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Love Your Country?

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14/04/2014

BBC Radio 4 - Love Your Country?

Professor David Cannadine investigates the origins of nationalism and the nation state.

Events in Ukraine have focused attention on intense nationalism and national sovereignty, but Prof David Cannadine challenges our ideas about the history and sanctity of nations.

Events in Ukraine and the forthcoming referendum in Scotland have focused attention on deeply felt ideas of nationalism and national sovereignty.

Here, Professor David Cannadine dispatches a few myths about nation states - arguing that they a relatively modern inventions and that, in part, the loyalty we owe them was a carefully constructed political strategy.

He looks at the ways in which nationalism reached a peak at the time of WW1 and how the artificially created states that emerged after the War were inevitably flawed .

He also asks questions about whether, in a globalised world, we couldn't do better in terms of governance - either by looking to collections of cities or to groupings of nations to solve the problems of the 21st century.


Producer: Susan Marling
A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 4.

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