In place of hereditary monarchs, radical doctrine attributed sovereignty to the nation. It followed from this that nations had a right to independence, and that fractions of a nation, separated by frontiers based merely on the whims of dynasties or the facts of geography, had a right to unite with each other. Nationalism in fact is inescapably derived from the democratic principle, and a world order based on the unit of the nation-state is the logical application of democratic doctrine to international relations.
