Hello, welcome to the history hit World Wars Podcast, a podcast dedicated to that turbulent period in history between 1914 and 1945.

In this podcast, we actually step a little bit further back into history to that period just before the First World War.

And this is so we can explore nationalism and a potent ethno-nationalism, something that we hear a lot about today with the rise of the alt right and the new right and a

spread of nationalism across the world. But we're lucky enough to have

the fantastic Pablo Diallana from Kings College London,

an expert in nationalism who actually takes us back on a history of ideas,

back to that period before the First World War and shows us how nationalism can lead to great battles, not only over ideas, but also into war itself. Pablo your research is fascinating. I was looking into some of your articles and seeing how nationalism drives anonymity within society.

And we see this today, of course, we see the alt-right and the new right and a wave of nationalism that spreads around the world.

But what I saw in your work is actually you take this idea back into history to just before the world wars. What is it about this period

that sparks a drive for nationalism and leads us into that period of conflict.

Hi James, thank you so much for inviting me.

Well, I suppose that as a historian of ideas, I'm a theorist that looks to the history of ideas

to understand how they work today and how they have worked in the past,

nationalism is not as old as we might imagine, and nor is it as independent that it is often claimed.

Nationalists like to think of their ideas as a simple

expression of nature. It is a social idea of what nature wants us to do. But that's

not necessarily the case. The history of nationalism begins as a reaction against

the universalism of liberalism in the French Revolution. And so in many ways we are now in the third

or fourth episode of nationalist struggles against the universalist liberal ideas of the French Revolution.

If these universalist ideas want to make mankind sovereign and every human

equal created equal under the eyes of God.

It says in the preamble of the American Constitution and the French Declaration of the

...