| Abstract: | Allow me to conclude my remarks on the state and its probable role in the future with the assertion that, while the state is a human creation, human beings are the creation of God. 1 Nationalism is a very distinctive species of patriotism … which in fact prevails in the modern world, and nowhere else. Nationalism is a species of patriotism distinguished by a few very important features: the units which this kind of patriotism, namely nationalism, favors with its loyalty, are culturally homogeneous, based on a culture striving to be a high [literate] culture; they are large enough to sustain the hope of supporting the educational system which can keep a literate culture going; they are poorly endowed with rigid internal subgroupings; their populations are anonymous, fluid and mobile, and they are unmediated; the individual belongs to them directly, in virtue of his cultural style, and not in virtue of membership in nested sub-groups. Homogeneity, literacy, anonymity are the key traits. 2 |
