liberalism signed on to nationalism in the guise of “self-determination of peoples,” which has a vaguely democratic aroma. Unfortunately, the whiff of humanism emanating from that phrase depended on a fatal synecdoche. The term “nation” or “people” came to stand for the individual men, women, and children who made up that nation, and then the political leaders came to stand for the nation. A ruler, a flag, an army, a territory, a language, came to be cognitively equated with millions of flesh-and-blood individuals.
