Nationalist, regional, ethnic, and religious movements are also defining factors in Philippine Mindanao, Tamil Sri Lanka, in all three corners of India, through Pakistan and Afghanistan, in Iran thanks to the Baluchis and others, among Kurds and other minorities in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey (as well as the Soviet Union), and of course throughout the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab conflict. In Africa, existing ethnic allegiances condition the attempts to build national states without nations. In Europe, the authority of existing national states is challenged by regional ethnic movements (from Scotland to Euzkadi and Sardinia, and throughout Yugoslavia), which offer possibly false promises of salvation in a time of national and international economic and political crisis. In Mexico, where the Catholic Church has played a minor role for a long time, the Pope’s visit still attracted three million people to the streets. In the United States, Spanish-speaking people of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and other Latin American origin are fast becoming not only the largest but also the most self-consciously militant minority. They have also contributed to the resurgence, particularly in the West and Southwest, of strong regional consciousness. y nationalism now poses a supposed threat to the survival of the Canadian state and has encouraged regionalism in other provinces as well, including petroleum-rich Alberta.

Most of this contemporary nationalist resurgence is no longer a component of a drive for national liberation, let alone to socialism, as nationalism was during much of this century. On the contrary, not unlike a century ago, the question arises whether these nationalist movements merit support by virtue of their possible contributions to progressive and socialist causes or whether much of this new nationalism deserves condemnation and opposition for its probable reactionary and even counterrevolutionary consequences. Certainly, the nationalism that contributes to war between socialist states or even to the abandonment of socially progressive movements, policies, or governments can only be the largest stretch of the ideological imagination be supported as conducive to liberation and socialism — except on purely nationalist grounds. Many other nationalist, regional, ethnic, and religious movements in the East, South, and West are also exposed to manipulation and use by conservative and reactionary class forces far more easily than they are of use to progressive, let alone socialist, forces. At best, nationalism now increasingly threatens to confuse and divide popular and proletarian forces; at worst, nationalist and religious sentiments threaten to be increasingly manipulated outright by reaction. The threat is very real that socialism will be sacrificed on the alter of nationalism.