by Daniel Singer

About the author: Daniel Singer is the European correspondent for the weekly magazine The Nation.

The specter haunting Europe today, as it approaches the twenty-first century, is the ghost of nineteenth-century nationalism. It sends shivers down spines everywhere on the no longer formally split but still deeply divided Continent. In eastern Europe, the collapse of the Stalinist empire, followed by the fragmentation of the Soviet Union itself, has provided scope for the resurrection of local nationalisms. Since the alleged purpose of the whole operation is to reverse the course of recent history, this revival of nation-states is logical, even if it does not make much sense. In western Europe, where history has developed more in line with what was expected and the boundaries of the nation-state are being blurred, rejection of the alien, of the other, is spreading...