Winner of the 1999 Michael Harrington Award, Caucus for a New Political Science
The
resurgence of nationalism accompanying the decline of communism has
been taken to indicate the failure of socialist theory to grasp the
nature of this phenomenon. Against both those who argue that the radical
tradition has ignored and underestimated nationalism and those who
accuse it of economic reductionism, this careful analysis of the idea
of the nation as it was developed in the work of the major thinkers
of the international labor movement reveals evidence of how seriously
they grappled with nationalism.
Each of the main sections of the book focuses on the most influential
theorists of the international labor movement as it became organized
and grew: Bakunin, Marx, and Engels and the concern of the First
International (1864-1876) with class solidarity across political
borders; Lenin, Luxemburg, and Bauer and the preoccupation of the
Second International (1889-1914) with socialism in ethnically plural
societies; Stalin and Gramsci in relation to the substitution by
the Third International (1919-1943) of nation-building and national
liberation for the old class project.
In the conclusion, the author examines the relationships among
ethnic and civic nationality, national self-determination, republican
institutions, and the process of globalization from the perspective
of the post-Soviet era and in the light of social theory and Kant's
ideas about cosmopolitan right. |
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