Friedrich August von Hayek, Review of Carr, Nationalism and After

Hayek’s periodical book review, originally published as “The End of Nationalism?” in The Spectator on March 16, 1945, appears here in a 1997 reprint with editorial notes. It assesses Edward Hallett Carr’s changing account of nationalism and the prospects for international order. Hayek’s judgment is cautiously appreciative but ultimately skeptical: Carr has begun to recognize the dangers of centralized planning and national collectivism, yet his proposed alternatives remain indistinct, and his expectation that nationalism will diminish lacks sufficient support. The review moves from evidence of Carr’s intellectual transition, through criticism of his historical and economic understanding, to an assessment of his proposals for cooperation beyond the nation-state.

The opening credits Carr with recognizing dangers that his earlier writings had neglected. Hayek singles out Carr’s acknowledgment that planned economy has both socialist and nationalist faces, and that concentrating all authority in a single national organ produces intolerable totalitarianism. These concessions matter because they weaken any simple opposition between progressive economic planning and reactionary nationalism. National organization can supply the institutional form through which socialist ambitions become coercive. Hayek attributes Carr’s movement partly to Franz Borkenau’s work and, more tentatively, to a delayed influence of Lord Acton. He also detects a retreat from Karl Mannheim’s conception of collective freedom: Carr now questions whether freedom can meaningfully be attributed to nations without turning the nation itself into an object of worship. The issue is thus not merely whether national power survives, but whether its exercise can plausibly be called freedom.

Hayek’s recognition of this progress does not extend to Carr’s understanding of the liberal economic order:

The rapid sketch of the three main phases in the past development of nationalism, with which the book opens, is well drawn, but so compressed that Professor Carr hardly does himself justice.

This qualified praise introduces a sharper objection. Carr appears more comfortable with the periods before and after the liberal age than with that age itself. His treatment of the Bank of England as the effective seat of government under laissez-faire suggests, for Hayek, an inability to understand coordination without centralized direction. Hayek makes the point through an anecdote about Germans who supposedly attributed the efficiency of Belgium’s black market to a hidden organizing intelligence. The comparison exposes the conceptual error: effective economic cooperation need not demonstrate the presence of a directing authority. Carr’s historical interpretation therefore bears directly on his capacity to imagine an international order that does not simply reproduce centralized organization on a larger scale.

Carr nevertheless anticipates a possible fourth phase of nationalism, in which the need for larger economic units reduces the importance of national divisions. Hayek sees continuity with Carr’s earlier attraction to an organized Grossraumwirtschaft, but also acknowledges that Carr has become more conscious of the scheme’s objections and difficulties:

Professor Carr has come to see many of the objections to, and difficulties of, such a scheme.

The decisive revision concerns Carr’s abandonment of the hope for a community of nations. In its place, he proposes regional agreements and an overlapping network of organizations exercising limited authority over individuals and functional groups across national boundaries. Hayek’s account makes clear why this change matters: integration would no longer depend solely on relations between national communities treated as unified actors. Specific functions and restricted jurisdictions might instead interweave their affairs. Yet the review does not establish that these arrangements resolve the political and economic difficulties of integration. It registers a promising modification of Carr’s position while withholding confidence in the resulting institutional picture.

That distinction between movement in a better direction and an adequate positive argument governs the final assessment:

The picture which emerges is a little blurred and indistinct.

Carr’s retreat from the sweeping generalizations of his earlier books reduces their capacity either to inspire or to irritate, but leaves his conception vague and many difficulties unresolved. Hayek allows that the book’s small scale may explain some of this incompleteness; urgency, however, does not justify treating so large a subject too briefly. He accepts narrower predictions—that smaller states may have less scope for nationalism and that the aggressive nationalism of younger nations may temporarily disappear—without accepting the stronger expectation of nationalism’s gradual disappearance. A reduction in one manifestation does not demonstrate the exhaustion of the phenomenon.

Hayek’s concluding warning relocates the danger from overt expansionism to resistance within established European states:

It may well be that for some time to come it will be the old national states of Western Europe where nationalism, not of an aggressive, but of an obstructionist kind, and closely allied to socialism, will form the main obstacle to a sensible solution of the great problems of international order.

The review’s enduring conceptual distinction is between aggressive and obstructionist nationalism. Nationalism can frustrate international cooperation without pursuing conquest, especially when allied to socialist economic organization. Hayek consequently asks readers to judge postwar arrangements not simply by their scale or their promise of integration, but by how authority is organized and limited. The reprint’s editorial apparatus also supplies a useful qualification: it reports that one phrase Hayek invokes concerning Carr’s earlier approval of Hitler’s form of integration does not appear in Nationalism and After. That attribution should therefore be distinguished from the review’s directly supported account of Carr’s revised proposals.