A lot of people are concerned about the
rise of nationalism, but I think we
should be very careful to separate the
good side from the bad side of
nationalism. Obviously ultra nationalism,
which becomes fascism and which leads to
war and genocide, is one of the worst
phenomena in human history, but
nationalism also has a very bright side.
People imagine that without
nationalism we would all be living in
some kind of liberal paradise, but much
more likely without nationalism we would
be living in tribal chaos, because the
big project of nationalism is to make a
lot of strangers care about one another
and be able to cooperate. I come from a
relatively small nation, Israel. It has
just eight million citizens, but still I
don't know 99.99 percent of the other
Israelis. I don't know them personally, I've
never met most of them, I'm
unlikely to ever meet them, but
nationalism makes it possible for me to
care about these millions of strangers
and to cooperate with them. This has
been one of the greatest advances in
human history.
One of the other problems that
often people cite with nationalism is
that nationalism is a barrier for
cooperation on the international level.
The president of the U.S. just recently
said that there is a contradiction
between nationalism and globalism, and
that people should choose nationalism
and reject globalism. I think this is
a mistake, it's a very simplistic
approach, because there is no
contradiction between nationalism and
globalism. Nationalism isn't about hating
foreigners. Nationalism is about loving
your compatriots. In the 21st century
the only effective way to guarantee the
prosperity and safety of your
compatriots is to cooperate with
foreigners, with other nations. So I think that today
good nationalists should also be
globalists. In the 20th century we had
three big "stories:" fascism, communism,
liberalism. Fascism collapsed, then
communism collapsed and now liberalism is in crisis and there is yet nothing to
replace it. The stories that 
try to fill the vacuum
caused by the crisis of liberalism are
mostly just nostalgic fantasies about
going back to some golden past that
never really existed, and that we can't
go back there anyway. I'm not saying is
that liberalism is completely
collapsing. Liberalism has managed to
overcome several very serious crises
before. It can do so again, but even if it
is collapsing so far we have no better
alternative. There is yet no new story
for the world in the 21st century. In the
1990s and early 2000s people were
convinced that this is the end of
history, and liberalism has won, and from
now onwards we are in a straight line
when liberalism and democracy will just
spread all over the world. Now we
realize this was very naive. Something
unexpected happened: history took a
different turn. And it is very likely to
happen again. If people now
imagine that we'll just see the spread of old-fashioned
authoritarianism, and extreme 
nationalism, and maybe the reemergence of
fascism. Maybe. But just as likely
history will take another unexpected
turn, and nobody really knows how the
world would look like in 20 or 30 years.
I think the main message to people is
that nothing is inevitable in history.
You still have a lot of agency, a lot of
power. If you want to see something
happening in the world you can try and
help make it happen.
