4 NAROD
as Eastern Europe where the rule of Law has usually been subordinated to the
dictates of political convenience, western statesmen have usually set greater
store on the reform of existing states than on the creation of new ones.
Incorrigibly sanguine about the willingness of autocrats and totalitarian to con-
fess their faults and to mend their ways, they hope eternally against hope that
the status quo can somehow be saved without recourse to violence and revolu-
tion. They long as earnestly today for the 'liberalization' of the Soviet Union as
their predecessors once longed for the reform of Tsarist Russia and for the
preservation of Austria—Hungary. Fearful that the new national states might
prove to be just as repressive as the dynastic empires, they have accepted their
formation with reluctance and with no small scepticism. Paradoxically there-
fore, and in clear contradiction of their supposedly liberal principles, they have
never hastened to give active support to the protracted struggles of national
movements against autocracy and tyranny.
In Eastern Europe, where the prevailing political environment has differed
widely from that in the west, attitudes towards Nationalism have been very dif-
ferent. So long as the dynastic empires remained in place, the main struggle for
power lay between the ultra-conservative champions of the ruling establishment
and the motley ranks of revolutionaries who saw no possible hope of progress
until the imperial regimes had been replaced by some new, more equitable form
of state-entity. Reformism of the western kind was the preserve of a small, intel-
lectual, and middle-class minority. In this context, the adherents of the numer-
ous national movements, whose ultimate goal of forming independent national
states was fundamentally incompatible with the integrity of the empires, must
be counted among the revolutionary elements, even though they may often have
recoiled from the use of revolutionary methods. They saw no contradiction
whatsoever between Nationalism and Democracy, preferring to view the one as
the natural guarantor of the other. Inevitably, they always included a hard core
of activists devoted to the classic paradox of fighting democracy by undemoc-
ratic means-. For the activists, recourse to violence had no necessary connection
with their own philosophies or aspirations, but was dictated by the violent
nature of regimes against which they were pitted. In situations where all polit-
ical life had been frozen solid by generations of autocratic controls, the idea of
gradual reform or of 'political evolution', like that of melting butter in a refrig-
erator, has always been unrealistic. What is more, the spectacle of western lib-
erals comfortably reproving the conduct of people whose ideals were repeatedly
tested in the fire, was as ridiculous as it was offensive. It is depressing to realize
that western liberals have had an unfortunate tendency to take the side of the
powers-that-be against the very people in Eastern Europe who most nearly share
their own principles.
In the last analysis, of course, differences of opinion about the ethics of
Nationalism cannot be resolved. Like Democracy or Autocracy, Nationalism
in itself is neither virtuous nor vicious. It can only be judged in relation to the
particular motives of its particular adherents. According to circumstance, it