ABSTRACT

Beginning in the 1990s and continuing to the present, political leaders in western states have claimed that nationalism in various parts of the world—invariably they had the economically less developed countries in mind—had destabilized international politics. Conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, the former Soviet republics, and the Balkans have been explained as products of the pathology of nationalism. As Tom Nairn had put it, anticommunist demonology was replaced by the “Devil of Nationalism…. Armageddon has been replaced by the ethnic Abyss.” 1