This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures.

This lecture in the series Peace in the Family of Man, given by Lester Pearson, was originally broadcast in 1968.

Tonight I would like to talk about nationalism.

Its extension into internationalism and what that could mean for all of us.

Well, what is nationalism? What value does it have?

How are we to move beyond the emotions and the prejudices, the prides and the loyalty that gather around it?

The responses to it which we learn in our cradle, and some of us will never

unlearn until we reach our coffins. One way of modifying national feeling and gaining a

stronger feeling for the whole community of man might be to discover another planet which

was inhabited and where the natives were hostile. A cynic might add that if they

had learned how we conduct our affairs on Earth, they would be bound to be hostile. Well, the

astronaut would come back to Earth from Mars or Venus and complain. I was arrested up there

and badly treated. He would report not as an Englishman or an American or

the Russian, but as an earthman. And then we would all get together and react vigorously.

You can't do that to us. And us would mean the inhabitants of this planet.

Nationalism, of course, can be a fine and noble thing,

the love of a man for his own country and what it means to him.

But political nationalism, the absolute sovereignty of the nation state,

can also be the strongest obstacle in the way of building world order and of the realization of the world community.

The first reaction of millions of people today to any proposal for more effective international

institutions or for international control of anything is that, well, this means that foreigners will be taking

charge of our affairs. To turn from a hypothetical future to an actual past, I hope I won't be

...