by Julius Jacobson

About the author: Julius Jacobson is coeditor of New Politics, a quarterly socialist journal.

“Nationalism” has become the “N” word. Mention it and the reactive image triggered is of socially retrograde and morally base movements marked by xenophobia, bigotry, ethnic hatred, anti-Semitism, religious fanaticism, bloodletting and of the governance of theocratic mullahs, assorted secular despots and authoritarian apparatchiks turned nationalist. This perception of nationalism as demonology is historically and politically untenable but it is not arrived at without cause. There are the chilling press accounts and televised images of mutilated victims of ethnic strife, of shattered neighborhoods, the heart-wrenching spectacle of refugees going only god knows where, the human toll of warfare within and between the newly created nations of Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzogovina, and more. Meanwhile, a nationalistic neo-Nazi scum has risen...