Why does the idea of a world community look so morally compelling yet so politically impossible? I started this book by describing a fundamental paradox that modern theories of world community have had to confront, and which has made them easy to dismiss on grounds of their incoherence and impracticality: while a world community must be based on some set of universal values, every effort to impose such values is likely to be met with resistance on the grounds of its particularity. But rather than trying to solve this paradox, I suggested that we should investigate how it came into being, thereby explaining why universalistic and particularistic conceptions of community have ended up in such rigid opposition within modern political thought. I then suggested that our present difficulties in making coherent sense of the idea of world community are the outcome of a successful nationalization of the concept of community. Consequently, understanding how this nationalization took place can hopefully help us understand how the tension between universalistic and particularistic conceptions of community emerged, and by implication, how it can be overcome. The time has now come to follow up on these suggestions.

The first thing to note is that the paradox described above is of fairly recent origin. It would have been hard to formulate this paradox in a more distant past, since the opposition between universalistic and particularistic conceptions of community itself is rather recent. This is because a world community is based upon a social ontology very different from that of particular communities.