The Scale of the Nation in a Shrinking World

Joan Ramon Resina

diacritics, Volume 33, Number 3/4, Fall-Winter 2003, pp. 46-74 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/dia.2006.0013

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/summary/v033/33.3resina.html

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THE SCALE OF THE NATION IN A SHRINKING WORLD

JOAN RAMON RESINA
The 1990s saw the rise of political issues that, although by no means new, generated a great deal of discourse based on a semantic rupture with the past. The need to inscribe political analysis with a feeling of historical acceleration was nowhere as patent as in George W. Bushs New World Order. Although the New World Order quickly gave way to the euphemism globalization, it soon became obvious that political agendas would change considerably as would the terms of engagement with realities that had once seemed straightforward and now appeared riddled with theoretical problems. Nationalism was salient among those realities. Although it had driven decolonization in the fties and sixties and throughout the Vietnam era, it seemed to are up roughly at the time when Bush pronounced the bipolar order dead. As the political map was being redrawn after the breakdown of the Soviet empire, other foci of political struggle caught the worlds attention. National struggles in other regions were interpreted as collateral of that breakdown rather than long-standing symptoms of similar tensions at different scales. Once more, the European continent was caught in the incongruity of its historical processes. While Western Europe was cautiously advancing toward economic and political integration, Eastern Europe found itself returning from a posthistorical experiment in supranationalism to the historical horizon of polities being recongured according to such social tangibles as a common language and religion, a traditional relation to place, and shared identifying memories. Until the 1990s the West smugly believed that it had consolidated state borders around seemingly homogeneous societies. Cultural integration was aky in spots (Northern Ireland, the Basque Country, Corsica); those resistances, however, were looked on mostly as archaic irrelevances bound to disappear. But as nationalism began to haunt the cozy dream of a posthistorical balance of power, nonchalance gave way to a glut of intellectual exorcisms meant to conjure the evil that had caught at Europes edges. In this new context, the Balkans represented for Europe, in ieks words, the peculiar status of a ghost that haunts it. If the Balkans are always somewhere else, a little bit more toward the southeast [3], in the 1990s the danger of Balkanization seemed ubiquitous. At the time, a true Balkan hysteria rang out in the most self-satised European nations. In France and Spain, long-standing conicts between center and periphery were recast in terms of the horror seen on CNN. Europe spatialized its fears, turning geographic distance into a metaphor for the racism directed against its internal others. Europes internal others did not consist only of immigrants from non-EU countries, for whom liberals always had a soft spot, but also of those peoples and territorial units capable and culpable of tearing admirable nations apart. It was in those territorial units, which had been incorporated but not assimilated in the course of nation-state building, that nationalism was raising its ugly head. It was here that reexive Politically Correct racism (iek) applied the Balkans metaphor, projecting every conceivable horror into the intentions of unsuspecting citizens. As iek observed at the time, [t]he

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Balkans constitute a place of exception with regard to which the tolerant multiculturalist is allowed to act out his/her repressed racism [6]. This perverse acting out was all the more acceptable, inasmuch as the peoples subjected to the logic of displaced racism were after all white and developed, and thus free game for the tolerant multiculturalist, who could always bring forward less-developed regions as potential victims of the centrifugal regions egotism. When the Balkans war broke out in May of 1991, the rst Western European reactions were predominantly pro-Serbian. Never mind that Slovenia and Croatia were pro-Western and democratic. Western intelligentsias accused them of pettiness and lack of solidarity and began to restrain their large-state bias only when Serbian annexationists directed their all-out war against Bosnian Muslims, who, although white and no less developed than their attackers, were, by virtue of their religion, a patent instance of otherness. Overnight politically correct racism swung from tolerance for the aggressor to tolerance by the book. The turnabout was so cynical that Alain Finkielkraut, who found positive reasons for not taking a stand [In the Name 97], sardonically remarked: In contrast to nations that sinned by the very fact of being nations, Bosnia offered ontological purity and multinational innocence. . . . Being Bosnian was certainly better than being Slovenian, Croatian, Albanian, Macedonian, or Serb [In the Name 99]. The lingering inuence of Marxism in these attitudes should not be underestimated. Marxism, like capitalism, was selective in its support of national freedom. On the eve of Communisms collapse, Marxist intellectuals could endorse certain independence movements in the capitalist world (though not in Western Europe), while blasting reactionary nationalisms within socialist countries [Blaut 134]. They thus showed that, regardless of the scientic light brought by theory to the question of under what conditions would national freedom be rational and progressive, the decisive rationale was, as ever, the bottom line of power added or subtracted. Nationalism was rational if it furthered our cause or debilitated the enemys; irrational if it threatened to indent our state or an allied one, or, quite simply, if it set a bad example that might be followed in ill-timed or inconvenient manner. But if the Balkans could throw such a long shadow over Western Europe, it was due not only to the persistence of Marxist teleology but also because the Continent was immersed in a process of convergence with different implications for the participating countries. Germany, suffering from low national self-esteem but untroubled by either centralism or regional challenges, had no problem recognizing Croatias and Slovenias independence. France, suffering from illusions of grandeur yet fearful of its powerful ally to the northeast, would not countenance any separatism on the European continent, for fear that it might encourage the grassroots regionalism that survived under its suffocating state apparatus. Throughout the nineties, the debate on nationalism was tinged by the unspoken tensions between two different models of European unication. Frances uncompromising attachment to the centralized nation-state collided with Germanys federal conception. It was not only a matter of coordinating each countrys territorial organization, but also of deciding the scope of popular representation in the European institutions. Frances model projected a rigidly compartmentalized union of existing states (de Gaulles Europe des patries), while Germanys opened the possibility of political representation for citizens of territorial units with existing political institutions, such as its own Lnder. It is in this context that French attacks on the German model of the cultural nation must be understood. For Finkielkraut, the postcolonial worlds effort to scrape back the remains of its ruined cultures was the consequence of the wrong choice of political model. Of the two European models of the nation, the third world opted en masse for the worse one [Defeat 75]. That is, it rejected the enlightened French vision

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of a world common to all people [74] in favor of the German romantic notion that the individual is socialized in concrete settings and that common experiences create attachments and self-denitions which over time become articulated in cultural practices. This is a rough but fair denition of the Volksgeist, or national culture, which Finkielkraut and a host of others declared a straitjacket for the individual, forgetting the Kantian pigeon, which can y only by apping its wings against the opposing air. In a similar vein, Julia Kristeva, noticing the chauvinistic tensioning of a French culture humiliated by American supremacy, German competition, and the invasion from the Maghreb [38], nonetheless went on to assert that there exists a French national idea that can make up the optimal rendition of the nation in the contemporary world [39, her emphasis]. And what was this optimal model? Quite the opposite of the spirit of the people (Volksgeist), whose origins have been traced back to the ambiguities of the great Herder and that is mystically rooted in the soil, the blood, and the genius of the language, the French national idea, which draws its inspiration from the Enlightenment and is embodied in the French Republic, is achieved in a legal and political pact between free and equal individuals. [40] In the face of postmodern trouble, Kristeva returned to French modernitys central myth: the pact between free and equal individuals. Ignoring that Herder was a spokesperson of the Enlightenment, she dismissed his sense of time and place and their importance for intersubjective ties as obscurantist mysticism, replacing them with the transcendental covenant allegedly consented to by each citoyen. Geography is sublated in the French national idea, which, far from being subject to locational constraints, shines forth in the Republic. If the optimal rendition of the nation in the contemporary world speaks French and only French, that is not because of the particular genius of the language or the result of historical constraints weighing heavily on each speaker, but because freedom and equality apparently demand it. So, despite those precontractual conditions (which Herder considered ends in themselves and not means to the state), Kristeva underscores the pacts legal nature to dispel any doubts about its normativity. From the preceding, it must be inferred that, if freedom and equality legitimate the pact, then giving the state the credit for securing those very values is nonsensical. On the contrary, free and equal individuals, orless mythicallyindividuals capable of making decisions in view of present conditions and future expectations, are strapped to the political pact by legal ropes which are at least as strong as, and possibly more coercive than, the irrational ties of membership in a cultural community. Freedom and equality, it will be said, result from the generality of the law, which tolerates no exceptions. But this is true only insofar as the individual is interpellated as a subject by the state. It is patently not true in the Enlightenment sense of the abolition of social hierarchy. And social hierarchy is culturally mediated by the state. The least that can be said about theoretical debates on macro-ideological concepts such as the nation is that they, like the realities they refer to, are geopolitically inected. Such debates can be mapped in terms of their conditioning factors and implicit outcomes. Finkielkrauts melodramatic opposition of mind (pense) and mindless multiculturalism, with all the implications of the Cartesian binary thrown into the conict, is inseparable from old Frances discomfort with the ricocheting of its imperial history. Not only has the French Enlightenment failed to establish itself as the norm of development in the Third World, but, more distressingly, it has suffered a setback at home in the form of multiculturalism. The dream of a universal culture radiating from Paris has turned into a banlieu nightmare of people who refuse to give up the ghost of

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their atavistic cultures. Atavism, from French atavisme, denotes the reappearance of a characteristic in an organism after several generations of absence (The American Heritage Dictionary). Thus, the term aptly suggests a throwback to a pre-imperial lore now visiting the French Rpublique. The postcolonial nightmare is, for Finkielkraut, the Enlightenments dream gone awry when the colonized Third World adopted the wrong European model. That model could become only deleterious in the hands of people like Franz Fanon, since it had served Germans in the early 1800s to preserve a core of subjective agency under French occupation. Furthermore, it was the inuence of that model in anticolonial struggles, rather than free-oating critical acumen, which in the late fties permitted Roland Barthes to illustrate the grammar of myth with the image of a black soldier saluting the tricolor ag on the cover of Paris-Match [201]. In that now-classic account, myth removes contingency by turning sense into form [203], and produces normativity by abolishing genetic considerations in favor of universality. Myth does not ask how the black man came to pledge allegiance to the French ag; instead it translates the salute into spontaneous devotion to the Rpublique and the military uniform into the citoyens robe. Myth collapses the diacritical difference between the colony and the metropolis, the capital and the provinces, language and patois, turning the second member of each duality from a dangerous factor of fragmentation [Kristeva 27] into the basis of a texture of many singularities [32]. Form, whether graphic or narrative, is a formidable instrument of nationalization. In its optimal rendition, the nation may not be bound to the genius of language, but it is nonetheless a language act and an attempt to inscribe on it other sensitivities, other experiences, and strangeness apt to extend its [the French nations] pursuit of universality [Kristeva 4445]. The pursuit of universality through a language act, which as act is necessarily particular, calls attention to the elocutionary space of political propositions. Although no one disputes that even homonymous political parties can differ widely from region to region and country to country, theorists often take for granted the locational substitutability of political concepts. Certainly, the process of abstraction through which concepts arise removes the contingencies of origin, creating the illusion of universality. Nonetheless, concepts tend to founder against empirically disparate situations, because traces of the contingencies of origin cling to their semantic form. This is the case with postnationalism. A Short History of the Term Postnationalism Since the 1990s, the concept of postnationalism has been marshaled concurrently with the idea of a global political order driven by international business and the heavily concentrated communications industry. The bottom line of this idea is that multinationals and free-moving nancial capital are today capable of bending national policy and therefore cancel the preconditions of national sovereignty for the majority of states. Although few would quarrel with this observation, still fewer credit its source in Lenin, who asserted in 1913 that the break-down of national barriers, the creation of the international unity of capital . . . characterizes a mature capitalism that is moving toward its transformation into socialist society [qtd. in Blaut 151]. Lenin clearly foresaw a new historical phase based on the export of nancial capital. But that was before August 1914 forced him to recast his theory and dene modern imperialism as a erce competition among the capitalist powers, leading to a struggle for the reorganization of the political map. Nowadays, Lenins premature analysis of the impact of the international unity of capital on national states is reoated under the trendier name of globalization. Thus, while it could be argued that economic history has ratied his prewar hypothesis,

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the politically relevant question is whether there is any correlation between postnationalisms deeper implications and Lenins postwar view that imperialism, far from transcending the national, is the era of the oppression of nations on a new basis. To the extent that the concept of postnationalism is more than the brainchild of theory, it must have developed in view of an empirical model. In fact, much political theory focuses on the European Union as the prime example of a postnational event. And whatever the Unions intellectual precedents, integration is clearly driven by the challenge of the now absolute American hegemony. Having ascertained the impossibility of further territorial annexations, however, Western European states in the second half of the twentieth century could expand their capitalist power only by imploding their internal borders. The European Union began as a European Economic Community under the protection of NATO and only much later began to develop, haltingly, into a state, impelled by the obsession of its core nations with remaining great powers in the global struggle. To be sure, evidence of dwindling national sovereignty can be found elsewhere, for instance, in the bald-faced interventionism of the United States since World War II. Even so, the European Union remains the privileged instance of political integration of preexisting national units. Despite this historical referent, the term postnationalism is more evocative than precise. It invites the same critique as postmodernism, insofar as it suggests circularity and repetition rather than rupture [Spivak 317]. No matter how one denes postnationalism, nationalism always determines its semantic core. This was the case in the mid-eighties, when the term was coined to denote a new kind of space at the heart of a partitioned Europe. More specically, it was meant to produce a new eld of political practice out of Germanys partition into two antagonistic states. When Karl Dietrich Bracher dened the Federal Republic as a postnational democracy among national states in Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, his intention was as much to distinguish the Federal Republic from the German Democratic Republic as to legitimize a state that remained under suspicion on account of its nationalist past. Bracher was proposing what German historians call a Sonderweg, a singular path, although this time the path led to the West. Rening the contractual model of citizenship, Bracher conceived the Federal Republic as a purely legislative state in the avant-garde of European integration. Whether by luck or design, the notion of a postnational democracy became instrumental for Germanys European leadership, as a means, on the one hand, to assuage French mistrust and, on the other, to push toward a more effective integration than French nationalism since de Gaulle had been willing to accept. The idea of a postnational state had been in the air since the preceding decade, when Dolf Sternberger proposed that a patriotism of the constitution would guarantee the loyalty of West Germans to their new state without the mediation of a suspect national identity. But it was Jrgen Habermas who brought the idea to the limelight in the aftermath of the Historikerstreit in the mid-eighties, especially in his essay Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity: The Federal Republics Orientation to the West. Explicitly seeking a break with the political culture model, Habermas adopted the Enlightenment rational-actor model, setting great store by what he called processes of universalization, which he identied with a state based on a strictly political contract. Who the contractual agents might be was not at all clear, for the culturally neutral subjects of the post-traditional pact must either exist prior to the pact, or they must rst be created by a postnational state that is supposed to have been articulated and freely adhered to by those very subjects. The aporia lies, of course, in the assumption that the state can ever become a purely political realm engaging purely political subjects. Or, what amounts to the same thing, postnationalists fail to consider the spatial location of

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the polity and the place-based socialization of citizens according to slowly changing orientations drawn from the past. Habermas recognizes the endurance of cultural identities. In the postnational state, cultural identity does not cease, but it is decoupled from the administration of the rights and guarantees, which command the citizens primary loyalty [25657]. Cultural identity is thus privatized. Yet Habermas fails to recognize that, insofar as cultural identity retains a strong territorial correlation, as it does in Germany, it functions as a de facto national identity. For him, post-traditional identity relies on a juridical patriotism that relates not to the concrete totality of a nation but rather to abstract procedures and principles [261]. Interestingly, though, Habermas recognizes that an abstract patriotism deprived of cultural traditions will not hold. And while he admits that national forms of life continue to shape collective identities, he believes that those forms can coexist and interact without any need to gather them into a unied symbolic core. Instead, the cultural aspects of national life will be subordinated to a purely political idea, which for Habermas can only be representative democracy [262], although he does not explain why it must necessarily take this form. Habermas neglected to factor in the spatial perspective that made his postnational vision possible. That perspective opened onto a political surface without a matching national totality. The German nation was still divided into two irreconcilable political orders, each demanding the postnational loyalty of its citizens. Postnationalism, in this context, did not transcend the nation; it merely denoted the uncoupling of the German historical identity from the diverging political regimes to which it was circumstantially bound. Habermas was looking at a postnational horizon from a perspective that was still national. He was not speculating on the transformation of the nation-state under global pressures, but taking a position in the historians debate against certain scholars efforts to historicize the Holocaust. He was motivated by the desire to create a livable political space for a German identity redeemed from the perturbing aspects of the past. His need to edit the German identity as a way of breaking with the national Sonderweg explains his recourse to the Kierkegaardian existential choice [264]. There was little in this argument that might be valid for other polities in different historical coordinates. Much less did it support the view that nations were about to fall into the dustbin of history. Germanys historico-spatial fracture asserted itself with force in a political model whose essential purpose was to keep a disquieting past from haunting the horizon of reunication. Another German intellectual, Gnter Grass, came up with a different formula to sever citizenship from national identity. He proposed to reconcile cultural nationhood with political differentiation in two separate states. Like Bracher, Grass considered this model worthy of emulation by other states [5] before reunication bankrupted the formula. Speaking from the perspective of a reunied Germany, Wolfgang Schieder could later assert that [t]he postnational bond of the citizen of a nationless state to an ultimately abstract constitution would have shown itself illusory, had everything not changed in 1989 [24]. Ampler territorial boundaries and the closure of the historical hiatus opened in 1945 had pulled the empirical rug from under Habermass theoretical feet. Reunication demonstrated that, in order to exist, differential cultures require their own geographic niches. During reunication, the constitution became the subject of earnest public debate, precisely as the national question stood once more in need of a solution. For Schieder, the end of the German Sonderweg was bound up with the normalization of the national identity, since throughout modernity nation and constitution have gone hand in hand. In fact, Schieder said, European integration required the development of a European identity that is constitutionally secured [24]. In short, for Schieder the European Union

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would succeed only if it managed to develop a national form. And again, spatial conditions would prove crucial to integration. To come alive and claim the allegiance of the population, the Union required integration from below even more than articulation from above. Rather than assimilating all social and political intervals into a superordinate administrative institution regulated by nation-states, the EU would need to free up space for the articulation of niches and networks of operations that overlap, intersect, or entirely renovate the traditional congurations of member states. But Europe will not free that space unless it can produce a constitution capable of grounding a common identity. Schieders view was authorized by the European Unions legitimacy crisis, which could be ascribed to a democratic decit. That certain states place their national constitutions in the way of European integration, or that European institutions are loath to intervene in the internal affairs of member states, can hardly bring European institutions closer to the people. The people respond in kind, voting without a sense of a common norm in European elections. Coinciding with Schieder, Salvador Cards and Joan Estruch considered that the EUs inadequate legitimation suggests the need for a European national identity. Yet, given the antinationalist bias in todays social sciences, they concluded that many analysts shun the ultimate sense of European convergence [351]. Speaking of a postnational Europe would thus be a subterfuge attributable to a theoretical inability to look squarely at the facts. Even so, a territorial formation with a dense historical humus could, as in the past, give rise to a nonpolitical unication. Some consider the lineaments of European citizenship to be no longer political but rather social and economic [Schnapper 176], while others deny the possibility of a European identity, because of the continued salience of national and subnational institutions and identities [Pantel 60]. While the former objection is plausible, at least for now, the latter is unconvincing. National and regional identities do not preempt all the potential identications of individuals or groups. As John Agnew points out, a national norm is constituted out of local situations [19]. Furthermore, it is arguably the growing salience of substate institutions and identities that will endow an eventual European identity with relevance. The Union becomes a larger container for the ever more complex networks of substate institutions and thus a correction to the constraints of the nation-state. In its heyday, the nation-state expanded the scale of economic and political operations hitherto restrained by disparate weights and measures, currencies, duties, and other restrictions. Today nation-states, while lowering interstate borders to commerce and capital, continue to deny substate political bodies the outreach enjoyed by corporations. Territorial connement of the political agency of substate institutions reveals fear of spatial promiscuity. Traditional hierarchies look anxiously on the reconstitution of European space, lest it subvert the scale of membership dened as the threshold for European integration. Yet, by retaining the nation-state as the minimal building block for European membership and representation, Europes political lords weaken the Unions legitimacy. In this way, the EU is deprived of the personalized leadership that has proved essential for mass politics. Individual competence is not lacking, but the mismatch of scale between national politics and the European institutions leaves a hiatus of representation that is hard to ll, because political discourse is in an intense and complex relationship to its national context [Gaffney 203]. Sharing this point of view, Jean-Marie Guhenno asserts: The disappearance of the nation carries with it the death of politics [19]. This observation points to a weakness in Habermass normative detachment of national identity from loyalty to a democratic state. As Habermas indicates, democracy requires a communicational space in which politicians and their constituencies can resolve the conicts arising from life in common. But communicational space is

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not produced by at. It presupposes a concrete intersubjectivity: a shared language, a common set of references (provided by a culture), and an array of common values and conventions. In other words, it cannot be abstract space, but the space that arises from the interrelations among concretely situated subjects and their relatively stable dispositions. A space without recognizable referents cannot be communicational space. This is why democracies do not survive crises that destroy the essential meanings of everyday living. After the German reunication, Habermas modied his denition of postnationalism. Now Germany was a nation-state again, and globalization had become a prominent issue. In an extensive revisiting of the concept of postnationalism, Habermas no longer separated the constitutional foundation of democracy from national structures. Instead, he acknowledged that until recently the institutionalization of democratic structures emanating from society (what he called democratic reexivity) had been possible only within the framework of the nation-state [Konstellation 94]. At present, however, globalization put the traditional basis of democracy at risk. Consequently, postnationalism no longer stood for a purely political refoundation of the state. Nor was it the political equivalent of global forces, but a new perspective from which extrastate dynamics could be envisioned. Habermas understood that this new perspective shakes democratic self-condence, and with it the possibility of resolving conicts in a strictly political manner [9495]. This suggests that democracy may be spacebound; that it arises and functions at a certain geographic scale but becomes dysfunctional above a certain threshold. The notion of world democracy could easily turn out to be a totalitarian constellation. Like Cards and Estruch, Habermas acknowledged that processes of convergence between states lack democratic legitimation. To remedy this problem, he called for the invention of new political forms to recreate the democratic process outside the nationstate [95]. He now removed the postnational abstraction to another political level, one that is intrinsically deprived of popular legitimation. This sphere of democratic futurity lying outside the nation-state is not a territorial reality but a warping of national space produced by global forces. Global postnational space, of which neoliberalism is the political expression, curtails the states action, as reected in its decreasing capacity to levy taxes on capital, stimulate growth, provide social services, or undertake other redistributing measures. Insofar as these weaknesses are proving to be structural, they erode the states legitimacy without giving any indication that the democratic decits will be compensated at the supranational level. Aware of these problems, Habermas criticizes the naivet of those who believe that the nation-state can protect itself by practicing a hedgehog politics, as well as those who believe that it can dissolve into a system of postnational networks [Konstellation 124]. It seems therefore that postnational space, far from being a fatal reality, is as much a construct as the nation is now widely held to be, if not more so. Its primary role is to mark the limits of popular sovereignty, although the latter retains its legitimating function within the dwindling scope of national politics. Globalization and National Identity Globalization is not univocal. It passes through the prism of competing tendencies, which can be represented synoptically on a system of coordinates. On one axis, extensive interchange between agents at any site or scale leads to integration through global networks. This plane of convergence, which simplifying enormously I shall call economic, intersects another plane whose form of integration is social. This sec-

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ond plane relies on subjectively shared norms and values, in short, on a normative acculturation whose classic form and vehicle is the national community. While power ows from both axes, national governments and other institutional agents resort to the second axis for their legitimation. Precisely for this reason, they misconstrue their relation to the collectivity, obscuring the differences between society and the institutions said to represent it. As Franco Ferrarotti warned, legitimacy thereby runs the risk of becoming confused with legality [2223]. Down this path, legitimation can be easily submerged under considerations of governance and disappear inside the new political macrostructures. The permutation of the institutional for the social is by no means the consequence of public perplexity or voluntary delegation. Rather, it is elicited by an engineered consensus on the inevitability of those macrostructures. In the postnational era, the two forms of power, economic and social, no longer blend as they did in the era of national markets. The appearance of a non-national political space dominated by the market and by those who dominate the market indicates not only a shift in the coercive measures that power always employs (for instance, instead of ghting labor with police and lockouts, companies relocate) but also in the levels at which power must work in order to be effective. And as John Agnew remarks, the transmission of power across space involves practices by intervening others who transform it as it moves from place to place. Not only is the ow of power potentially disrupted in its actual spatial deployment, it is also subject to negotiation and redirection [17]. Globalization is economic powers most ambitious space-spanning thrust, but it operates within political geography. While globalization (like all forms of power) aspires to operate in a perfectly transparent medium, in reality it must work its way through channels that refract it in different ways. Globalization is reconguring political agendas, but geographical scales, among them the nation, are still providing the dominant forms of political action. Postmodern theory has provided an analytical framework for this situation with the post now said to affect the nation. Accordingly, some theorists place national identities alongside other kinds of identity, treating them as phenomena on the same scale. One gets the impression that such theorists are trying to raise themselves above their own political niches by pulling their national bootstraps. It is with national boots that some individuals race through opportunities faster than those wearing more modest footwear. Even globalization is not indifferent to the hierarchical relation among the national spaces through which power ows. There is something illusory, and politically self-defeating, in the notion that identities are a matter of free choice. Globalization is said to produce identities according to patterns of consumption. Just as a new product alters the market equilibrium, so its acquisition by consumers changes the way those individuals perceive themselves and are perceived by others. Publicity, at any rate, ceaselessly offers ontological transformations of the subject through the magic of the commodity. Yet, as Michael Billig warns [139], not all identities are interchangeable or on the same plane. Some reach deeper into the persons psychological makeup. My identity as a white male and English-language speaker congures my actions and reactions in a way that my identities as a heavy coffee drinker or Internet ignoramus do not. Some identities prove extremely resilient to deconstruction, for even when rejected they remain spectrally visible, in the negative so to speak. Such identities are not a matter of personal attitudes or convictions but of entrenched social assumptions and overdetermined individual responses. National identity is not a mythical or ideological constructalthough myth and ideology often rally to its formationbut a balance between material and discursive processes obtaining in a given space. The material processes are at the root of the automatism with which the discursive processes are universally assumed within national space.

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Doubtless, socialization occurs on different levels, and new political processes imply not only new forms of organization but different identities too. The sharp rise in anonymous relations and the multiplying of occasions for interacting with others bring increasing dissonance to the horizon of shared experience. These changes have been deleterious for traditional forms of subject formation, such as the family, cultural traditions, social and geographic origins, and so forth. Disruptions of the communal framework for interpersonal relations set in motion a transformation of the forms of social integration. Modernity, however dened, is bound up with the loss of stable agents of identity-authorization. As Ulrich Beck notes, Individuals still communicate in and play along with the old forms and institutions, but they also withdraw from them, with at least part of their existence, their identity, their commitment and their courage. Their withdrawal, however, is not just a withdrawal but at the same time an emigration to new niches of activity and identity [20]. This emigration without ever leaving ones footing in the old forms characterizes the present wavering between the old territorial niches and the new postnational networks. From this perspective, globalizations reconguration of traditional political patterns does not diminish the nations role; it resituates it in relation to other forms of political-geographical integration. In fact, globalization presumes a plurality of spaces, not superseding but qualifying the former hegemony of the nation-state. In other words, global forces act differently upon the space that used to be monopolized by the nation-state, contributing to the reappearance of previously hidden territorial identities or to the appearance of new ones. The urgency with which the national question has emerged over the last two decades suggests that globalization, although unquestionably transforming the meaning and instrumentality of the nation, may be strengthening rather than eroding its symbolic value. Its traditional role in unifying opinion around some elementary but widely accepted values remains indispensable in the new global order, at whatever territorial scale of political action one chooses to enter. That is why, to the chagrin of analysts who would rather ignore the question of scale, substate political-geographical formations mimic or claim national form on the basis of an internal set of values, which may range from those of a civic to those of a traditional culture. But the same applies at a scale larger than the nation-state. By entrusting the European Unions legitimation to a common praxis of opinion and will formation fed from the roots of European citizenship [151], Habermas shows himself relying on methods of unication that were historically implemented by nation-states. Even if citizenship denotes for him a political rather than a cultural form of membership, the idea of roots feeding the opinion and the will of European citizenry suggests the persistence of the need for popular legitimation. That need presupposes a traditional form of subject-formation that has long been replaced by a eeting consensus orchestrated by the media conglomerates in complicity with or against (as the case may be) whatever remains of state control of information. Even so, the tacit dependence on the national community haunts contemporary political theory. When someone envisions democratic polities based on impartial law and the subordination of special to public interest, the nation is never far away. As Margaret Canovan points out, contemporary political theory is saved from complete utopianism and linked to the tangled world of empirical politics only because the community it presupposes is an idealized version of a political community that really does exist in some places, namely the nation [46]. This tacit assumption may be less a contingent effect of the still prevalent tendency to view political space in terms of national territories, than a logical necessity based on a historically determined relation between the rise of popular sovereignty and national politics. Outside the theoretical imagination, decoupling the nation from democratic polities may prove as elusive as separating a

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body from its shadow. According to Liah Greenfeld, [d]emocracy was born with the sense of nationality. The two are inherently linked, and neither can be fully understood apart from this connection. Nationalism was the form in which democracy appeared in the world, contained in the idea of the nation as a buttery in a cocoon [10]. But if nationalism was democratic ab ovo, then the severance of the two attitudes suggests the radical alteration of the genetic conditions of democracy and thus the end of it in any rigorous sense. Guhenno is surely right to stress the relation between the Western idea of liberty in an open community and the territorial roots of the nation in La n de la dmocratie (The End of the Nation-State). The liberty that [the nation] gives individuals [. . .], he says, is based on the space that it governs [5]. Liberty, in a classic sense, meant a state of exception vis--vis general exactions and burdens. Liberties (often expressed in the plural, and with a meaning close to that of contemporary rights) were granted to certain villages, cities, or regions and not to others. Nationalism universalized the liberties throughout the state, making them the birthright of each member of the political community. But since liberty was a pledge of all to each, it depended on the national jurisdiction. In other words, it was guaranteed only insofar as the state could protect its borders. If globalization deterritorializes the polity, there is reason to suspect that it will bring an end to politics. Politics is here understood in the sense of universal participation in public affairs through stand-ins whose claim to represent the civic community rests on the assumption, or the ction, of a coequal relation to the public good. Habermas exemplies the tacit assumption of political community in the discourse of liberalism, when he points out that only a limited postnational constellation such as the European Union can develop a democratic form of governance. The caveat introduced by the notion of a political limit (and hence of territorial borders) is important, because the principle of self-determination requires the distinction between members and nonmembers. There is no autonomy without the possibility of heteronomy. Furthermore, Habermas opposes an enlightened realism to the abstraction of dogmatic rationalism. Even when a collective identity purports to regulate itself through universal principles, it still interprets and implements those principles in light of its history and in the context of its characteristic life forms [Habermas, Konstellation 161]. As it turns out, the political functions and reexive practices of postnational polities are practically indistinguishable from those of the nation. This functional similarity on different scales eludes Habermas, however, while the decreasing efcacy of national sovereignty and the evidence that national interests interlock with transnational economic agents deter him from recognizing in European integration a long-term process of nation building. While the sweep of transnational and multinational ventures conditions the vocabulary of political theory, not every analyst concurs with the announced demise of the national model. Some observers offer a very different prognosis concerning the implications of Maastricht. Analyzing school curricula throughout Europe, D. Coulby nds that nationality and nationalism are resurgent factors in both the politics of Europe and in the shaping of the various European identities [qtd. in Pantel 2]. It remains to be seen whether these factors will create resistance to European integration or, on the contrary, will contribute to the breakdown of state rigidities and to the formation of a Europe of all its peoples. Once again, the question is one of geographic interplay at various levels. Nationality and nationalism are factors operating at not only the state but also at the substate level. By operating through local political hegemonies capable of linking up with other geographical areas in terms of overlapping historical, economic, or cultural assets, those factors may help to reduce the resistance of state nationalism to integration at a higher political level. There is ample evidence that this possibility is a matter of concern for state nationalisms, which now face a revolt of the regions

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amounting to inchoate competition in areas such as education, control over natural resources and the use of the territory, administration of infrastructure and communications, and the symbols of identity formation, which powerfully condition institutional loyalty. The Fear of Nationalism among the Postimperial Intelligentsia The confusion of political-geographical levels is responsible for the incapacity of much contemporary political theory to conceptually disengage nationalism from imperialism. A reason for this inability may lie in the methodological warp introduced by the hardly fortuitous fact that many conspicuous theorists stem from cultures that are steeped in imperial traditions. Memory of imperial expansion weighs heavily on postimperial theorists, such as Eric J. Hobsbawm, Ernest Gellner, Homi Bhabha, and others. Their disgust at the brutality of imperialism is succinctly expressed in Hobsbawms acid remark: There is nothing like being an imperial people to make a population conscious of its collective existence as such [38]. But Hobsbawm himself is unable to consider nationalism apart from imperialisms accomplishments. The large political conglomerates produced by the wars of conquest seem to him more respectable and forward-looking than the movements for self-determination, which are, in his view, the expression of sectional or minority interests, and as such run counter to the march of history and compare unfavorably even with religious fundamentalism in not accepting the legacy of the past [169]. Thus a critic of imperialism ends up reafrming imperialisms legacy in his lasting reverence for Hegelianism. Nowhere does he justify his assertion that self-determination movements inevitably express sectional interests, or concede the possibility that a twentieth-century national minority may be the transitory spokesman for universal values, as eighteenth-century New England colonials were. Instead, he expresses a bias for larger spatial congurations, considered as the genuine expression of the legacy of the past, and a visceral animosity toward the ssiparous nationalisms of the peoples who have, to different degrees, born the brunt of that legacy. A rigorous Marxist critique of Hobsbawms errors can be found in James Blauts National Question. As remarked above, however, ideology led Blaut to distinguish between progressive and reactionary national liberation movements, the former in the colonial and neocolonial Third World and the latter in Europe. If Hobsbawm was mistaken about the former, his scathing views were devastatingly correct when applied to the latter [134]. Within few years after the publication of Blauts book, history adjudicated the issue concerning the practicality of national movements in the socialist block. But in the broadest sense, Blauts insistence that national liberation struggles react to modes of exploitation remains a sound guiding principle, as does his argument for the conceptual detachment of nationalism from odious excrescences such as fascism. For my part, without ignoring the economic or geopolitical conditions of each national struggle, I prefer to conne nationalism to the doctrine of self-determination and popular sovereignty, because it is this doctrine that provides modern struggles for liberation with their inner coherence and outward shape. Contrary to Hobsbawms grim view that nationalism is inescapably the expression of sectional or minority interests, peoples aspiring to political recognition as national groups must ineluctably base their demands on an ethical universality that is lacking in their master states. This means, in effect, that they cannot demand their freedom without simultaneously afrming the right of every nationality to exercise self-determination. They must, that is, practice international solidarity as nations.

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Nationalism, in this sense, has nothing to do with the pathological prejudice Adorno held it to be. His own prejudice in this matter kept him from heeding his observation that thought must go not only beyond the fetish of public opinion but also beyond its conrmation by the given facts [198]. A dangerous proposition, no doubt, but one that is in tune with Adornos condence that thought, like art, holds the sole potential to resist the negativity of administered reality. His assumption that nationalism inevitably means collective self-praise motivates his assessment that there cannot be healthy national sentiment [118]. This position is understandable in view of the historical experience that was uppermost in Adornos mind, but, by circumscribing his understanding of nationalism to that experience, he accommodated thought to the limitations of ad hoc political reality, betraying thoughts potential to free concepts from the tyranny of sanctioned facts. But even if one sticks to observable facts, it is questionable that, in the present world system, at least in the non-underdeveloped countries nationalism has lost its real basis and has become the full-blown ideology it has always been [118]. It is not clear what Adorno means by real basis, whether popular legitimacy, cultural traditions, the territorial range, or just a self-justifying raison dtre. But one thing is clear: in using the word countries, he falls prey to the conventional identication of societies with the states that rule them. He succumbs, that is, to what Herminio Martins has called the rule of methodological nationalism [qtd. in Agnew 17], meaning the reduction of all politically signicant spaces to the nation-state norm. With a similar lack of critical nesse, he asserts rather dogmatically that all national sentiment must inevitably slide down the path of inated self-assertion. Nowhere does he address the issue of precisely why the line of national legitimacy happens to coincide with the line of economic development, as if nationalism were permissible to the poor, who may thus have a real basis for ideological backwardness as well. Nor does he ask himself, or the historical record, whether it is possible for processes of self-determination to escape the logic of self-absolutization. And he certainly does not consider if the refusal of legitimacy to national sentiment may be complicit with a state ideology that subjugates both minorities and individuals as soon as it prevails as the ultimate referent for social life. The conception of nationalism as ideological dross left behind in the course of development lands another Hegelian, Francis Fukuyama, in conceptual straits. Not only does he expose, better than anyone else, the correlation between the faith in the end of history and the fear that history might return led by the hand of nationalists, but also he cannot square the fact that [n]ationalist movements have [...] been closely associated with democratic ones since the French Revolution [266] with his nding of a horrendous irrationality latent in the nationalist form of recognition [270]. Fukuyama believes that he has solved the conundrum when he notes that, being private to a group, the egalitarian form of legitimacy on which nationalism is based runs counter to universality and thus contains the seed of conict with other groups seeking the same kind of recognition. But group differentiation is not opposed to universality, and conict does not follow from claims to recognition but from disputes over resources and the disempowerment of certain groups. And a time-honored way to disempower people is to deny their national status. Nationalism, says Fukuyama, is therefore fully capable of replacing dynastic and religious ambition as a ground for imperialism, and did precisely that in the case of Germany [266]. But this is to beat one dog for anothers mischief. It is to think of nationalism as the cause of imperialism, even though the former has often been immolated to the latter. Germany is a case in point. Nationalist feeling ran high there after the turn of the nineteenth century, reaching a feverish pitch after World War I. But it is worth remembering that Hitler was not a nationalist in a strict sense. Had he been one,

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he would have satised himself with the reversal of the humiliating treaty of Versailles and at most with the Anschluss of the European areas settled by ethnic Germans. He would not have squandered his initial successes in pursuit of unlimited Lebensraum in the East and of racial domination worldwide. Hitler of course knew what he really was about, and declared it in a letter to Hermann Rauschning: The nation is a political expedient of democracy and Liberalism. We have to get rid of this false conception and set in its place the conception of race, which has not been yet politically used up. The new order cannot be conceived in terms of the national boundaries of peoples with a historical past, but in terms of race that transcends those boundaries. . . . I have to liberate the world from dependence on its historical past. Nations are the outward and visible forms of our history. So I have to fuse these nations into a higher order if I want to get rid of the chaos of an historic past that has become an absurdity. [qtd. in Finkielkraut, In the Name 51] An antinationalist who knew that the nation is a liberal and democratic idea, Hitler was motivated by a materialist universalism based on biological values. Like a fulledged postnationalist, he despised the historical atavism of self-governing peoples and dreamed of a loftier dispensation based on the transcultural notion of race. Race solidarity would sweep away the historical clutter, which, to this visionary of a new world order, looked as absurd as it does today to those who ridicule the struggle for identity of stateless peoples. Hitlers lack of interest in settling historical claims through geography led him to remove them by displacing conict to the biological terrain. His vision has fallen into extreme disrepute, as has that of its main competitor, Communisms own narrative of universality beyond the fetters of the past and the subjectivities of the present. Ironically, it was Liberalism that revamped the idea of superseding history in a world order free from cultural or spatial attachments and populated by citizens from whom national identity had been extirpated like a useless and potentially harmful organ and replaced with placebo identities based on subjective dispositions, such as consumer or sexual preferences, or the more or less fanatic dependence on services tailored to individual proles. In the past, nationalism could replace dynastic ambition and religious intolerance as a ground for imperialism, because it was the one political doctrine that the masses could feel as their own. Nationalism ultimately meant a government of the people, by the people, for the people; and twentieth-century dictators understood this very well when they resorted to populism in order to project themselves as the nation incarnate. But other things are capable of grounding imperialism, including free markets and democracy. All that this proves is that an adjectival function should not be taken for a nominal one. Imperialism, a degraded form of universality, involves unequal interactions both inside and outside the national group. Its hierarchical arrangement of the internal social composition correlates with profoundly unequal external relations based on domination. Imperialism is, at the limit, a struggle for global power and resources. It views space from the top down, whereas nationalism is steeped in the sense of place. Detractors of nationalism, blind to the institutionalization of violence in colonial or semicolonial situations, tend to associate the ravages of imperialism with the struggles of groups seeking to disengage themselves from the clutches of an abusive state. Such critics often justify domination with the argument that the alien state is the bearer of a universal culture and the source of precious rights for the dominated; in short, a ray of civilization in the native darkness. Yet the racism inherent in cultural Darwinism is explicit in such formulations. As Christopher Miller remarks of African pre-independence

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movements, nationalism in this period designates any form of resistance to colonialism and involved an assertion of African rights. Fundamental to this nationalism was its opposition to European authority, whatever its institutional form or objectives; independently, that is, of that authoritys form of self-legitimation [121]. In other words, even a democratic colonialism, if it were not a paradox, would be illegitimate because the unfullled right to self-determination would belie the pretended equality based on the generalization of individual rights. Even so, the right of self-determination, a legacy of the Enlightenment resting on a universalistic ethics, is unequally distributed in space. During the wars of independence in Algeria, Vietnam, Guinea, and Mozambique, few progressive intellectuals reviled the nationalist struggles against external power. Indeed, one was progressive to the extent that one supported the ght of liberation. And one did not look too closely at the relative merits of the colonizers or the demerits of the nationalist leadership. The right to the homeland and to political self-organization took precedence over more nicky considerations, and whatever the problems arising from the resulting partition of colonial space and the ensuing political turbulence, no one has advocated the revocation of national rights in the former colonies. But moral perspicuity seems to blur where the European/non-European divide is no longer operative, either because Europeans are not party to the national conict, as in Turkey, East Timor, or Rwanda, or because the conict is between Europeans, as in Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, or Spain. Mapping Nationalism It is, however, a curious form of geography that decides who is and where is a nation. We are not dealing with the spatialization of history or the projection of collective memory onto a topography that outlines the connes of a homeland, but with what we might call a spatialized anthropology. Examples abound: France swaps the historical name of Catalogne for the purely geographic marker, Pyrnes-Orientales, while allowing the Catalan identity to appear in regional food products only. After displacing Chechens from their land during Stalins era, Russian authorities in the post-Soviet period bestow a social rather than an ethnic identity on these people: Chechens are bandits. In recent years, Spain has been edging toward the identication of all state-deant Basques as terrorists, and the captive Spanish press routinely associates democratic Basque nationalism with racism. The modus operandi of this spatial anthropology or anthropological geography shines forth in the formula used by the Turkish government to deny the Kurdish nationality: the Kurds are not Kurds but mountain people. They do not speak Kurdish; they have simply forgotten how to speak their original Turkish language. When the same country denies the massacre of one million Armenians during the creation of the Turkish national state under Mustapha Kemal, claiming that the victims were Turks fallen in a civil war, it transforms the liquidation of an ethnic minority into an internal affair. With disarming ingenuity, Turkey sets the pattern of denial of which many states avail themselves to produce homogeneity. Mountain people, Southern people, rural or peripheral people, the model is always the same: anthropological space is nonhistorical space, and a space without history is politically barren. Stateless nations are construed as premodern or even antimodern clannish groups. And in a certain sense this is true. Not because, stripped of national identity, the minoritys difference is recast as resistance to the modern national state, but because invisible nations, living on the margins of abstract national space, cultivate a keen sense of place, and this sets them apart from the supermodernity that Marc Aug denes as a spectatorial

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relation to the past and to history, a new state of affairs in which history is exoticized and turned into curiosities [110]. There is, as Neil Lazarus observes, something deeply disingenuous in the antinationalist litany that emanates from policy centers and institutions of higher learning in the core capitalist nations and nds resonance in the established media of these nationstates [69]. When pundits inveigh against the resurgence of nationalism, they target principally the struggles for self-determination and conveniently forget the nationalism of existing states. State ideology conceals a struggle over the map, for the primary aim of such rhetoric is to naturalize the present organization of the economic-military alliance, whose continuity depends on the maintenance of the power balance and hierarchical space within and between existing nation-states. Tim Brennan calls Western antinationalist attitudes a conveniently European lapse of memory [qtd. in Lazarus 69]. And he is right, but perhaps the faltering memory is not uniquely European but state-nationalist generally. Such attitudes, like the nationalisms they oppose, are momentary expressions of the long-term struggle for power between groups who use the national idea as a tool to subjugate or to ght subjugation, to acquire collective agency or to deny others the right to it. And yet, nationalism tends to be seen geographically, even cartographically. It appears in certain places, like an epidemic or a wildre that burns its way through increasingly larger tracts. In the nineties, Partha Chatterjee saw it picking its way back toward Europe, through the long-forgotten provinces of the Habsburg, the czarist, and the Ottoman empires [qtd. in Lazarus 69]. This tracking of nationalism is illusory but responds to an entrenched view that nationalism arose in Western or Central Europe and was subsequently disseminated throughout the world. Curiously, there is a theory of nationalisms globalization, sometimes held by those who also afrm that globalization has sounded the death knell of nation-states. Nationalism has never left Europe, not even in the form of struggles for sovereignty implied by Chatterjee. But the diffusionist thesis has many adepts. Mark Mazower, for instance, believes that nationalism triumphed after the end of World War I, and that then, with the Treaty of Paris, the principle of self-determination was extended to East European populations, giving rise to the minority as a contemporary political problem [41]. For Mazower, the principles of popular sovereignty and national self-determination are culpable of the bloodshed, war, and civil war (his pleonasm) that aficted the area in the twentieth century. According to him, the dire consequences of creating nation-states in that part of the world were obvious, but not heeded by the British and the French, then at the peak of their empires and interested in circumscribing German and Russian ambitions by encircling them with an array of new states [4243]. It is hard to understand how anyone could think that German or Russian territorial ambitions would be better contained by small states than by the retaining walls of the deliberately broken empires. The subsequent history of the century exposed the weakness of this reasoning. Germany was able to gobble up, one by one, each of the new states created at Versailles. And the Soviet Union did the same in its countermarch. So much, then, for the theory that self-determination is a tool of containment. The theory of nationalisms Eastward dissemination after Versailles runs afoul of nationalist ferment in Poland, Hungary, and other East European nationalities in the nineteenth century. Likewise, the notion that the problem of the nationalities emerged as a result of the breakup of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires is to neglect the ostensible cause of World War I, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his consort Sophia by Serb nationalists in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The problem of the nationalities long preceded the conagration, and there is little evidence that the empires could have prevented the bloodshed by withholding the right to democratic

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self-determination from the ethnic groups who lived in the shadow of the imperial bureaucracies. On the contrary, the two World Wars and the Cold War, which included the wars of colonial independence, provide massive evidence for the costs, in blood and suffering, of not respecting the principle of self-determination and making a mockery of popular sovereignty. Nationalism is difcult to discuss as an academic subject, because its theory is inseparable from deeply held beliefs, which nd expression in the map. Detractors point to nationalisms divisive nature. Reviving the myth of Babel in a secular context, they accuse nationalism of splitting up humanity into exclusive groups, yet appear undisturbed by humanitys division into existing nation-states. While criticizing nationalisms alleged reliance on the notion of natural communities, they naturalize constituted polities and display an extraordinary reverence for existing borders. The existence of territorial nationalities demanding to be included in the map logically upsets the political horizon. Such demands require a broadening of focus that takes cartographic account of areas that claim national signicance on their own terms. Defensive nationalisms underwrite projects of community reclamation from within the boundaries dened by the very power whose presence denied community [Brennan, qtd. in Lazarus 74] and thus threaten the implosion of existing states, many of which achieved national status through imperial expansion. With the colonies gone, such states continue to repress the memory of their formative process, holding back too any stirrings of community memory within their boundaries. In 1862 Lord Acton described the nationalization of states: By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, [the hegemonic nationality] reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary [. . .] according, therefore, to the degree of humanity and civilization in that dominant body which claims all the rights of the community, the inferior races are exterminated, or reduced to servitude, or outlawed, or put in a condition of dependence [qtd. in Mazower 41]. While it would be tempting to infer from this historically accurate description that the national principle turns nasty as soon as it gets hold of the state, it is important not to read the quotation halfway only, for it involves a question of scale. Lord Acton plainly was speaking about imperial states with colonial extensions and multinational components. But even the classic nation-states, which have reached today an advanced stage of uniformity, were not formed by internal homogenization only. Reducing the view of their formation to the internal colonization of the provinces is a retrospective mirage caused by the projection of political unity backward in time. Imperialism produces a certain trompe-loeil effect, whereby internal unity is posited ahead of its achievement by means that were rarely democratic. Colonization is always external; it does not subject nationalities preexisting within the original boundary, but violates borders prior to subjugating those who are different and assimilating their territories. The formative history of core nation-states such as France, England, Germany, or Spain shows that struggles for hegemony are often bids for territorial acquisition. Under pretext of a religious crusade, France conquered Occitaine in the early thirteenth century, precluding the consolidation of a Pyrenean state in the making and crushing the language of this culturally puissant region. The Germanization of Poland, steadily promoted in the nineteenth century, would have succeeded in obliterating the memory of conquest and absorption, had it not come to an abrupt end in 1918. In the case of Spain, Olivaress war against the Catalans in 1640 was a war of conquest and border removal, as the prime minister admitted in his Gran Memorial to Philip IV, a fascinating document of Castiles nationalization of the Crown. Olivaress plot succeeded fully only in the following century and under a different dynasty. In 1714, Philip V, the victor

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in the War of Spanish Succession, abolished the self-government and political guarantees of the lands of the Crown of Aragon. Discussions about the nature and origin of modern nationalism remain abstract, unless they consider the cartographic evidence of the efforts to map states on previously existing nations. Pierre Bourdieus description of the concentration of symbolic capital as the gradual occupation by the state of a space that is not yet the national space it will later become but that already presents itself as a fount of sovereignty [7] needs to be qualied. While the modern state is permanently engaged in the nationalization of its territories, it does not effect this codication in a national vacuum. The cognitive unication implying centralization and monopolization in the hands of clerks and men of letters [Bourdieu 7] requires the peripherization of previous centers and the abolition of alternative unities. Nonetheless, the unitary representation of space from above cannot reect instantly the alleged rationalization of the territory on which the centralizing point of view stakes its factitious universality. Symbolic domination needs time to erase the memories of the dominated. This means that the process of cognitive unication must go through a period of repression during which cartography retains and raties the memory of the physical domination that will later be silenced or denied. When considered diachronically, the national map reveals that the major effect of historical evolution is to abolish history by relegating to the past, i.e., to the unconscious, the lateral possibles that it eliminated [Bourdieu 15]. This can be readily seen in a virtually unknown and much less publicized map of Spain from 1854, which is kept in Madrids National Library [g. 1]. The map shows a composite state in the process of being reduced to one single nation. It also shows unmistakably which nationality is extending its hegemony to the entire territory. The map divides the state into four areas: Uniform or purely constitutional Spain, comprising the thirty-four provinces of the Crowns of Castile and Leon, equal in all economic, judicial, military, and civil aspects; Foral Spain, comprising the Basque Country and Navarre, which preserved some of its traditional rights; and, last on the Peninsula, Incorporated or Assimilated Spain, comprising the eleven provinces of the territories of the Crown of Aragon, still different in matters of taxation and in some aspects of private rights. Different in matters of taxation was a euphemism for the punitive taxation visited on these formerly self-governing countries after their annexation by the Castilian (or uniform Spanish) Crown [Ferrer i Girons 41]. The fourth territorial category on the map is Colonial Spain, containing the Philippines, the Antilles, and the African colonies. Of interest in this map is the tension between the nationalist dogma of homogeneity and equality, represented by Spains modern division into provinces (implemented in 1833), and the memory of the assimilation manu militari of the territories of the Crown of Aragon and the lasting political and scal imbalance between these territories and those of Constitutional Spain. This map, then, visualizes the political conditions for the appearance of nationalism on the periphery of the imperial nation-state: in the colonies as well as in Foral Spain, and in the territory of the former Crown of Aragon most severely dealt with and, for that reason, least assimilated. Instead of the abstract division into provincial units of an arbitrary modular size, the map displays the historical contingencies of subjugation and resistance in irregular surfaces corresponding to their far from smooth accommodation within a political system that is intensely engaged in reducing historical complexity. From the vantage point of that reduction, critics of ssiparous nationalisms often denounce the alleged falsication of origins in the nationalist recourse to history. Such nationalisms ght in the name of a unity that was never validated by a corresponding nation-state. This critique overlooks that, as K. W. J. Post observed, the adherents of liberation nationalisms struggle not in the

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Fig. 1. 1854 map of Spain displaying the different political status of the monarchys territorial possessions. Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.

name of an already-existing unity, but rather for the right to be free politically to try to create one [qtd. in Miller 128]. Indeed, unity is always lacking in colonial and semicolonial situations. The goal of those who ght to change a hostile political map is never to revert to a pre-traumatic political existence but to overcome the post-traumatic state by emerging into political maturity through the exercise of self-determination. The Space That Difference Makes To map politics is to represent difference in space. This is true regardless of the political scale of the map. Local, regional, national, and postnational models represent political cultures with different scopes and degrees of concretion. As one moves upward in that order of increasing abstraction, terrain changes into area and place into space. Concurrently, the anthropological passes into the geographic and the historical before reaching the posthistoric in the disappearing borders of globalization. Globalization posits a world without differences as a desirable goal. It remains to be seen, of course, whether globalization can work in the absence of difference, or needs to reproduce difference in order to maintain its expansive dynamic. The point is that difference is inseparable from the representation of space, that it is an effect of the map. Groups whose differences are kept below the threshold of political recognition drop into geographic variations on the national with a heavy stress on their contingency: the mountain people of an invisible Kurdistan is a good instance. Conversely, a peoples political status presupposes national difference and a discrete space on the map. Such space is unproblematic as long as self-regulating and theoretically self-sufcient institutions command it. More interesting, however, is the transitional case of a people moving in or out of the existing political map through assimilation or independence. In those cases, liminality generates difference of another kind. Independence or unication gradually produces a national identity out of a diffuse set of traditions, classes, and political cultures. And the space of that identity begins to appear on the map, to take shape and a deepening color even before statehood is formally achieved. Assimilation, on the contrary, proceeds to replace national difference with characterology. As the peoples space loses its former political contours without totally disappearing into the politically indistinct category of the region, anthropological differences based on allegedly stable categories like temperament and collective personality replace difference based on social habits that resolve themselves in political institutions. The stereotypical image of the laborious Catalan, for instance, which lasted well into the twentieth century, was created in Castile in the aftermath of Catalonias assimilation in 1714. Hardly known in the seventeenth century [Herrero Garca 303], the commonplace image of the hard-working Catalan appears to be the typication of a defeated people burdened with retaliatory taxes (the infamous catastro), which, being in some cases higher than personal income, forced men and women to intensify their labor under compulsion. That stereotype was the anthropological correlate of the political perspective that gave rise to a map juxtaposing a uniform Spain to an assimilated one. Differences are not the essence of a group but a factor of its existential condition as located on the map. National identity may be imaginary, in the sense of something fashioned in the realm of culture, but the spiritual materials out of which the identity is hammered out must be self-evident to all the members of the group. This means that the cultural components of the identity presuppose a common pool of memories. But if we ask what is the social surface of inscription of those memories, the answer cannot be a Volksgeist or popular soul, but a common space or literally a common ground on which collective representations take shape as on a screen or canvas. By common ground I

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do not mean a mystical relation to the land in the sense that land and nationality imply each other. I mean, rather, that a groups interrelation with a territory, especially during the groups formative period, entails that land through the slow sedimentation of experience. In turn, this slow appropriation, which cannot be achieved overnight through the surrogate of conquest, or the lightning speed of relocation under global neoliberalism, gives that land omnipresence in the peoples cultural memories, and it hardly matters whether the content of the memories is historical or mythical. In fact, a people and cultural memory imply each other; they are both aspects of a longue dure phenomenon seeking political expression. Identity, then, is not a precultural or prepolitical given but develops as part of the process whereby a group attempts to achieve national recognition. It can be considered an effect of a groups location in space, a matter of perspective. The principle of national identity, then, is not exclusion, as is often asserted, but location in a grid of political coordinates. It is the consciousness of that location that makes it possible to communicate ones experience with other individuals situated in the same or an equivalent nexus in the grid. Space refers to the homogeneous plane on which the coordinates extend their axes, while place refers to the noninterchangeable nexus where institutional life and the everyday intersect. In Agnews words, Space represents a eld of practice or an area in which an organization or set of organizations (such as states) operates, held together in popular consciousness by a map image or narrative story that makes the space whole and meaningful. Place represents the encounter of people with space. It refers to how everyday life is inscribed in space and takes on meaning for specied groups of people and organizations [1516]. Producing identity is one way to claim ones location on the map. As Miller points out, in colonial Africa, Nationalists had to produce an identity effect for themselves in order to be nationalists, a claim of identity on which their unity could be stakedand in order to have any effectiveness whatsoever, their identity effect had to be African [124]. The African identity was an effect of the imperial map. In the coordinates of imperial space, the colonized were located on a variety of nexus marked as African. Hence, the colonized could resort to this common experience when the time came to forge an identity on which to stake their claim to self-determination. Africanism, like Americanism, both North and Latin, was a colonial effect. Those identities, which bloomed in the anticolonial struggle, were rooted in the difference established by the colonists to legitimate their domination. African nationalism, for instance, turned to its own advantage the French concept of negritude, reelaborated by Lopold Sdar Senghor [Miller 124]. Constructionist critics of the nation like Eric Hobswabm, who was deeply inuenced by Rosa Luxemburgs view of nationalism as a bourgeois creation, have insisted on presenting the invention of traditions as a fraudulent practice of late, small-scale nationalisms. The tacit and sometimes overt implication is of masses deluded by an intelligentsia that deliberately feeds them symbols and falsies history to attain its particular goals. Yet, setting aside the question of whether all those symbols were created out of nothingand if so, how they could insert themselves so readily into the emotional memory of the masseswhat matters, as Miller says in relation to African nationalists, is not just whether they lied (although that also matters) but how any motivating statement relates to others within the battle for the status of the truth that the struggle for national liberation engenders. For Homi Bhabha, a people is a problem of knowledge that haunts the symbolic formation of modern social authority [Location 146]. One does not have to fully accept the idealism of this statement to agree about the epistemic effects of authority on the conguration of the political map. Hobsbawm, for instance, traces the regulatory division between genuine and spurious

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nations according to a threshold of scale that favors large conglomerates. Below that threshold, ad hoc traditions swarm and obfuscate the historians view, especially in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the golden age of irredentist nationalisms. Constructionists delimit the eld of the true on the basis of the power equation graphically demonstrated on the map. It is no coincidence that they emphasize the role of elites, losing sight of the masses, whose will, memory, and practical intelligence never seem to enter the eld of knowledge. For Miller, however, [n]ationalism is that battle for the status of truth, for the power to determine the dominant lies and truths. In Andersons terms, it is a battle to decide who will imagine the community [124]. In other words, far more relevant than the origin of symbols is the function they perform. Invented rituals work because they are perceived as apt channels for community-shaping energies and desires whose truth lies beyond the critique of an intelligentsia that is always already on the side of the victors. If nationalism is itself the battle for the truth of the political community, then disputes over the nature and status of nationalism are in effect epistemological, not just ideological, skirmishes. Nationalism has been for a long time a cognitive framework, allowing certain narratives and disallowing others. The question is not whether nationalism is true or false, but which truths it allows to be established and which it sties and holds back. Nationalism, Ethnicity, Modernism Nationalism is frequently characterized as irrational and vestigial, a kind of religion, even a fundamentalism. Why is it so? For one thing, nationalism operates on the affective levelhow else could it motivate individuals to ght and sometimes die for referents that transcend their objective selves?and it relies on an interpersonal and intergenerational set of duties, as religion does. Some fundamentals of group solidarity must be in place before such behavior can be elicited, an irrational one, to be sure, if we dene rationality in terms of calculation of individual gain according to very restrictive criteria. Such criteria, however, fail to explain why anomic violence chooses preferably sites that symbolize national integration: schools, post ofces, churches, the Oklahoma City Federal Building. Do these acts not reveal a yearning for a communal spirit, which those buildings symbolize yet people experience only in extreme situations such as national catastrophes and declarations of war? Nationalism is similar to religion in one respect. tienne Balibar reminds us that theology inspired the sanctication of the state. In its early phase, the nation-state adopted a state religion, because the statea secular artifactrequired transcendental sanction. But as Balibar warns, the analogy does not take us very far. In reality, the opposite obtains. If awe before the sacred and the affective bond among members of a religious community could pass successfully into nationalism, it was because the nation-state was a different type of community. Otherwise, it would not have been able to replace religious identity after absorbing its structure, as happened almost everywhere [Balibar 95]. Besides religion, a choice designation of nationalism among its detractors is tribalism. Bhabha offers one example of this semantic abuse when he asks rhetorically, Should we not have remembered that the old Balkan tribes would form again? [59]. Balibar considers this taxonomy both mysticatory and revealing: [m]ysticatory because it imagines nationalism as a regression to archaic forms of community which are in reality incompatible with the nation-state [102]. On the contrary, the appearance of nationalism signals the onset of a process of modernization in social segments that have outgrown a more archaic, exceedingly restrictive, or inadequately structured framework. Its characterization as tribalism is revealing of the substitution of one imaginary

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[form] of kinship for another, a substitution which the nation effects and which underpins the transformation of the family itself [102]. Under national conditions the family has been profoundly altered through the removal of its most characteristic features, sexuality and procreation, from the genealogical order. By creating an abstract or ctive ethnicity, the nation-state erodes pre-national forms of solidarity based on kinship and lineage. Balibar downplays the importance of ethnicity in the segregation of multicultural communities. For him, [t]he real obstacle to the mixing of populations is constituted rather by class differences which tend to reconstitute caste phenomena [103]. Conceding more importance to ethnic symbolism, Anthony D. Smith notes the failure of modernist theories of nationalism, such as Gellners or Andersons, to account for the popular base of national movements. He warns that Any attempt to grasp the post-modern trends of transcendent eclectic globalism and the new localism must, therefore, relate them not merely to processes of modernization, but also to earlier pre-modern identities and legacies that continue to form the bedrock of many modern nations and exert a powerful inuence today [Nations 47]. For Smith nations are sustained by ethnohistories, that is, by discrete legacies made of memories, myths, and symbols. This is not a disposable patrimony that can be thrown overboard to lift like a balloon a sagging political community [13839]. Yet memories fade and myths come under attack as soon as they are identied. Culture is syncretic by denition and thrives on hybridization, while traditions, though sometimes remarkably enduring, are nowhere safe from the ravages of modernization. Smith does not postulate a univocal relation between the modern nation and its ethnic forerunner. Nations synthesize ethnic elements of different origins, although the ethnic group that dominated during the formation of the nation continues to inuence the present through its traditions and symbols. The Uses of the Past and the Nations of the Future Far from reecting an owl of Minerva condition, as Hobsbawn wishfully predicted [183], the upsurge of theoretical concern over nationalism suggests that nations are protagonists in postnational space. If one asks why the nation, far from becoming a casualty of globalization, appears to be adapting marvelously to it, most answers are likely to refer to traditional forms of legitimationto the nation-states historical track, its involvement in established forms of sociality, its consolidation in peoples unreective habits. All those reasons have to do with the nations pastness, with its space of common memories and experiences, in short, with its identity. Pastness, says Immanuel Wallerstein, is a mode by which persons are persuaded to act in the present in ways they might not otherwise act [Construction 78]. True, but pastness is not only a tool to extort consistency or conformity; it can also provide the reasons and the moral strength to resist the latest power scheme. Populations that are imbued with an identity receding a long stretch into the past do not easily let go of their particular experiences or rely on an externally provided identity. A penchant for the past is, of course, typical of nationalism; but it would be a mistake to assume that the past is necessarily cultivated in a nostalgic mode. The past furnishes arguments to the present. And since it is a function of the need to live in the present, it is always a contemporary phenomenon, always, therefore, in the making. The continuing revision of the past is no proof of an intentional fallacy (though it can also be that) but the inescapable condition of the socialization of history. A matter of concern in nationalism is not so much the soft-edged past it promotes as the implications of that past, since pastness that is moralized contains the clues of political action

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in the present. Richard Rorty says it trenchantly: Stories about what a nation has been and should try to be are not attempts at accurate representation, but rather attempts to forge a moral identity [13]. What is subject to censure, therefore, is not nationalisms ctionalization of the past but the moral quality of the identity produced through collective self-representations. To return to a distinction I made earlier, nationalisms that inherited an imperial legacy will produce a different quality of pastness from nationalisms that challenge domination. Traditions are shaped and reshaped in view of present needs and ambitions, and certain lacks in the past augur well for the future. States without national armies, central banks, or customs ofcers are perfectly conceivable in an age of suprastate agencies and outsourcing of services. The state will continue to claim a monopoly on legitimate violence and the redistribution of wealth and opportunities in relatively stable and coherent social spaces. And it will do so in reference to national priorities, which it will continue to dene while satisfying the need (but also exploiting the myth) of representing the national community in the international arena. The enshrining of the popular will as the only acceptable modern form of legitimation has accompanied the development of capitalism beyond the industrial era. Rather than fall away as capitalism moved into its second (or by some accounts third) wave, democratic legitimation has become a threshold of political decorum and, in the West at least, it is formally promoted from the institutions of government. Political liberalization goes hand in hand with the worldwide intensication of capitalist relations. Wallerstein is surely right when he observes, [w]e are growing more, not less, attached to these basic Gemeinschaften formed within our world-historical Gesellschaft, the capitalist world-economy [Construction 84]. This trend suggests that the recent surge of peoples in search of state or quasi-state form is perfectly coherent with advancing globalization. Nevertheless, the states that have appeared after 1989 and that will appear in the future bear little relation to the nineteenth-century standard, the large state that Hobsbawm and others respect. Many of the new states are small and lacking in military resources. They can hardly be put on the same footing with the classic nation-states that resulted from violent processes of unication. But the classic nations themselves are losing some of their traditional features, such as tight borders, state or state-supervised education, a guided economy, and an independent monetary policy. Modernitys map is changing to make room for new entities whose reduced size at once belies their independence and declares that their origin is different from that of the larger states. These pretend-nations and miniature simulacra of true nation-statehood, as Tom Nairn calls them [148], appear and survive in a postimperial climate, which allows them to become economically viable and even important while relying on the new empire of civil society, as Justin Rosenberg calls the new world order [qtd. in Nairn 147], to prevent their incorporation by more powerful neighboring states. If these are pretend-polities, says Nairn, so increasingly are we all [149]. The logical consequence of the world growing interdependent is that independence becomes a premium value. For some reason related to the predatory memory of the human species, small, harmless states do not command a great deal of sympathy, not to mention respect. Hence, captive nations aspiring to achieve interdependent statehood often meet with a hostile projection of the traditional problems of classic nation-statehood, which they neither can nor want to replicate. Ethno-national rituals, militarism, the epic foundational histories, the territorial skirmishes and the threatening moves that bring countries to the brink of war, all these were and remain staples of classic nation-statehood. However, says Nairn, it is both a theoretical and (more seriously) a political mistake to think these things inseparable from national identity or character, nationality politics or the generaland probably growingneed for self-government [149].

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A mistake or not, the association is regularly made to justify opposition to the spread and redistribution of the rights and privileges of nationhood to populations that enjoy or suffer them vicariously. Sometimes the detractors of nationalism are caught in the contradiction of defending existing nation-states from the voracity of ssiparous nationalists while asserting that states are doomed. Others claim to transcend the nation in the name of cosmopolitanism, which assumes the existence of yet another kind of global space: one sustained by universal values that apply uniformly, if not in actual political space, at least in the subjectively shared space of a community of enlightened individuals who happen to enjoy considerable mobility. Typically, cosmopolitans portray nationalism as inherently illiberal and undemocratic, but as Will Kymlicka notes, increasingly the debate is not between liberal cosmopolitanism and bigoted particularism but between liberal cosmopolitanism and liberal nationalism [20]. Liberationist nationalism struggles for the rights of particular groups, but this does not make it a strategy against universal rights. Cosmopolitans make themselves vulnerable to the charge of mistaking the nature of the political communities on which they rely for the range and resonance of their voices. It is above all in those states most secure in the permanence of their political systems, states that can afford a degree of internal skepticism, that intellectuals may question the conditions of citizenship ineffectually but with impunity. Their ostensible aloofness from nationally vital issueswhich can be a response to the embarrassment caused by cultural intimacy with their own national group [Herzfeld 2]often strengthens the state ideologies they rhetorically deplore. One does not have to accept Richard Rortys nationalism of global leadership to realize that it recognizes the role that the United States has cut out for itself after 1989, including the self-given American citizens duty to act ethically and politically on a world power whose legitimacy devolves upon them. This nationalism of the New World Order projects its own kind of space. Voicing a conviction that today has the status of a US dogma, Rorty conceives the globe as a space to be lled with democratic values, which, far from being universal, have their source in one nation, from whence they spread to the rest of the world. Rorty is not a reactionary thinker but a pragmatic one. Whether or not he is right about the universalizable nature of American democracy, he surely is to critique the futile attempts [of academics] to philosophize ones way into political relevance [94]. One cannot insert oneself into the political process while speaking from a transcendent space. Disengagement from practice produces theoretical hallucinations [94], a statement with which Marx would have agreed. Among these hallucinations he includes the alleged disappearance of the nation into an uncharted territory whose sphericity is about all we know with reasonable certainty. Belief in the nations obsolescence, says Rorty, is the major obstacle to tackling problems of social justice, whose resolution will remain bound to national governments for the foreseeable future. It is possible to object to Rortys claim that national governments remain the sole effective agents on matters of social justice, since the power of the United States is not transferable, and even here, it is questionable that Washington exercises its power of arbitration to achieve a semblance of social justice. But what about the more obviously dependent nations, those that are vulnerable to neocolonialism and those that, lacking a state of their own, do not even gure in the global map? Are they dissolving in postnational space? Whatever their ultimate fate may be, they cannot afford to give up the right to democratic self-regulation any more than inuential nation-states can. And this right cannot be exercised if it is not grounded in a common memory and experiences held in common. National forms of political organization do not hinder globalization. Globalization deploys universal principles but needs popular legitimation, and this is likely to remain national.

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The persistence of nationalism becomes less mysterious when one understands that nationalism is the oil that lubricates the state. Furthermore, the increasing interdependence between states does not eject the nation from the political map. One may call the space of interdependence postnational if one wishes, but the entities that relate in this way are national through and through. As Wallerstein reminds us, The interstate system is not a mere assemblage of so-called sovereign states. It is a hierarchical system with a pecking order that is stable but changeable [Construction 82]. If it is not a constellation of symmetrical democracies, then it can be only an arrangement of spaces with an unequal distribution of social, economic, cultural, and political opportunities, in other words, a political map. This pecking order is apparent, quite graphically, in the position taken by heads of state before the camera that records their attendance at G-7 or European summits. Inequalities within this order, according to Wallerstein, lead to ideologies able to justify high rank but also to challenge low rank. Such ideologies we call nationalisms [82]. Nationalism, then, is not an irrational force but a tool, and at times a weapon, in the struggle to alter the picture of world relations and to recreate the space of the world. It is an instrument for progress and also an imposing bulwark for immobility. In the conditions of worldwide interrelatedness, [f]or a state not to be a nation, Wallerstein states, is for that state to be outside the game of either resisting or promoting the alteration of its rank. But then that state would not be part of the interstate system [82]. A postnational state, if such a thing existed, would be literally invisible on the political map. The nationalism of stateless nations or, more exactly, of nations incorporated into a state ruled by a hegemonic nationality is also an attempt to alter rank by securing a place in the interstate hierarchy. Although world-systems theory is often credited with providing the impulse for the surge of the global paradigm, Wallerstein reminds us that the globality conceptualized by world-systems analysts was based on the premise that the interlocking and reciprocally determining parts of the system remained rmly behind the political boundaries of states [End of the World 196]. For him the capitalist World System is the system of nation-states, and there is no reason to believe that the globalization of capital signals their demise. On the contrary, there are grounds to think that the relative relaxation of the states traditional prerogatives will be compensated through a renewed emphasis on its symbolic attributes, such as a normative culture, which in the West could well take the form of a secular fundamentalism. To this end, state-guided cultural institutions and the media conglomerates will receive a growing share of social power and resources, outperforming the military and even the educational apparatus in the task of internal control through the fabrication and enforcement of consensus. Globalization is neither a mishap nor a panacea for the worlds problems. It would be naive to think that the trend can be reversed or that it will mean the superseding of core-periphery tensions in an egalitarian world system magically cleared of ethnic claims and power rationalizations. One way to view globalization, however, is as diffusion (in the sense that the term has in physics, where it means the redistribution of radiation ideally producing an isotropic distribution of intensity). As capital ows become more random and the West-versus-the-rest binary loses meaning while decolonization in the Third World changes into massive migration to the First (to use terms that are themselves quickly becoming obsolete), the imperial legacies of the classic nation-states become less tenable. At this point, the diffusion of political power throughout the system ends up affecting the most rigidly centralized nation-states, which nd themselves less capable of legitimizing their repression of demands for independent interdependence arising within their thinning borders. States are being reconceptualized, and so is the space of politics. National politics will not disappear; it will just multiply its centers. This is not to say that the nation of

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the future must be conceived according to the template inherited from the past. Modernist theories of the nation tended to subsume national constellations under a common origin (the industrial revolution, the impact of print, the emergence of a middle-class readership, and so forth). Such an approach posits a particular historical cause that would have spread with similar effects in different societies subject to similar conditions over a relatively contained period of time. Others emphasize a doctrinal or ideological origin. Certain political conceptions, which happen to have crystallized in a given nation, were blessed with insight into the eternal laws of human reason and thus constitute a truly ecumenical space for the modern subject, regardless of ethnic or cultural origins. Habermass postnational state and Kristevas French national idea of a legal and political pact between free and equal individuals are cases in point. The tension between conceptions of the polity based on historical conditions that may be running out and conceptions based on an ideal abstracted from the real life of societies begs the question: what kind of nationalisms will emerge in the train of globalization? To invoke a jaded dichotomy: will they be ethnic or will they be civic? Will they be cultural or juridical in an abstract way? Will they invent forms of coexistence with other nationalisms, interlocking their needs and interests, or will they continue to compete for the pecking order, giving rise to a violence that is often proportional to the size and population of the state in question? The range of options, I submit, is as wide as that of solutions to the problems arising from concrete situations, each with a specic history of political conict and limited room to maneuver on the political map. WORKS CITED Adorno, Theodor W. Opinion Delusion Society. Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords. Trans. Henry W. Pickford. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 10522. Agnew, John A. Place and Politics in Modern Italy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. Aug, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 1995. Balibar, tienne. The Nation Form: History and Ideology. Trans. Chris Turner. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Ed. tienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein. London: Verso, 1991. 86106. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris: Seuil, 1957. Beck, Ulrich. The Reinvention of Politics: Towards a Theory of Reexive Modernization. Reexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Ed. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. 155. Bhabha, Homi. Cultures In-Between. Questions of Cultural Identity. Ed. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay. London: SAGE, 1996. 5360. ________ . The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: SAGE, 1995. Blaut, James M. The National Question: Decolonising the Theory of Nationalism. London: Zed Books, 1987. Bourdieu, Pierre. Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field. Sociological Theory 12.1 (1994): 118. Bracher, Karl Dietrich, et al., eds. Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. 5 vols. Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt; Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 198187. Canovan, Margaret. Nationhood and Political Theory. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1996. Cards, Salvador, and Joan Estruch. Politically Correct Anti-Nationalism. International Social Science Journal. 144 (1995): 34752.

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