Abstract

Unlike the rational political conception of a nation state, the nationalistic view is not so much an idea as it is an ideological construct, based on a certain pseudo-naturalistic approach to community life. In order to explain the success of nationalistic "mythologisms", one has to understand them as surrogates or substitutes for an integrated religious or mythical world view for the great mass of people who have lost their identity and their roots. The real importance of such an ideology does not consist in its being theoretically correct, but in its producing an abstract, often mistaken feeling of a so called national character. Nationalist ideologies, however, need not be true to have influence, and the fact that masses of people do identify themselves with their nations, easily turns their hypostatical constructs into social and historical realities. There is accordingly a social and political urgency for finding efficacious ways in order to overcome the danger of national ideologies. This will not succeed by denying their importance or reality, but only by understanding the rationale for diverging spiritual traditions meeting each other and by accepting their plurality on the basis of moral and conceptual decisions