>>2655383Here the very language we use is embedded with liberalism so it gets thorny to talk about things like "nationalism"
National liberation is different from national chauvinism because of the concrete classes and roles of the nations in question in the world order.
Ideas have no existence without the material conditions, "similar sounding ideas" can be functionally very different.
Natlib is progressive for imperialized countries to do, nationalism is reactionary for imperialists to do.
It's not called "the primary contradiction" for nothing, it affects every other contradiction downstream.
But yes, the eventual horizon is true universality. Again I'd look to China for an example, mao united china against imperial japan on the basis of chineseness, even uniting with natbourgs etc. But they do posit themselves as a multinational, secular state, and "chineseness" is not associated with ethno-cultural hangups or one nation within the bloc colonizing the other in the name of "nation" (see india).
My personal unsubstantiated waffling is that this is the direction that the third world will have to start moving towards, because tiny countries with 20m people and no nukes can't survive against empire, they'll have to unite into truly universal multi-national states. The trajectory is towards universalization.
My controversial opinion is that federalization in the USSR was a mistake. It sounds good to give central asians "their own" countries, but by enshrining those nations into actual legal and political structures reproduced nationalism rather than sublating it: russians became the "universal soviet subject", whall small soviet nations became "the particulars".
The consequences of this resonate even after the collapse, where my passport (slave brand) is weaker than a russian's, even though we emerged "from the same country of equals among many".