The latest American Interest blogpost from Walter Russell Mead, on the ongoing tragedy in Kyrgyzstan, is like all his writings full of wise words and wise thoughts. It’s certainly worth reading the whole thing, even if you can’t find Kyrgyzstan in your atlas. But one sentence especially caught my eye, a sentence which seems to sum up one of the central truths of world history of the last two centuries and of the one just beginning.
“The tragedy of modern life seems to lie in the fact that we cannot live with nationalism and we cannot live without it.”
Ponder that for a moment. What I think he is saying that we cannot live without a loyalty and an identity to a national group, variously defined. But of course he is also aware that nationalisms of various kinds have helped to produce war and slaughter on a vast scale. You could write a whole book about that—and maybe Walter will. I don’t know anyone who could do it better.
