Ethnonationalism Wasn’t the Problem Then February 26, 2008
Posted by Webmaster in Foreign Relations, Globalism and UN, History, Nationalism and Devolution.trackback
Writes Muller: “A familiar and influential narrative of 20th-century European history argues that nationalism twice led to war, in 1914 and then again in 1939. Thereafter, the story goes, Europeans concluded that nationalism was a danger and gradually abandoned it. In the post-war decades, Western Europeans enmeshed themselves in a web of transnational institutions, culminating in the European Union.”
Actually, WWI can’t be blamed on nationalism. In fact, it makes better sense to blame EU-style transnationalism. The reason is that in the decades leading up to WWI, secret treaties among European countries were the de rigeur of foreign policy. The theory is that since all Europe knew that every country had a secret treaty with someone, it would deter any country from attacking another. For example, if Germany invaded England, Berlin would have no clue which countries England had secret treaties with, and attacking England was the moral equivalent of attacking half of Europe, in all likelihood. The foible in that mentality, as we saw in 1914, was that a minor affair, such as an assassination of nobody in particular in nowhere in particular, set up a domino effect, thanks to the secret treaties, that ended in Europe being at war with itself.
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