As noted earlier, Marx and Engels believed that capitalism created
the preconditions for extending human loyalty from the nation to the
species – and Lenin and Bukharin thought the destruction of national
community and the return to cosmopolitanism would resume after a
brief detour down the disastrous path of militarism and war. Their idea
that the superabundance of finance capital was the reason for the First
World War was mistaken, but that does not mean their analysis lacks all
merit. Like Marx and Engels before them they were dealing with a fundamentally
important theme which has received too little attention in mainstream International Relations. This is how political communities
are shaped by the struggle between nationalism and internationalism in
a world political system; it is what unusually high levels of globalization
and fragmentation mean for the future of political community and
for the level of human solidarity; and it is how national and global
economic and political structures affect the lives of the marginal and
most vulnerable groups in society.