Neither nationalism nor imperialism is altogether good or altogether evil. For nationalism and imperialism are not primarily ideologies but rather organizing principles of group pride and of vast territorial administration. Ideologies, on the other hand, entail a degree of abstraction and are in the main utopian. German Nazism and Soviet Communism were utopian movements that combined nationalism with imperialism. That’s part of what made them unique. The point is to beware of easy comparisons and judgments. To put the nationalism of civil society demonstrators in Kiev’s Maidan in the same category with the nationalism of Vladimir Putin’s Russia is nonsense; so is condemning the Habsburgs as imperialists just because the Nazis were also.

Not only can nationalism and imperialism play out differently depending upon the circumstances, so obviously can broad phenomena such as religion and democracy. For example, it is a mere commonplace to state that the Christianity of evangelicals in the American Midwest is different from that of Lebanese Phalangists during the civil war of the 1970s and 1980s, just as the aesthetic and moderate Islam of Morocco and Oman is different from that of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Democracy in America is different from that in Iraq. And while Deng Xiaoping may have been a ruthless dictator, his accomplishments in China put him in an entirely different category from Saddam Hussein and Bashar al Assad.

But we know all that!, you might say. Yet apparently we don’t. For spreading democracy no matter what the local circumstances has been a philosophical feature of a significant branch of the American foreign policy establishment for decades now. Of course, one can argue that since in most circumstances, imperialism is bad and democracy is good, we will oppose the former and support the latter. But while that might work as a broad consensus-driven goal, the messy specifics require more nuance in application.