Nationalism: The Modern Motive-Force

Not a day has gone by in these past several years without nationalism appearing in the headlines. Let us, for the sake of this chapter, limit ourselves to the period since 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics. The event signified Chinese nationalism’s coming of age; it was in no uncertain terms and very publicly presented to the world. The world, unaware that Chinese nationalism existed at all, was caught by surprise, from which it still, over a decade later, cannot quite recover. The rise of nationalism in China was an extremely important development in the history of nationalism in general. It opened a new page: the spread of an essentially Western form of consciousness beyond the limits of its original, monotheistic civilization, or the actual globalization of nationalism.