Politics & Power Quote by Emily Greene Balch

Nationalism, in Balch's framing, isn't a proud banner so much as a contagion with a widening radius. The word "prevalence" is doing quiet but pointed work: it treats nationalism not as a noble awakening but as an ambient condition of the age, something you catch by living in modernity. Coming from an educator and peace advocate writing in the shadow of world wars, her intent is diagnostic and preventative at once. She's naming a force that converts political identity into moral certainty and makes conflict feel like common sense.

The line also reveals how nationalism travels: not merely among established powers, but "still spreading" into "new communities" and "peripheral regions". Balch is watching the nation-state model export itself, often through empire, collapsing older loyalties, borderlands, and multiethnic arrangements into a single, armed story about "us". The subtext is that nationalism is not organic everywhere it appears; it can be imposed, incentivized, or learned, a syllabus taught by bureaucracies, schools, and militaries.

Her most combustible phrase is "so-called backward peoples". It signals awareness of the period's colonial vocabulary while refusing to fully endorse it. The scare-quote "so-called" is a moral flinch: she knows the label is a power move, a way for "advanced" nations to patronize others even as they recruit them into the same nationalist competition. Balch is warning that the modern world's default setting is not peaceful progress but escalating identity politics, spreading outward until even those once treated as outside history are drafted into it.