Hello, I'm Dominic Green. I'm Life and Arts Editor of Spectator USA, and I like to welcome you to our weekly

Life and Arts podcast, The Green Room. This week, my guest is Yoram Hazani, author of The Virtue of

Nationalism. He's joining me by Skype from Jerusalem, Israel. Yoram Hazani, author of The Virtue of Nationalism, is joining me by Skype from Jerusalem, Israel.

Yoram Hazani, welcome to Spectator USA.

Hello, very glad to be here.

Thank you for having me.

Now, your book, The Virtue of Nationalism, addresses a topic which for a long time has been considered beneath discussion, which is nationalism itself. Why was nationalism

out of fashion for so long? It's a very good, very good question. And as you know, people have

been arguing about it for the last couple of years, if not longer. I think that much of our

political discourse is dominated by, still dominated by the trauma

of the Second World War. A great many different things that are odd about the history of

political ideas in Europe and in America can be traced to this trauma, which we still haven't

overcome. The issue of nationalism,

as you know, nationalism was for decades, you could even say centuries, a term that was used

in a very positive sense by many political and intellectual figures, including very prominent ones.

Usually the word means

someone who seeks independence for his nation from some kind of international empire, but often

it was also used to describe a more general political theory, according to which the world

is governed best if nations are allowed their independence rather than being submitted to one all-embracing kind of universal empire.

And that traditional use of the word continues to exist in many countries and in many intellectual circles, including the ones that I grew up in.

In academia, you can still find

prominent political theorists, both political theorists in favor of nationalism and those against

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