“It is as if a really secure nationalism, already in possession of its nation-state, can fail to see itself as 'nationalist' at all. Its own distinctive bonding is perceived as natural and obvious by contrast with the mere projections of any nationalism which is still in active progress and thus incomplete. At this point radicals and minority nationalists emphasize the artificialities of the settled 'common sense' nation-state and to their own satisfaction shoot them to pieces from history and from social theory.”

— Raymond Williams

Who Speaks For Wales?: Nation, Culture, Identity (published posthumously in 2003), p. 193

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Raymond Williams 12

philosopher 1921–1988

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

As cited by Eric G.E. Zuelow " Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and the Reconstruction of Nations http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/smith1.htm" on nationalismproject.org. 1999-2007.
Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations. (1994)

“A few years ago a majority of the States had adopted prohibition or rigid restrictions on the traffic in intoxicating liquor. But other States did not cooperate in advancing this policy, and ultimately by national action it was extended to all the Union. By failing to meet the requirements of a national demand the States became deprived of the power to act. If questions which the States will not fairly settle on their own account shall have to be settled for them by the Federal authority, it will only be because some States will have refused to discharge obvious duties.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Reign of Law (1925)

“To a radical Korean nationalist, the division of the nation, the race, is an intolerable state of affairs. So too is the continued presence of the foreign army that effected that division in the first place.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Interview with Isaac Chotiner (February 2017)

“Socialism with its ideal of the national control of consumption and production, its substitution of national barter for the processes of foreign trade, is by no means an international force. … It looks inwards rather than outwards and sets up a national economy, which every true protectionist should envy. Russia is a powerful national state and has indulged in nationalist policies. … Even a Socialist state cannot provide against war unless a world authority has been formed.”

Michael Foot (1913–2010) British politician

Article in Young Oxford and War (1934), quoted in Mervyn Jones, Michael Foot (Victor Gollancz, 1994), p. 31
1930s

“A State which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a State which labours to neutralise, to absorb, or to expel them, destroys its own vitality; a State which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government. The theory of nationality, therefore, is a retrograde step in history.”

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian

"Nationality" (1862)

“A nation is all the individuals of same blood, forming by their cohesion a natural related collective being with it s own organs and state which are social classes and the State and the same soul, which is nationality.”

A.C. Cuza (1857–1947) Romanian politician

From Naţionalitatea în artă ("Nationality in Art"), Bucureşti: Cartea Romaneasca, 1905.

“The interests of the working class and of its struggle against capitalism demand complete solidarity and the closest unity of the workers of all nations; they demand resistance to the nationalist policy of the bourgeoisie of every nationalist.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

"Right of Nations to Self-Determination", (1904), The Lenin Anthology
1910s

“The nation that refuses to behave nationalistically, when all the other nations are doing so, is fatally destined to die.”

Alfredo Rocco (1875–1935) Italian politician and jurist

“L'ora del nazionalismo” (“Nationalism's hour”), 1919 essay in Alfredo Rocco’s Scritti e discorsi politici, Milan: Giuffrè. Vol. 2, (1938) p. 507

“[N]o serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist… Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality http://books.google.com/books?id=OHz70fY8t2UC&lpg=PA12&pg=PA12#v=onepage&q&f=false (Cambridge University Press, 2nd ed. 2012), p. 12.
Nations and nationalism since 1780 programme, myth, reality (1992)

“By promoting justice and thus the interests of the international community as a whole, a state will be able to make its influence over others sustainable and achieve its own national interest.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Neo-statecraft and Meta-geopolitics (2009), p.147

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Raymond Williams 12

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