Fatherland or Mother Earth?: Essays on the National Question (Iire Notebook for Study and Research, No 27-28)

Do fragmentary writings by Marx and Engels leave clues to a second coherent theory of nationalism? This timely new book argues that in work left uncompleted at the times of their deaths the two authors may have been laying the foundation for a truly international dialectic.The conventional Marxist concept of nationalism is essentially Eurocentric. However, author Löwy argues that the explosion of nationalist movements around the world today cannot be wholly understood without acknowledging Lenin’s notion of ‘oppressed nations’ nor be adequately addressed without Bauer’s toolbox of ‘national/cultural autonomy’. Löwy demonstrates that by doing justice to national realities and identities, and simultaneously linking together new forms of social-movement internationalism - anti-IMF, ecological, feminist - a new internationalism can be created for the twenty-first century. This first English-language edition of Fatherland or Mother Earth? has been fully updated and revised for English readership.