‘Virtues are individual; vices are national.’ That witty Enlightenment formulation gained added authority through the twentieth century, as nationalists of one kind or another wrought havoc. By the 1980s the very notion of international solidarity had changed its meaning, having ceased to denote the pooling of national resources and become instead an alternative to nationalism, an international style. All talk was of ‘world novels’ and ‘world music’ in a global economy. Yet by 1998 cricket fans celebrated a famous victory in the test series with South Africa by waving English flags rather than Union Jacks. The Cross of St George flies ever higher on these occasions, while cultural nationalism enjoys a new vogue even among exponents of left–liberal Critical Theory. John Rutherford's Forever England concludes with a lament that ‘England’ remains as yet undefined.

Only rare contemporary thinkers such as Tom Nairn have registered the fact that, far from being only a backward-looking philosophy, nationalism might also be the sign and shape of the future. The collapse of communism in 1989 simply speeded up a process which had marked a growth from about fifty recognised nation–states in 1945 to something more like two hundred as the century ends. Critical Theory is now becoming open to the suggestion that many ‘international’ arrangements from Great Britain through the European Union to the Organisation of African States may be little more than mechanisms for reinforcing the hegemony of one strong power at the expense of all others.