The Long Tail

This final chapter opens with the universal adoption of the principle of the nation’s right to self-determination, which, applied in the Paris Peace Treaties of 1919, was meant to stabilize international relations and which turned the central tenet of nationalism into a cornerstone of international law. In a European continent purportedly divided into ethnoculturally defined nation-states, the culture of nationalism continued to be operative. Many post-1918 nation-states slid (partly because of an unresolved ambiguity between civic and ethnic definitions of the nation) from parliamentary and constitutional governance towards authoritarianism and dictatorships. Meanwhile, a new cultural medium emerged: cinema. This medium is surveyed to explain the remarkable survival of nationalism across the totalitarian dictatorships and devastating wars of the mid-century, and across the internationalist and anti-totalitarian recoil that dominated the post-1945 decades. It is suggested that this survival, and the renewed contemporary dominance of nationalism as an ideology, is due in large part to its ability to shift back and forth between anodyne and virulent states, latent and salient. The alternation between those states served to proclaim the nation’s charisma both as a merely cultural (unpolitical) feel-good factor and as a political imperative, a commanding, inspiring validator for belligerent heroism.