&#62; The Greeks had a nationalistic loyalty to their particular city-state. This ended when the Persians showed up, who were orders of magnitude less appealing to the Greeks, and that did away with a lot of inter-Greek warfare and nationalism.<p>By replacing it with pan-Greek nationalism? The Greeks shared a lot of attributes (language, ideology, etc…). What you are railing against is “Geographic nationalism”. There is more to nationalism than that.<p>&#62; I believe the same can be said of races and religions these days. Conflict between races is like conflict between the various Greek city-states: A damn waste.<p>The word “race” is a loaded word.<p>IMHO nationalism is not a waste. Each and every group should have the right to their own culture, religion, language and self-determination. As the UN Charter states:<p>&#62; To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures to strengthen universal peace<p>&#62; All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development<p>&#62; We've got bigger problems to solve, and can probably work on a better level than that.<p>To what end? Are problems really so big that the religious and cultural identities should be destroyed? Are our “problems” really bigger than a hundred years ago (when almost everyone died of Polio)?<p>I think that the common trend in many places is to replace culture with some Americanised version of culture and replace all native languages with English. I think this is a huge step backwards.