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Paramount Loyalty. As the Afro-Asian nations make their way along the slippery path of nationalism, they may well discover that it eventually leads them to federations, or to such combinations as today's European Common Market. Historian Arnold Toynbee argues: "Nationalism certainly doesn't fit into a world riven into ever larger groups. We can no longer afford to have many tiny states which may go to war with each other.
Nationalism is an anachronism—our paramount loyalty is to the human race." But Toynbee overlooks the basic human impulse which, so far at least, seems to find greatest satisfaction in a nation of common instinct and common creed.
Any form of world government seems an unlikely and perhaps even an undesirable possibility. The present answer may lie in loose regional groupings, which have a skeletal form in the unstable Arab League, the British Commonwealth, the French community of African nations.
Freely entered into by nations that still retain their own sovereignty, the regional leagues may finally fit the description of the great French historian, Ernest Renan, who maintained that a viable nation is a daily plebiscite of its people.