by Yael Tamir

About the author: Yael Tamir is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Tamir, author of the book Liberal Nationalism, is a founding member of the Israeli peace organization Peace Now and is active in the civil rights movement in Israel.

As we entered the final quarter of the twentieth century, there was a widespread assumption that the age of nationalism was over, that we were on the threshold of a postnational era. It is now clear that this assumption was wrong. National movements are regaining popularity, and nations that had once assimilated and “vanished” have now reappeared. Estonians, Latvians, Corsicans, and Lombards awake from the long slumber that communist regimes or Western European nation-states had forced upon them, flex their muscles, and set out to march under the banner of...