Стр. 37 - V

Author : E. Arlyapova
Department of Comparative Politics, School of Political Science, Moscow State Institute (Univesity) of Inter-
national Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Candidate of Science (Political Sci-
ence)
THERE ARE INTERPRETATIONS that are growing more and
more complicated, theories that explain and methods that help
comprehend nationalism. This phenomenon long ago spread far
and wide beyond the framework of disciplines that normally stud-
ied it to become an object of interest of academic branches that
study international processes and relationships. They supply the
background against which the "self-evident opinions" about na-
tions and nationalism George Kennan offered in his Around the
Cragged Hill look like old postcards that gladden the eye and
warm up the soul.
For several decades, anything written by George Kennan, Profes-
sor at Princeton University, invariably attracted attention and
echoed far and wide.
Never before the theorist of the "containment policy" had gone so far in revising his own ideas
and, what is even more important, in critical analysis of realities. This easily explains the response:
In public opinion, this book stands apart from his other works; this explains the epithet "radical"
in one of the reviews; this explains why all reviews mentioned his advanced age even though it
was generally accepted that "as his new book shows, he writes in his eighty-eighth year as tren-
chantly and elegantly as ever." The book reads more like a "collection of critical observations"
than an exposition of the author's personal and political philosophy (of which he warned in the
title) and contains highly original conclusions on all topical issues discussed.
In view of this interpretation of the essence and history of the nation-state, nationalism is iden-
tified in Kennan's work as "the sense of belonging to such an entity - giving it one's loyalty and
indeed of accepting citizenship in it as part of one's own identity." In other words, the phenom-
enon was contemplated mainly through the prism of a combination of identities and the problem
of dominating loyalty.
Through the features typical of an entity (its numerical strength, in the first place) the romantic
assesses his own value. "Hence many facets of his behavior. Hence the frequent demonstrational
loyalty of his patriotism: the flag-waving" as well as bias toward intolerance and militarism (p.
79). "It is a real and terrible disease of the human spirit. The damage it has done is appalling. It
was one of the two fundamental causes of the First World War." He wrote that "it would be
wrong to assert that the diseased form of nationalism is an inevitable product of the modern
national state as an institution.... It is a disease of national society, not an essential concomitant
of it but it is an illness to which members of the modern national community are particularly
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George Kennan on Nationalism in World Politics