Nationalism and violence in international relations

Pierre Hassner

pp. 202-221

in: Alain Dieckhoff, Christophe Jaffrelot (eds), Revisiting nationalism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Abstract

"From humanity through nationality to bestiality". This was the prediction of the great Austrian nineteenth-century writer Grillparzer. The great English liberal thinker Lord Acton, who himself had an Austrian con-nection, was more optimistic as to the final outcome and slightly more academic but hardly more favourable, when he concluded his essay on Nationality with this paragraph: "Although the theory of nationality is more absurd and criminal than the theory of socialism, it has an important mission in the world, and marks the final conflict, and therefore, the end of two forces which are the worst enemies of civil freedom—the absolute monarchy and the revolution."¹