Basil Davidson

Ever since the Trojan Horse, the telling of lies in wartime has been found honourable, along with the bedevilment of enemies and the invocation of gods, and has been practised more or less cheerfully by persons who would otherwise assert in all conscience that they had never told, or ever would tell, anything but the truth. Courage and hardware may win wars, but cunning deception is just as surely a helpful friend. And this erasure of guilt for indulgence in ‘double standards’ has suited all sides and combatants, is quite in line with the manichaean ferocities of war, especially of big-scale war, and has proved altogether desirable in times of ideological strife. The removal of any obligation to refrain from deceit has generally survived, in the wake of any great war, as a widely-tolerated legacy of sanctioned economy with truth. When this or that authority has ‘lied to the House of Commons’ since 1945, he or she has been drawing on this legacy while standing on the family hearth as a model of veracity.

If the sovereign nation-state is truly nearing the end of its useful life, as political philosophers here in Western Europe now seem ready to persuade us, so that regional unities of one kind of another may replace it to the general good, the tendency looks far more problematical further east. Resounding nationalism, or rather nation-statism, the two being by no means necessarily the same thing, is what presently appears to reign from Lithuania to the Black Sea or further east again, and from Slovenia to Albania by way of a newly abrasive ‘Serbianism’. The Bluntschlis of the 1990s, romantic or otherwise, may even now be sharpening their sabres, or at any rate their wits, at the prospect of another bout of Balkan wars. The traveller on the Stambul train will expect adventures. It may be so.