The Politics of Nationalism in Contemporary France

Abstract

For the past two decades the nation-state in Western Europe has been on the defensive as a principle of political organization and the nationalism which sustains it has been held in disrepute. The assailants have been both internal, reacting against the increasing centralization which comes first with nation building and later with modernization, industrialization, and increasing welfare activity, and external in the form of federalist, neo-functionalist, and supranationalist claims against the nation-state. These latter claims challenge the material adequacy of the nation-state to fulfill the security and welfare demands of the modern age and die moral validity of the principle of nationalism at whose door has been laid the responsibility for the bellicosity, aggression, war, and destruction which plagued the European Continent during the first half of this century.