>> the predominant, most prosperous, safest, most free societies have been the internationalist ones... I'm not sure there are rules to this. A lot of the narr

>> the predominant, most prosperous, safest, most free societies have been the internationalist ones... I'm not sure there are rules to this. A lot of the narrative depends on how we define terms, and the story can be told in radically different ways. For example, European and ME multiculturalism existed. The empires were multicultural, in various ways. Ottoman, austrohungrarian... Under these regimes, multiple national/religious/language groups coexisted in most major cities. Warsaw was barely 50% Polish at times. Istanbul 50% Turkish. Budapest, Etc. In this telling, nationalism, liberalism, democracy & republicanism are the same movement. They're the anti-empire, anti-monarchy radicalism that ended multiculturalism. Nations were became self governing. This was followed by population exchange, ethnic cleansing and worse. WW2 shifted borders and populations until we were left with culturally homogeneous "nations." Jews during & after the holocaust, Germans of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other post war population shifts & cleansing. The Greek/Turkish populations "exchanges." Cyprus dividing, more recently. Yugoslavia violently breaking into nation states. Multicultural societies that existed, often for centuries, under imperialism. Under nationalism, democratic or otherwise, that multiculturalism came under attack. Much of the middle east current troubles, can also be seen as nationalism playing out after centuries of Ottomanisms. The multiculturalism of Bagdad, for example, is much diminished after every round of violence and war. Familiar story. Baghdad has been shedding diversity for a long time, as have many other post-empire cities. >>Many, including Churchill, blamed nationalism for WWII (which is why the survivors built the UN and the predecessor of the EU) You could also argue that the UN is a very strong pro- nation state force. The UN assumes that nations exist, everyone belongs to a nation state, that national sovereignty is supreme and that there are no other ways to be. You have to fit this framework to even exist, from the UN's perspective. In any case... in my (this time) telling the multicultural, international order was empires. The force that brought this order down was "liberalism," which also, generally was closely linked to democratic mandates, republic-seeking, national liberation. National liberty came at the expense of non-national liberty. I'm not making a case for empires. I'm just making a case for complexity of perspective. There is no "X leads to Y" in history.