Nationalism?

Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul declared to our new Ankara representative "let's not get swept away by a wave of chauvinism." Good for him, he expressed this very well, paying lip service to a forward looking way of thinking. But I want to go further than that...."let's not get swept away by a wave of nationalism." In fact, forget storms and typhoons, let's not even let a gentle breeze of nationalism carry us away.Let's first go back to the 19th century, when the word made its way into Turkish. The word "nationalism" in Turkish is completely wrong! And this mistake is not coincidental. It would only be correct if we used it the way it is used in French, as a natural derivitive from the word "nation." .....But in our language, the word "nation" or "millet" was originally a collective concept, something used by the Empire to unite our multicultural peoples....Now, without exception, at the very base of "nationalists" is the exclusion of the "others."In this vein, in the West, where the term "nationalism" was invented, is almost never even used, is even counted as a swear word. However let me not be too unfair to our country....in a little time here, "nationalism" has attained a notoriety that it never achieved in the West.  Let me ask you, was it not "nationalism" that supported Hitler's "National Socialist" party, Stalin's "National Communism" theory, and Mussolini, Mao, Pol Pot, Milosovic, and all of the totalitarian rejimes in the 20th century?......Like I said, leave off storms and typhoons, the breeze that contains the "exclusion of others" in it is enough to rock the boat!  Â