because of the rise of the far right to meet the newly resurgent far left, it becomes very urgent indeed that we recall George Orwell’s fundamental distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Nationalism, which he opposed, is ‘inseparable from the will to power’. Its abiding purpose is to secure ever more prestige for the nation: ‘Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.’ Patriotism, by contrast, he defined as ‘devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force upon other people’.11
