Hans Kohn on the Struggle Between Liberalism and Tribal Nationalism
August 26, 2026
The times we live in inescapably influence our lives. There is an intellectual, social, and cultural milieu into which we are born, which, obviously, includes our parents, siblings, relatives, friends, neighbors, and the country into which the accident of our birth have placed us.
These influences are seen in the histories of some of the famous scholars, authors, artists, and intellectuals who grew up and lived portions of their lives in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire during the reign of Emperor Franz Joseph, who assumed the Habsburg throne in 1848 when he was eighteen years old and ruled for 68 years until his death in 1916 in the midst of the First World War.
Many of those who lived through those years recalled it with great nostalgia. Just one example out of many was Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), an internationally renowned novelist and essayist. He fled with his wife from his native Austria in 1934 with the Nazi rise to power in neighboring Germany; they finally immigrated to Brazil in 1940, where in despair about their ruined life and an uncertain future, they committed suicide together.This meant, Kohn said, that in America what defined an American was not language, religion, ethnicity, or family background but rather anyone who joined this unique land of liberty as an equal member of the society.
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But before his death, Zweig had written a book of reminiscences of his life in that milieu of pre–World War I Austria-Hungary, The World of Yesterday (1942). He looked back and explained its charm and easy-going cosmopolitanism:
One lived well and easily and without cares in that old Vienna…. “Live and let live” was the famous Viennese motto, which today still seems to me more humane than all the categorical imperatives, and it maintained itself throughout all classes. Rich and poor, Czechs and Germans, Jews and Christians, lived peacefully together in spite of occasional chafing, and even the political and social movements were free of the terrible hatred which has penetrated the arteries of our time as a poisonous residue of the First World War. In the old Austria they still strove chivalrously, they abused each other in the news and the parliament, but at the conclusion of their ciceronian tirades, the selfsame representatives sat down together in friendship with a glass of beer or a cup of coffee….
The hatred of country for country, for nation for nation, of one table for another, did not yet jump at one daily from the newspaper, it did not divide people and nations from nations; not yet had every herd and mass feeling become so disgustingly powerful in public life as today. Freedom in one’s personal affairs, which is no longer considered comprehensible, was taken for granted. One did not look down upon tolerance as one does today as weakness and softness, but rather praised it as an ethical force…. For the genius of Vienna — a specifically musical one — was always that it harmonized all the national and linguistic contrasts. Its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures. Whoever lived there and worked there felt himself free of confinement and prejudice.
Wistful memory of a time before World War I
Of course, it was a colored dream of a past never so magical and beautiful and humane as Zweig’s memory made it seem in comparison to a far less attractive and far more cruel world in which he was then living after World War I. Certainly, in contrast to the dark reality of the Nazi-dominated Europe from which Zweig had fled, that era before the First World War, an epoch still in the afterglow of the classical liberal ideas and partial practices of the world before 1914, indeed seemed like a dreamland of wide personal freedom, economic liberty, international peace occasionally upset by limited regional wars, and ever-growing prosperity for expanding portions of the European and indeed global population.
Many of the Austrian economists who were old enough to have living memories of that world before 1914 often expressed similar sentiments, including Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, and Friedrich A. Hayek. The fairly liberal world of Austria-Hungary in which they had lived during early parts of their lives made them realize that a society of individual freedom, civil liberties, rule of law, and a wide arena of free enterprise was not some impossible utopia, but in an imperfect world, with imperfect people, it had existed and was practiced to an amazing extent.
Another subject of the Hapsburg monarchy during that pre–World War I time had been Hans Kohn (1891–1971), who was a German-Jew born and raised in Prague (now the capital of the Czech Republic). In later years, especially after coming to the United States in 1934, Kohn became an internationally recognized expert on the meaning, history, and consequences of nationalism in its various forms. Indeed, he is often credited with being one of those making “nationalism” a field of scholarly study in the 20th century. In his memories, Living in a World Revolution: My Encounters with History (1964), Kohn recounted the same type of nostalgia:
The Hapsburg monarchy had acted as a restraining influence over a large area of mixed populations located in the crossroads of Europe…. It was the meeting place of all European civilizations, to which the proximity of the Near East offered an exotic note. The great variety of ethnic origins, languages, and historical memories in its population made the Austrian Empire the foremost multinational state in nineteenth century Europe….
Even today, many remember this period [in Austria-Hungary] as the beautiful sunset of an ordered and cultured society and way of life. And indeed, life was then easy and pleasant…. The pace of technological progress, assuring ever greater comforts, was still relatively slow; the belief in man’s perfectibility and in continuous progress were articles of faith not yet beset by doubts; the life of the average citizen was fairly leisurely and relaxed; governmental interference was limited; freedom, though largely for a privileged minority, seemed assured; and at the time its compass was widening; international intercourse was easy.
Kohn’s search for a collective meaning in Zionism
While life was easy and fairly free for a middle-class boy and young man like Hans Kohn, like many other young people in his generation, there was a disappointment and frustration with “bourgeois” life and society. Living in a community of German Jews who followed a path of cultural and social assimilation, Kohn came to feel cut off from his Jewish roots, heritage, and sense of meaning. So when he was seventeen years old, Kohn became a Zionist in search for a belonging and purpose he felt missing from his life.
But in the group of Zionists of which he became a part and contributor through his writings, Kohn was looking for a moral and spiritual revival of his Jewishness. A return to Jerusalem, while having its literal meaning as the historical homeland of the Jewish people, was only a part. Any physical return to Palestine would be meaningless if it did not represent a wider and deeper restoration of a moral calling of a life of justice and truth represented in the word of God and what was expected of someone traveling along a path meant to be the journey toward ethical perfection in thought and deed.
He, therefore, was doubtful and increasingly suspicious of those Zionists who conflated their Judaism solely or primarily with the establishment of a restored Jewish nation-state in Palestine. If all that Zionism only or even primarily meant was the creation of Jewish nation-state, then it would be substituting a political form for a more meaningful spiritual substance. For Kohn, Judaism was a universal message of justice and right that God called the Jews to follow, and through them, it was to be a message for all peoples, everywhere, a unifying of mankind called to a universal ethical perfection.
Equal to or even more of a dilemma for Zionist nationalism was the issue of the Arab population in Palestine. Palestine was not an unoccupied land. Jews may have lived there two thousand years ago before the diaspora, but for hundreds of years Arabs had made that land their home for generations, with towns, farms and grazing lands, and their own history, culture, and communities. If the establishment of Jewish settlements and cities there did not take all this into consideration, then a clash of Zionist and Arab nationalisms was inevitable and inescapable.
Disillusion with the dangers of Zionist nationalism
What was needed was a binational political system, that is, one that combined and respected all the residents of Palestine, Jews and Arabs. Kohn moved to Jerusalem in 1925 and remained there until 1933 hoping to cultivate such a political entity. He argued that what was needed was, “a state inhabited jointly by the two peoples living in the country under complete equality of rights, as the two elements that jointly and equally determine the destiny of the country without regard for … which of the two is, at any particular time, numerically superior.”
But by the late 1920s, Kohn was rapidly losing hope for such a solution, as those members of the Zionist movement dedicated to a singularly and solely Jewish state, with little or no regard for the Arab population, had gained the upper hand. In 1929, Kohn explained that his vision of a Jewish homeland in Palestine was one in which “we could realize our most fundamental humane conviction: our pacifism, liberalism, and humanism…. The reality of the Zionist movement and of Jewish settlement in Palestine is far from this.” The time was approaching when the achievement of the Jewish nation-state would end up relying “on the help of our own bayonets … by that time we will not be able to do without the bayonets. The means will have determined the goal. Jewish Palestine will no longer have anything of that Zion for which I once put myself on the line.”
In early 1933, he concluded that, “[In] Palestine there is no hope. The [Zionist] ideology there is of conquest and ‘civilizing mission,’ and [hence] the battleground there will only grow fiercer.” The nationalist dogma, of course, was even worse in central Europe with the newly established National Socialist (Nazi) regime in Germany. In April of 1933, Kohn observed the emerging horrors in Germany and unhesitatingly noted the parallels between Nazi ideology and the more dogmatically nationalist elements in the Zionist movement in Palestine:
News from [Nazi] Germany. Really bad. Above all, barbarism of moral degradation. Real sadism … in the concentration camps. Nationalism advances triumphantly on all fronts. Yet the Zionists don’t even note the parallels (boycott of Arabs in Palestine for “national” reasons, emphasis on “blood and soil” as decisive factors) … without seeing that for Jews the salvation is only in [liberal] internationalism.
During a lecture tour at several universities in the United States in 1933, Hans Kohn was offered a position at Smith College in Massachusetts. He immediately accepted this opportunity to escape both from the emerging totalitarian madness in Europe centered in Nazi Germany and from his lost hope for a Palestine that could have been a cultural and spiritual home for Jews in an ecumenical setting for all living there, but which was becoming, in his view, a closed ideological Zionist nationalism willing to ignore and trample on the rights of other groups to assure ascendency and domination for one “chosen” group.
Kohn never abandoned his critical view of the ethnic nationalist basis upon which the case for the State of Israel was made. In 1945, for instance, even in the wake of the newly discovered horrors of the Jewish Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis, he said at a conference of Jewish critics of Zionist nationalism that:
The Jewish nationalist philosophy … has developed entirely under … the influence of German romantic nationalism with its emphasis on “blood,” race, descent as the most determining factor in human life, its historicizing attempt to connect with a legendary past 2,000 year ago…. Its emphasis on folk [Volk] as a mystical body, the source of civilization. In that this romantic nationalism is dramatically opposed to the liberal concepts of the West, especially the U.S.A, according to which men of all kinds of descent, “blood,” past belong to the nation to which they wish to owe their loyalty and the civilization in the midst of which they grew up.
To many modern readers, this may seem disconcerting, even deeply disturbing, that a scholar who was himself Jewish, who had long viewed himself as a Zionist, and who knew full well the Nazi reality in the 1930s and then in the aftermath of the Second World War the horror of the Nazi extermination of so many millions of European Jews, should challenge the rationale for and the attempt to establish a separate Jewish state that became Israel in May of 1948.
Kohn’s analysis and critique of nationalism
This can best be understood in the context of Hans Kohn’s concept of two different types of nationalism that he developed in a series of books written in the 1930s and 1940s, Force or Reason (1937), Revolutions and Dictatorships (1939), Not by Arms Alone (1940), and World Order in Historical Perspective (1942), which culminated in his major work, The Idea of Nationalism (1944), along with his many other writings after the Second World War.
The post–World War I period, Kohn argued, was dominated by several ideological elements, among which were what he called the Cult of Force and the Dethronement of Reason. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in his view, were a product of a series of ideas going back to the ancient Western world:
This [Western] civilization believed in Man and Reason…. Reason was common to all normal men; it was therefore possible to arrival at rational explanations and by discussion at a reasonable settlement of disputes. In a world ordered by reason the application of force still remained necessary, but it was to be used only as far as it was strictly unavoidable…. Force had to be strictly controlled both in the frequency and in the manner of its application, which was hedged around with all possible precautions. The development of the state in the nineteenth century, the state based on the Rule of Law, tended to confine force and violence to exceptional cases, both within the state and in the relation between states…. As far as men and governments used force, they did it with a bad conscience.
The Enlightenment era of the 18th century had replaced mythical beliefs about divine rights of kings and other political superstitions. In their place were the use of reason to understand reality and the rights of the individual against the state:
Reason, the natural light in man, made superfluous all supernational and super-human light. Natural law, law founded on human reason, which is the same for all men, and not law founded on divine authority, guided men’s steps from philosophical rationalism to political and social rationalism which found its expression in the American and French revolutions … starting from the self-evident truth that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable rights and derive their powers from the consent of the governed.
The application of rationalism to political and social life created the most far-reaching revolution in history…. The occult and dark powers, superstitions and prejudices seemed routed by reason … the power of the demons and witch doctors broken…. The faith in man and reason gave Europe [and America] two centuries of unprecedented greatness. Out of the right and duty of man to think for himself grew a new toleration, a feeling for the rights and opinions of one’s fellow man, for his freedom of thought.
Liberal individualism as the basis of American nationalism
These ideas were especially pronounced, first in Great Britain and then in America. A central idea was that rights resided in individuals: They were not privileges bestowed on some by those in government. In addition, these rights are universal. While in Great Britain it had become common over the centuries to speak of the “Rights of an Englishman,” in America it was believed that these were rights belonging to all human beings, regardless of who they are and where they may live.
This meant, Kohn said, that in America what defined an American was not language, religion, ethnicity, or family background but rather anyone who joined this unique land of liberty as an equal member of the society. Kohn quoted Benjamin Franklin, who said that in America, “people do not inquire concerning a stranger, What is he? But What can he do?” He quoted another early American: “What then is the American, this new man?… He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices, and manners, receives new ones [of individual liberty]…. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”
Kohn articulated this American conception as a “liberal nationalism,” in that the distinguishing characteristic of being an American had nothing to do with “blood,” land, lineage, language or religion. The idea and ideal of an American liberal nationalism was that of a nation of free individuals bound together not by force, superstitions, or hierarchies of privilege and rank. Kohn quoted another early America, Joel Barlow, who in 1792 said that in the new United States, “the science of liberty is universally understood, felt and practiced, as much by the simple as the wise, the weak, and the strong. Their deep-seated and inveterate habit of thinking is, that all men are equal in their rights, that it is impossible to make them otherwise; and this being their undisputed belief, they have no conception how any man in his senses can entertain any other.”
Or as Kohn expressed it, “Though the Americans had come from Europe, they seemed to be changed men, as if the air of America was filled with liberty and able to transform men’s minds and hearts.”
Kohn was not unaware of prejudice, discrimination, and the contradiction and hypocrisy of slavery in the American South or antagonism against waves of immigrants, especially in the later decades of the 19th century. He wrote the essay on “Race Conflict” for the 1934 edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, in which he analyzed the origins and negative societal consequences arising from race hatred, including in the United States. And in his book on American Nationalism (1957), he highlighted the slow acceptance and only gradual but inescapable improvement in the equality of rights and opportunities for black Americans.
Nonetheless, the benchmark and standard upon which the country had been founded and put into practice, far more than in virtually any other part of the world, was the idea that an American’s sense of nationality was based on a society of liberty with equal individual rights for all, but favors and privileges for none. And as an ideal, it always forced anyone who gave lip service to it to confront every instance when it was not practiced, because the national characteristic of America was a declared individualism, not tribal collectivism, regardless of its name or form.
Europe’s antiliberal tribal nationalism
In Europe, on the other hand, the appeal and pull of liberalism and liberty had never been as strong. While the liberal philosophy of individual freedom, civil liberties, freedom of enterprise, rule of law, and constitutionally limited government had its European counterparts, especially in Great Britain and partially in other western European countries, these liberal ideas never successfully penetrated and influenced people’s thinking to the same extent in central Europe, and far less, Kohn argued, in eastern Europe. The further east one went in Europe, the fainter the echo of liberty was heard.
In the middle decades of the 19th century, two new ideals rose up to capture the imagination of European intellectuals and members of the population, nationalism and socialism. The concepts of freedom and “liberation” were not as securely connected to the idea of individual liberty and liberation from governmental restraints. Instead freedom meant national independence and liberation referred to independence from the control of another nation-state. Domestic “freedom” meant paternalistic care by the government.
A particular breeding ground for antiliberal ideas beginning in the middle decades of the 19th century was Germany. Here, freedom increasingly came to be identified not with the liberty of the individual but with that idea of national independence. It took on the tone and character of a strange romanticism in which emotion was placed above reason, and shared identity was linked to “blood and soil.” “Germanness” was based on racial lineage linked to those whose ancestors were rooted to a particular geographical area that seemed to have mystical powers, creating collective senses of shared belonging. As a distinct people, a unique and historically “special” people, Germans were called to a destiny and a mission to supersede decadent liberal individualism with a higher collective calling and purpose, which only the “German spirit” possessed.
This form of nationalism spread especially through central and eastern Europe, with each ethnic and linguistic national group claiming, in its own ways, its own special characteristics different from other peoples and for which it needed to preserve its distinct homogeneous qualities. Each people had to have their own nation-state, their own mission and purpose, and their own cleansing of any linguistic, ethnic, or cultural groups different from their own within the territory of their historical homeland. In addition, any lands once populated or controlled by that particular group in the past, needed to be reunified with it. Since these geographical areas invariably overlapped in central and eastern Europe, conflicts between nation-states were inevitable.
Hans Kohn said this type of nationalism, and its often accompanying forms of domestic socialism in the service of national collective purposes, had dominated post–World War I Europe. It was nationalism of this sort that had undermined the multinational Hapsburg Empire, with its attempt to have many different peoples living under one political regime of fairly equal rights and liberties for all. It was why people like Hans Kohn had a nostalgia for Austria-Hungary: It seemed to project, however imperfectly, the ideals of a political community of many different groups able to live and work together on the basis of individual rights rather than tribal national identity.
In his book The Hapsburg Empire, 1804–1918 (1961), Kohn quoted a 19th-century Austrian liberal, Franz Schuselka (1811–1886), who said, “In Austria no people should rule over another and least of all over all other peoples. All peoples must enjoy equal rights, which will result in the voluntary fulfillment of common duties. Austria must be conceived as a multinational state, it must be so constituted that it does not absorb any nationality but preserves all.”
That is, this was a call for an imperfect European version of America, with many different peoples allowed to live their own ways but unified by the principle of individual rights, rule of law, and private property. It failed because almost no one in Austria-Hungary wanted it. The pervasive ideal was national identity, separate nation-states, and political power to preserve and increase each nation-state’s reach and “greatness” at the expense of all other groups.
Nazi nationalism and the anticommunist Cold War
Out of the First World War had come all the collectivism of the 20th century: communism, fascism, Nazism. In all of these, the individual was reduced to nothing other than an object to serve the collective purpose as defined by those in political power and control. In Kohn’s view, Nazi Germany epitomized the abandonment of liberalism in all its facets, replaced with all the worst elements of 19th-century nationalism, especially Germany’s version of it before the First World War.
Who and what an individual could be was determined and dictated by his genes. This is what identified you, classified you, in terms of being a member of the “master race” or inferior racial “vermin.” This included the insistence that all from that ancestral blood owed loyalty, obedience, and sacrifice for the higher good of the racial tribe. There were no laws, no sense of justice, right, or reason above the collective’s purpose and message as determined by the “leader,” who carried in him and expressed the nature and calling of the master national race.
“Reason is ridiculed in present-day [Nazi] Germany,” Kohn said during the Second World War: “Might creates right. The objectivity of law is declared to be a liberal prejudice. Right is what helps in the struggle for power.” With a return to “instincts, traditions and heredity,” Kohn wrote, “the world sank back into its earlier, most primitive past, with all the best of what Western civilization had produced being threatened anew.”
Out of the Second World War came the spread of variations of this same type of nationalism in the new nation-states in Asia and Africa that emerged out of the European empires that had dominated so much of the world. In addition, there was the Cold War after 1945 between the United States and the Soviet Union. For the first 20 years after the Second World War, Kohn was very much a Cold Warrior, believing that America needed to take the leading role in holding off the threat of global communism emanating from the Soviet Russia.
However, the war in Vietnam changed his thinking. Lyndon Johnson had used false and fraudulent means to justify American intervention into what was more of a nationalist struggle between two competing Vietnamese nation-states, one of which was communist and the other a corrupt regime propped up by the United States. In his last years before passing away in 1971, Hans Kohn’s support for America’s foreign interventionist policy withered away. The United States was far more an unjustifiable imperialist power and far less that beacon of liberty he had so much believed in and explained in his earlier writings on liberalism and nationalism.
America needed to restore that idea of “liberal nationalism,” as Kohn called it, in which people have a common political sense of belonging centered on a philosophy of individualism, personal liberty, freedom of enterprise and association, with government the guardian of freedom rather than its violator. Otherwise, the world suffers from ideologies of collectivism with individuals reduced to cogs in the wheels of national governments with their duty being to serve the ends of the nation-state to which they belong.
That message is the same now as when Hans Kohn wrote about it in the middle decades of the 20th century.