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Today, Zionism is understood as a national movement whose primary historical goal was the establishment of a Jewish state. However, Zionism's association with national sovereignty was not foreordained. Zionism and the Roads Not Taken uncovers the thought of three key interwar Jewish intellectuals who defined Zionism's central mission as challenging the model of a sovereign nation-state: historian Simon Rawidowicz, religious thinker Mordecai Kaplan, and political theorist Hans Kohn. Although their models differed, each of these three thinkers conceived of a more practical and ethical paradigm of national cohesion that was not tied to a sovereign state. Recovering these roads not taken helps us to reimagine Jewish identity and collectivity, past, present, and future.

Most studies dealing with Kohn (1891-1971), a central Zionist figure in Prague, emphasize his resistance to the idea of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine and his consequent binationalism as indications of an exceptional position with respect to the contemporary Zionist mainstream. This representation is embedded in one of the fundamental conventions of Zionist historiography that the movement was intended exclusively to create a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. This convention, however, is the outcome of the misleading, teleological tendency to observe pre-1948 Zionist history through the retrospective lens of the establishment of the State of Israel. In fact, pre-state sources show that Kohn's binationalism was not exceptional. Kohn, the radical members of \"Brith Shalom,\" and even the Zionist mainstream shared a basic outlook regarding Palestine's future political complexion, which I call autonomist Zionism and which rested on an autonomist interpretation of national self-determination. Statehood in Palestine was envisaged within a confederational political framework embracing both a Jewish and an Arab autonomous entity. A common governing body would deal with civil and territorial matters, but would refrain from intervening in purely national-cultural matters that would be the exclusive perview of the respective autonomous authorities.

In the writing of historian Hans Kohn (1891–1971) East and West were never geographic locations, but rather geographic metaphors. They were ideas, which served as his major tool of analysis throughout his career: in Habsburg Prague as a young spiritual Zionist; in Jerusalem in the 1920s as a 'bi-national Zionist'; as comparative historian of nationalism as of the second world war; and finally as an American Cold Warrior. This article situates the evolution of Kohn's notions of East and West in a primarily Jewish context, and toward a Cold War horizon. It also seeks to illuminate the genealogy of the ideas he propagated as a notable purveyor of Cold War ideology, particularly the need for a 'New West'.

This intellectual biography of Hans Kohn (1891-1971) looks at theories of nationalism in the twentieth century as articulated through the life and work of its leading scholar and activist. Hans Kohn was born in late nineteenth-century Prague, but his peripatetic life took him from the Revolutionary-era Russia to interwar-era Palestine under the British Empire to the United States during the Cold War. Bearing witness to dramatic reconfigurations of national and political identities, he spearheaded an intellectual revolution that fundamentally challenged assumptions about the \"naturalness\" and the immutability of nationalism. Reconstructing Kohn's long and fascinating career, Gordon uncovers the multiple political and intellectual trends that intersected with and shaped his theories of nationalism. Throughout his life, Kohn was not simply a theorist but also a participant in multiple and often conflicting movements: Zionism and anti-Zionism, pacifism, liberalism, and military interventionism. His evolving theories thus drew from and reflected fierce debates about the nature of internationalism, imperialism, liberalism, collective security, and especially the Jewish Question. Kohn's scholarship was not an abstraction but a product of his lived experience as a Habsburg Jew, an erstwhile cultural Zionist, and an American Cold Warrior. As a product of the times, his concepts of nationalism reflected the changing world around him and evolved radically over his lifetime. His intellectual biography thus offers a panorama of the dynamic intellectual cornerstones of the twentieth century.

This article assesses the analytical value of the “Kohn dichotomy” – the notion that there are two types of nationalism, resting on civic values in the West and on ethnic values outside the West. It begins by outlining the intellectual history of this dichotomy since its origin in the 1860s and by analyzing its main features. It contrasts the state traditions of Central and Eastern Europe and Western Europe in three areas: the geopolitical evolution of the state, the state's perspective on its own population as reflected in efforts to measure “ethnic nationality” through such instruments as the population census, and divergences in citizenship law. It shows that data from recent programs of comparative survey research, and analysis of nationalist ideology, highlight the variety of forms that nationalism may take in the two parts of Europe. The article concludes that the “ethnic–civic” dichotomy is valuable as an ideal type with the capacity to shed light on the nature of ethnic affiliation, not as a categorical classification system. Different ethnonational groups comprise mixtures of people who use a combination of “ethnic” and “civic” reference points; they do not coincide with global territorial zones that may be identified with any level of clarity.

This article analyzes the international consensus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that there should be a two state solution and finds it unworkable on several counts. The conflict has no territorial solution: high population density makes partition impossible without leaving unwanted pockets of one people in the territory of the other; it is not possible for any Israeli government to dismantle settlements in the West Bank without causing a civil war; and in such a small and overcrowded territory, it is not feasible to have monocultural nation-states when the population is now evenly divided between the two conflicting national communities that reside in overlapping areas. Demographic forecasts show in the short term, a decrease in the proportion of Israeli Jews and an increase in the proportion of Palestinians. In the face of this stalemate, the article recalls the 90-year-old proposal by enlightened Jewish personalities to create a binational state under the modality of national-cultural autonomy. Furthermore, and paradoxically, in a reversal of the situation 90 years ago, Palestinian Israeli citizens are slowly creating a bottom-up series of autonomous communal organizations that provide self-government without territorial control, a model for nonterritorial autonomy in a manner that reminds of the earlier proposals of the Jewish personalities. The article concludes that this could potentially be a way out of this stalled and protracted conflict. A plurinational state in Israel-Palestine based on the model of National Cultural Autonomy with shared sovereignty and collective rights for all communities.

Comparative research looks for “ethnic nationalism” to classify a party as either “extreme right” or “radical right.” “Ethnic nationalism” has turned into a common theoretical concept by way of various interpretations of Hans Kohn’s work, developing a theoretical ethnic/civic contrast of national ideologies. Th e application of this dichotomy has been criticized for lack of theoretical depth that resulted in inaccurate analysis and, in some cases, harmful normative judgment. Th is article claims that this simple contrast between two types of national ideology omits complex theoretical views of nationalism that are neither civic nor ethnic, which are promoted mainly by the conservative right. By expanding Kohn’s dichotomy into an “axis of ideological nationalism,” it off ers a normative theoretical tool to be used in comparative politics, paving the way for a more comprehensive model of right-wing national ideology.

In addition to Romania's economic backwardness, the experiences of repressive political culture have contributed to restricting society's ability to act by impairing the development of its own identity for centuries. The background to the emergence of totalitarian regimes can be derived from the context of the European modernization processes, which have gripped the whole of Europe through the industrialization and consequently secularization and rationalization process. By reproducing these processes, political situations and the experiences of Romanian society on which they are based, reveals the significance of their political culture. The aim is to put together the political culture of modern Romanian society in order to ultimately understand what the problems are for their current political consciousness.

The author focuses on Hans Kohn (1891-1971) who is generally regarded as the founding father of modern Anglophone academic research on nationalism. He was first to adopt a more neutral stance toward nationalism, one that made sustained attempt at dispassionate analysis of the phenomenon in order to define, classify and explain it. However, not only did he bring in a innovative and novel perspective to the subject by producing broad comparative studies but he was responsible for introducing one of the basic and long-lasting themes to the study of nationalism, namely a strongly moralistic distinction between a good nationalism, which he associated with the West, and a bad nationalism allegedly typical for the non-Western world. The paper discusses three questions: first, how did Kohn conceptualize the differences between the two types of nationalism? Second, how and why did he come to his conclusions and, finally, if it can be argued as many authors claim, that his discrimination between the two types of nationalism are valid and useful?