The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism.

THOUGH the title might lead the reader to expect otherwise, the focus of William Pfaff's new book is none other than the human condition. It is wholly appropriate then that the book should fall, as it does by the author's own admission, into the category of "conjectures of dilettantes." Mr. Pfaff's aim appears to be neither analytical nor polemical, but meditative. He does not seek to persuade or to prove his point of view and seems satisfied to share his reflections. "I argue about these matters," he writes. "I cannot prove them, nor can anyone else."

If there is a coherent argument to the book, it is an argument about progress. There is none, claims Mr. Pfaff, if progress is understood as "a natural development toward higher and implicitly more virtuous forms of political and social organization and conduct." To think that we are morally superior to those who lived before us (or more sophisticated and intelligent) is arrogant; the resurgence of murderous nationalisms--in Yugoslavia and elsewhere--is a proof that today man is as capable of evil, and as foolish, as ever.

This is a conclusion with which one cannot argue, though a cynic might ask whether at the end of the twentieth century, which hardly encouraged a belief in the moral progress of humanity, it needs further proof. The answer to the cynic is yes, apparently it does, for it was the idea of progress that justified our premature celebration of the end of history a couple of years back and led Western observers to misinterpret completely the nature of the transformation in Eastern Europe. We did believe that things could only get better: that despotism is necessarily replaced by greater freedom, that increased efficiency (or a desire for increased efficiency) produces increased happiness. Matters proved to be more complex, and no proof was more tangible than that of the unhappy (and clearly inefficient) rage of post-Communist nationalisms--the wrath of nations.

Abandoning a belief in progress, with us as its culmination--and assuming in its place the "moral constancy and continuity of man through millennia"--has serious implications. Among other things, it implies that social and political systems must be treated as morally equivalent, and that we have no right to pass judgment on systems different from our own. For moral superiority and depravity can be attributed only to agents exercising moral choice--individuals. If the moral level of humanity is a constant, one has to assume a roughly constant distribution of moral, immoral, and morally indifferent people in every type of society. This means that no society can be considered, morally, better or worse than another. Moreover, rejecting the possibility of progress presupposes that it is at least conceivable that there is no universal morality. This too would make moral comparisons, and therefore judgment, impossible.

But the right to judge is not something one gives up easily. And it becomes all the dearer at times of national self-doubt. As Mr. Pfaff notes, such self-doubt has been the mood of the United States since the Vietnam crisis. When sources of moral confidence dry up within, one tries to find them elsewhere. So it is not at all coincidental that the end of history--the world's presumed conversion to our liberal-democratic faith--was celebrated exactly at the time when we were no longer happy with, or even sure of, what we were.

Progress is the subject of the concluding chapter of The Wrath of Nations. The rest of the book consists of evidence of man's unchangeable moral nature--drawn mostly from the history of modern nationalisms. The book is, therefore, also a meditation on the nature of nationalism. It puts the current nationalist eruption in historical perspective and underscores the complexity of the phenomenon. And yet, the book is not about nationalism. Though Mr. Pfaff is not entirely consistent (at one point nationalism is defined as "a phenomenon of the European nineteenth century"), throughout the text nationalism is referred to as an expression "of human identities," "social and moral realities at the core of human existence," "primordial attachments of an individual to a group," "a form of love of self." Such generic formulations do not allow us to distinguish national identity and attachment from any other of the possible and historically prior identities and attachments. Nor are they much help in telling us what nationalism contributes to the political experience of the modern age, beyond giving expression to the constant tendencies of human nature. Having defined nationalism as a matter of human nature (and deprived it of its specificity), The Wrath of Nations, by definition, becomes a book about human nature. Its subtitle, Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism, itself juxtaposes nationalism and civilization, implying that nationalism is a phenomenon of psychology, rather than of culture and history. Calling it something like The Wrath of Nature: Civilization and the Furies of the Id would clear things up and do the contents of the book more justice.

What's in a name? one might ask. And yet the title clouds the book's main contribution. The questions it raises--about the human condition, progress, and moral judgment--are very important; they should be reflected upon again and again, and Mr. Pfaff performs a valuable service by offering the reader a framework for doing so. But presenting them under the guise of a different set of problems, to the elucidation of which The Wrath of Nations contributes little, may both deprive these questions of the attention they deserve on their own and deprive the book of the recognition it deserves for raising them.

Liah Greenfield is a Fellow of the University Professors at Boston University and the author of Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Harvard).