ABSTRACT
Shortly after the suppression of the 1848 revolutions and the subsequent resurgence of nationalist feeling in continental Europe, John Stuart Mill wrote that nationalism makes us indifferent to the fate of our fellow human beings unless they bear the same name and speak the same language. Hence nationalism was to be seen as a modern variety of barbarism, generating emotions that in practice proved much stronger than the love of freedom. Only ten years later, however, Mill arrived at the reluctant conclusion that the main tenet of nationalist ideology (namely, the call for the unification of all members of a nation under their own government) appeared to be in accord with the ideals of freedom and the democratic principle that ‘the question of government ought to be decided by the governed’.1
