The Wrath of Nations: Civilizations and the Furies of Nationalism: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism - Softcover

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William Pfaff is a political columnist for The International Herald Tribune, London's The Observer, and other newspapers. A political essayist for The New Yorker from 1971 to 1992, he is the author of eight previous books, including Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the City of Geneva's Prix Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He lives in Paris.

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In this "refreshing antidote to the swell of books about the end of modernity" (Ivan Sanders, Commonweal), William Pfaff writes an enthralling narrative of the fall of empires and the rise of nations-- and with them, of modern nationalism, the most important of all political forces as we enter the next century.

Rooted in the human need for secure place, communal loyalty, and individual identification, nationalism has both created nations and ruined them. It paved the way for Nazism but eventually destroyed it. It brought down the European colonial empires, but has left Africa confronting anarchy, and much of Asia dominated by ambitious and authoritarian new nations. It forced Soviet armies out of Afghanistan and Eastern Europe, and eventually led to the downfall of Communism.

Writing with both urgency and sobriety, William Pfaff shows that without understanding this ineradicable factor in our political life, we cannot reckon with the realities that may await us.