With the explosion of nationalist discontent in the USSR, the revival of fierce hostilities between ethnic groups in Central Europe and the persistence of older nationalist conflicts in Western Europe, nationalism is again firmly on the agenda of world politics. the phenomenon on a world scale. Serbia and Albania, Hungary and Romania, Germany, Poland and the Baltic States are a few of the examples brought into play in a development of Nairn's argument that nationalism is not some pathological aberration but the normal form of development for all societies and an inescapable part of modernity.