ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter it was argued that moves towards a the-oretical (rather than a philosophical or ethical) analysis of nationalism had begun by the eve of the First World War. However, as might be expected from such a singular event, the war was to have an extraordinary and lasting impact on studies of nationalism, as it did on many areas of academic life. In the first instance, it focused unprecedented attention on the issue of nationalism. Carlton J. Hayes, one of the most prominent writers on the subject during the interwar period, claimed that it had made nationalism ‘the most significant emotional factor in public life today’.3 However, the war did far more than merely concentrate academic consideration on the issue of national sentiment. In many ways, the war
imbued theories of nationalism with a heightened political significance. The political importance that academic explanations (and indeed, ‘justifications’) of nationalism had assumed during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and which had waned slightly during the early part of the twentieth, was again intensified, often to the detriment of dispassionate academic thinking. Indeed, it might be argued that the war of 1914 rudely interrupted a period of ‘intellectual openness and doubt’ to which ‘we have only recently returned’, having finally shaken off ‘the certainties of interwar nationalism’.4
