by Yael Tamir
solved, that progress is eternal and there will be more for
everyone.
It’s not without hesitation that I set out to write this text. Tak-
ing a pro- nationalist view one faces a risk that some arguments
will be used to support unworthy policies. But the fear of being
used should not stop one from drawing attention to some valid
arguments.
12 • Chapter
1
Things are likely to get tougher in years to come, and without
human empathy and national solidarity there is no way forward.
What is desperately needed is a Churchill who will not promise
greatness or togetherness but “blood, toil, tears, and sweat,” or
a Roosevelt who will urge people not to fear but to support “a
leadership of frankness and of vigor” that will encourage nations
to build a bearable future.
Intellectual history resembles an archaeological mount built
from remnants of great ideas. In order to move to a new era one
needs to dig in, brush off the dust, examine the way ideas were
used in order to build a theory that is, at the same time, new and
familiar. Liberalism with its faults and virtues, democracy with
its promise of self- rule, national ideology with its transgenera-
tional communal aspirations, and class- related theories with their
sensitivity to the way social status dictates one’s life options must
be included. From the theoretical fragments of the last century
a new theory should be built that fits the needs of the twenty-
first century.5
2
Never Say Never
On November 11, 1918, World War I came to an end. Over sixteen
mil ion people were killed in a war described as the war to end
all wars. Seeking ways to ensure an everlasting peace, the League
of Nations was created. Revulsion with war and futile bloodshed
was a popular sentiment in the 1920s. Nothing describes it
better than Erich Maria Remarque’s Al Quiet on the Western
Front. The book tells the story of a generation of men who
were destroyed by the war and criticizes the detachment of the
decision makers, far removed from the horrors of the front,
condemning people to death without caring to know who they
were. After years of fighting in the trenches, Paul, the book’s
hero, is killed: “He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so
quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined
itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western front.”1
By the end of World War I, nationalism was on the winning
side. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points as well as Lenin’s sup-
port for national self- determination made national policies the
guiding principle of the new world order. In the first wave of
national self- determination twenty- six new states were born
and more were soon to follow.
The national spring and the hopes for eternal peace ended ex-
actly twenty years later in March 1938 with the Anschluss— the
annexation of Austria to Nazi Germany— and with Neville
Chamberlain signing the Treaty of Munich promising “peace for
14 • Chapter
2
our time.” In 1939 World War II erupted; it was longer and dead-
lier than the first. It lasted six years and a day and left behind an
unprecedented number of casualties: over seventy mil ion dead
and hundreds of mil ions injured and displaced.
In the West, the liberating perception of nationalism was re-
placed with a demonic one. Nationalism came to be seen as a vile
force that sets free the evil that lies within us. Nazism showed that
even the most cultured of all nations, “the land of the poets and
thinkers” ( Das Land der Dichter und Denker), wears its humanis-
tic values lightly only to cover a deep- rooted dark spirit. Neither
culture nor philosophy could stop Hitler and his troops.
While German elites were reading Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” and
venerating universal brotherhood, they were ordering the per-
secution and extermination of entire peoples. One particular
moment captures the bitter irony of this situation. The movie The
Reichsorchester, which tel s the story of the Berlin philharmonic
orchestra, opens with a scene from a ceremonial concert that
took place in 1942. In the spectacular concert hall, crowded with
cultured music lovers, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of pro-
paganda, sang the praise of the Führer before introducing the
musical pieces. Then, the orchestra played and the choir sang
Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” a part of Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony: “Your magic joins again. What convention strictly
divides; All people become brothers . . . You mil ions I embrace
you. This kiss is for all the world.” The gas chambers at Auschwitz
were already releasing clouds of human smoke; the generals
humming Schiller’s words were fueling these chambers. It thus
became clear that being culturally savvy was not enough to evoke
a commitment to universal human values. The most cultural and
abysmal of human experiences could live not only within one
nation but also within one person. For more than eight years
Europe sank into a moral abyss.
Never Say Never • 15
When the war was finally over, optimism resurfaced. Repress-
ing the horrors of the war and forgetting the ease with which
people had been recruited to join the ranks of the executioners
allowed confidence in the benevolence of humanity to be re-
gained. Nationalism, it was assumed, had been defeated forever.
In his informative book Year Zero: A History of 1945, Ian Buruma
describes the first New Year’s Eve in Berlin after the end of the war:
Some were chanting: “Wir Sind das Volk! ” (“We are the people!”). Oth-
ers sang: “We are one people!” But there was nothing nationalistic or
menacing in the air of that night. It was an international crowd, a kind
of political Woodstock without rock bands, celebrating freedom,
togetherness, and hope for a better world, in which the bitter experi-
ences of the past would not be repeated; no more barbed wire, or
camps, or kil ing. It was good to be young. If ever Beethoven’s anthem
of “All Men Will Be Brothers” (“Alle Menschen werden Bruder”) had
meaning, it was on that extraordinary New Year’s Eve in Berlin.2
After the war, nationalism was discredited in the West, dissoci-
ated from its liberal foundations and associated with murderous
totalitarianism. It did, however, keep its liberating power in the
developing world and was the engine behind postcolonial move-
ments.3 In many ways this division between the developed
world, which was supposed to have moved beyond nationalism,
and the developing world, which was just growing into its
national stage, reflected the liberal theory of human progress:
nationalism was a necessary though not a final stage of moral
and political development. While essential in moments of
political birth, in maturity nationalism must be transcendent,
giving way to univers
alism.
Less than ten years after the end of the war, it was clear that a
new front was opened. The enemies of the West were now living
in Moscow, threatening to bring liberal democracies to an
16 • Chapter
2
end. Senator McCarthy was hunting down Communists all over
America. In October 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik
into orbit: “The Sputnik’s radio signal highlighted not only the
fact that the Soviet Union had beaten the United States into
space, it also made it clear the Soviets possessed rocket technol-
ogy strong enough to launch nuclear bombs at the United
States.”4 The Sputnik’s beeping signal stimulated a wave of Ameri-
can nationalism and led to reforms in science and engineering
education to enable America to regain its technological and
national prominence.
From the assassination of Martin Luther King to the students’
marches in Europe, 1968 seemed, once again, a turning point. The
anti– Vietnam War demonstrations that started in the United
States spread to London, Paris, and Berlin; the civil rights and
human rights movements gathered support; and youth culture
exploded with force. On the eve of his assassination, King de-
livered an inspiring and uplifting speech that would define the
American progressive vision, a fine combination of liberal and
national values, connecting the love of country (its topography
affectionately depicted) and the love of human kind.
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true. And
so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let
freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow- capped Rockies of Colorado. Let
freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California. But not
only that: Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let free-
dom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every
mountainside, let freedom ring.
Never Say Never • 17
Freedom was not only an American dream. In 1968 Czech
president Alexander Dubček tried to convince the Soviet lead-
ership to award his country independence. He pleaded for an
al iance grounded in mutual national respect. The Soviet Union,
he argued, should fully respect the sovereign rights of the Czech
people. This acknowledgment is the sole “reliable basis for the
further development of friendly relations.”5 His request was re-
jected, the Soviet army invaded Prague, and the tensions be-
tween the East and West reached a new peak. Jan Palach’s act of
self- immolation sent a clear message to the world that freedom
is worth dying for. Yet, the Kremlin turned a blind eye. The USSR
seemed an unshakable power.
Barely twenty years later, the Berlin Wall was demolished and
the Soviet Union had col apsed. This was misguidedly taken as
evidence of the end of all ideological struggles. In a dismissive
tone Francis Fukuyama declared that socialism may still have
“some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyong-
yang, or Cambridge, Massachusetts,”6 but globally it has lost its
power. As liberalism declared its final triumph, Fukuyama was
to announce victory:
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War , or
the passing of a particular period of post- war history, but the end
of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological
evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as
the final form of human government.7
In the twentieth century, Fukuyama argued, “liberalism con-
tended first with the remnants of absolutism, then Bolshevism
and Fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened
to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. The struggle
is now over.”8
18 • Chapter
2
The great liberal enthusiasm overshadowed the fact that the
collapse of the Soviet Union evoked national aspirations:
within three years (1990– 92) nineteen new states were estab-
lished, all gaining their independence on grounds of national
self- determination. In the eight months between May and
December 1991, ten new states were established: Somaliland
(May 18, 1991), Estonia (August 20, 1991), Ukraine (August 24,
1991), Moldova (August 27, 1991), Uzbekistan (September 1,
1991), Macedonia (September 8, 1991), Tajikistan (September
9, 1991), Croatia (October 8, 1991), Azerbaijan (October 18,
1991), and Kazakhstan (December 16, 1991). This was the second
great wave of national liberation, yet it did not undermine the
celebratory liberal spirit. On the contrary, the national aspect
of the emergence of the new states was silenced, their estab-
lishment was taken as evidence of the victory of liberalism over
communism.
The fact that in 1993 the European Union was established was
taken to be the final proof that the West was approaching a post-
national age. Ironically The European Union chose Hitler’s be-
loved musical piece, played on his birthday— “Ode to Joy”— as
its hymn, proving the shortness of human memory or maybe the
victory of hope over experience.
Nationalism wasn’t the only ideological power whose prema-
ture death has been announced. The events of 9/11 made it clear
that religious fundamentalism was back. With the vil ains in the
movies now speaking Arabic, the Western world met radical
Islam. Only one ideology seemed uncheckable: capitalism. The
second part of the twentieth century saw an amazing economic
and political growth. With the help of the United States, Europe
was rising out of the ashes to rebuild itself at an unprecedented
speed. This process was to be seen as the beginning of a new age
of endless progress.
Never Say Never • 19
Globalization was the vehicle by which liberalism expanded
its ideology. All seemed well and quiet on the Western front until
in 2001 Enron, one of the world’s major electricity and natural
gas corporations, col apsed and became the symbol of corpo-
rate corruption. The closing monologue of a play based on its
collapse is delivered by Jeremy Skil ing, Enron’s CEO:
I’m not a bad man. I’m not an unusual man. I just wanted to change
the world. . . . I know it’s hard to understand. . . . Everything I’ve ever
done in my life worth anything has been done in a bubble; in a state
of extreme hope and trust and stupidity. . . . Mark Twain once said:
“Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still
exist, but you have ceased to live.”9
By 2008 major cracks in the success story of neoliberalism
started to appear. The stock exchange bubble burst and every-
body was wondering how they hadn’t seen it coming. On
September 14, 2008, the American investment bank Lehman
Brothers Holdings announc
ed bankruptcy and the economic
crisis went into full swing, and yet the supremacy of liberalism
as the leading ideology didn’t come into question. Or maybe it
did: that same year, on August 8, an event took place the politi-
cal importance of which went almost unnoticed: the Olympic
Games opened in Beijing, sending an official announcement
of the arrival of a new global superpower. In a traditional national
manner, the opening ceremony created a continuous narrative,
connecting China’s glorious historical achievements to the
present- day process of intense economic progress.10 In the next
ten years the promise made in the opening of the games was ful-
filled and China became a major global power. In an interesting
change of roles, it became the defender of globalism against its
new rival, the United States. It is President Xi who now claims
to defend free trade as part of his “One Belt, One Road” policy,
20 • Chapter
2
while President Trump makes antiglobalism a centerpiece of his
policies.
Xi’s globalism is a nationalist one, a state- centered globalism,
a version of globalism the West has surrendered. Xi never meant
to allow the individualization of globalism; he remains within the
centralist Chinese tradition but with an eye open to the world.
Processes of globalization in the West were different. The move
from state globalism to individual globalism had brutal outcomes
for the developed world; the most of obvious was the col apse
of middle classes and the rapid growth of social and economic
gaps. No wonder those harmed by this stage of globalism are
wishing to turn the clock back. This became evident in the de-
bate over Brexit that placed EU supporters and globalists on
the one side and nationalists on the other. We know who won the
debate. Euro- skepticism and global skepticism is now spreading
around the world. Citizens want to put their country first— and
they have a good reason to demand we take their preferences
seriously.
A hundred years of an ideological journey that has known un-
precedented peaks and valleys ended in 2018. Starting with the
“war to end all wars” and culminating in the “end of history,” it
was closed with the reemergence of nationalism, Brexit, and a
wave of separatist demands. The losing ideologies are back, fight-
