The limits of tolerance: Nation-state building and what it means for minority groups

When we think of the most egregious forms of intolerance directed against m inority communities we tend to associate them with particularly despicable regimes, such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, where racism, ideology or s ome special route to development is often held to blame, or where ultra-nat ionalism swamps positive tendencies towards democracy and a civil society. In this essay Levene proposes a partial corrective to this view with refere nce to the supposedly 'good' nation-state derived from the western liberal model. He considers the behaviour of two such states at their inception, Po land and Israel, with regard to two minorities, Jews and Arabs, with the Je ws providing linkage between the two state trajectories. Levene charts thei r respective rejections of bi-national or multinational development, and su ggests that the fact that both states today maintain a modicum of tolerance towards their residual Jewish and Arab minorities is more the result of (p aradoxical) good luck than of conscious, benevolent design. In conclusion L evene proposes that the very nature of the modern nation-state militates ag ainst genuine pluralistic tolerance, a goal that requires a massive structu ral re-ordering of contemporary society away from global economies to a sus tainability of human scale.