In many quarters of our society today it is taken for granted that nationalism is a malign force, just a step or two removed from Nazism. I take a different view: nationalism rightly understood can be a powerful positive force. Churchill, Roosevelt and de Gaulle were nationalists, after all.

A similar view is taken by Paul Collier, economics and public policy professor at the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford, writing in the Times Literary Supplement:

“Shared identity based on nationalism has been so universally condemned as to have become unacceptable. Liberal disdain has been driven by fears that nationalism would incite a return to majority violence against minorities, and by the hope that nation-based governance can be superseded by multiculturalism and global citizenship. Neither the fears nor the hope are well founded.”