Development of Civic & Ethnic Nationalism

The idea that every nation should have its own state·accompanied by the corollary that one ethnic or cultural group should not collectively role over another·has been the most powerful political force of the past two hundred years. "While particular nationalisms vary, this basic nationalist conception of an ideal world order has been remarkably unchanged for well over a century."

The concept of nationalism has survived setbacks since the French Revolution. One argument against the spread of nationalism is that such a phenomenon destabilizes the international political order. The harmful effects of alteration of existing borders·even peaceful alteration·would, it is contended, outweigh the benefits. "The belief of the Bush administration that the United States was a status quo power explains its efforts to keep both the Soviet empire and the Yugoslav federation intact." The breakup of a multinational state may create a regional power vacuum or a new balance-of-power pattern among its successor states, and such outcomes may be strategically desirable for some countries. The following events illustrate this point. Britain sought the independence of the Low Countries, the Hapsburgs the fragmentation of Italy, and successive Chinese empires the disunity of the

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have failed are numerous: "Cyprus, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Sudan, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia (India increasingly looks like another failure). Nevertheless, many persist in arguing that multinational democracy not only is possible but represents the wave of the future. Multinational despotisms, they argue, should not be partitioned into nation states that (in some cases) may become democracies. Rather, they should be transformed from multinational despotisms into multinational democracies." As examples of successful multinational federations, proponents of multinational democracy usually point to three countries with elaborate ethnic power-sharing arrangements: Switzerland, Belgium and Canada. "In reality, these three examples hurt the multinationalist case more than they help it. Switzerland, for example, is better described as a confederation of relatively homogeneous territorial nation states (the cantons) than as a truly multiethnic society. Belgium is a society deeply troubled by its linguistic and political divisions, and Canada recently almost came apart over the Quebec question. The two 'founding nations' of Canada may yet go their separate ways, like the Czechs and Slovaks did." Those people "who
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 5029
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page)

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