Ovi Magazine Issue #24: Nationalism - Published: 2013-01-31

tory
Theme
nationality: Austria-Hungary, the
German Empire, the Ottoman
empire and the Russian empire.
Certain historic states simply
disappeared from the map while
Czechoslovakia, Finland, Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania appeared
suddenly and out of nowhere on the
map of Europe.
After World War II nationalism
spreads to Arab countries, India,
the Far East, Africa below the
Sahara, on the dovetail of European
imperialism. As the UN exemplifies
the world is now made up of hundred
of nations despite the predictions of
nationalism’s disappearance after
the second World War. Nationalism
in fact goes viral and produces after
World War I tyrants such as Hitler,
Stalin, Mussolini, Franco and
Salazar, Mao, Castro, Amin; they
all considered themselves superpatriots.
The schizophrenia on the
part of Mussolini is almost comical.
On one hand he fancied himself a
Roman Emperor out to restore the
ancient glory of the Romans and
establish Italian hegemony in the
Mediterranean; on the other hand he
was, monkey-like, imitating all the
worst features of a narrow negative
kind of European nationalism,
colonialism and all, as evidenced
in the most powerful European
nations. Had he remembered the
true glory of the Roman Empire
and the Italian Renaissance and
the Catholic Church he would
have known that the core of that
glory was not narrow nationalism
but universality. Those were all
universal movements to which
Italy had become accustomed,
thus rendering rabid nationalism a
straight jacket of sort.
The question thus arises: has
this gift of nationalism on the part
of Europe to the rest of the world
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