The story of nationalism in the modern era is an ongoing failure of liberals to control it. Even if at times, for a fleeing moment, it appears that liberal principles and nationalism might combine forces for the better, those very energies often rest on latent compromised convictions that later spell trouble. For instance, the United States proclaimed lofty liberal commitments in the Declaration of Independence, only to undermine them by race-baiting language later in that very document. The Founders then went on to erect a nation in which what was most self-evident was that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” would be restricted to white men. In Europe too, the lofty ideas of Herder and Mazzini faltered in 1848, when it became clear that liberalism and nationalism cannot abide peacefully together. Therefore, Historian Jacob Talmon called 1848 “the year of the trial,” and declared the trial a failure. There were simply too many potential nations intertwined in an overlapping patchwork that would never allow them to coexist peacefully together. And by World War I and II, it was clear that not only was nationalism disruptive to world peace, it might be the most dangerous and insidious idea in human history.
While historians cannot achieve something that has been tried many times over and almost always failed quite monumentally—as so many wars of the modern period clearly show—they can still contribute to the ongoing leftist project to disrupt, where possible, the hold of nationalism over modern peoples. This is a worthwhile task that has helped foster in most nation-states a healthy and much needed alternative to the cult of the nation. In this way, they may contribute to a radical counterculture that has done much to limit the damage of the nation-state and at times, when the winds were right, even to participate and invigorate significant change in the life of the nation for the better. Think for example of the numerous communist activists who helped make the New Deal more radical than it would have been otherwise. Or recall how antislavery activists in the wake of the Mexican American War (1846-1848) were able to turn abolitionism into a powerful force in American political history, even though until then it had been relatively marginal to American political culture.
In my experience, history in this vein can help young nationalists see through the thick ideological fog that usually hovers over most of us who grow up in modern nation states. I am a citizen of what Patrick Wolfe regarded as two of the classic cases of settler-colonialism, the U.S. and Israel. And one of the defining features of settler-colonial nations, according to Wolfe, is that they best hide their true chauvinistic nature from their very own citizens. I can personally testify that while growing up, though I knew well the dangers of nationalism—especially its virulent German form, given that my maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother were Holocaust survivors —I never imagined that Israel or the United States shared any resemblance to virulent types of nationalism. I grew up idolizing Zionism and the United States as the lands of the brave and the homes of the free.