The recent surge in academic theorizing of the nation and nationalism has made it difficult to isolate the actual phenomena from their constructions as objects of theory. This is all the more difficult because most contemporary theories are grounded in unacknowledged political agendas that to a significant extent generate the theories independently of the phenomena. Chapter 1 focuses on “antinational-ist” theories of the nation—theories that deny the reality of nations or fundamentally delegitimate them as retrogressive or inherently oppressive political forms. (...) Such a theory rejects the nation primarily because it is inconsistent with the theorist's uncritically assumed political ideology. In Chapter 2, I examine theories that do not reject the nation, but rather control its form—again in line with a particular political agenda or ideology. Such a theory allows the reality and/or legitimacy of nations, but only after theoretically misconstruing them as consistent with the theorist's specific ideology or by limiting approval to only those nations that are in line with this ideology. I stress the important practical consequences of this: when backed by powerful institutions and forces, such a theory of the nation supports the coerced transformation of minor or post-colonial nations to fit it. These critiques expose the complexities of nations and nationalisms that most theories fail to register, due to their limiting assumptions. In Chapter 3, I develop an account of the nation sufficiently comprehensive to capture this complexity. Perhaps most importantly, my account does not reduce the nation to just one type of social force, political relation, identity characteristic, narrative structure, or “false consciousness”—which virtually all other theories do. All “unity” associated with the nation is partial: any presumed universal unity is always cut by gaps or discontinuities. A nation exists where the discontinuities are bridged by some alternate connector, by another type of relation. I then consider the relationship of nation to race, gender, and sexuality, as well as to state and ethnicity. Finally, I develop a novel concept of national “self-determination” as conceptual self- definition, not territorial control. (shrink)

Abstract Reversing the arguments of Anderson, Gellner, and Hobs?bawm, Liah Greenfeld contends that it is nationalism that produces economic development. Specifically, she claims that nationalism inspired three seminal economic thinkers: Marx, List, and Smith. However, Greenfeld's ideological preferences lead her to a problematic conception of individualism as nationalism, as well as to flawed treatments of Smith, List, and Marx. Nationalism is better understood as an attempt to address the deepening conflict between the imperative of community and the secular trends of (...) the marketplace, which challenge national sovereignty and democracy. (shrink)

This article explores the interplay between the globalization process and the nation/nation-state by examining the case of contemporary Taiwan. Globalization is analyzed along four dimensions: flows of people, flows of culture, economic globalization and international/transnational institutions. Along each dimension, it is found that globalization has had a profound impact upon how cultural and political elites imagine their nation, leading to rising aspirations for nationhood and nation-stateness. Meanwhile, nation-building efforts have deepened Taiwan's embeddedness in globalization, where globalization itself is being employed, (...) both by the state and non-state elites, as a strategy to construct the nation. Three implications suggest that the relationship between `the global' and `the national' be reconceptualized. First, nations and nationalism can be better comprehended against a global/international backdrop, as national identity to a large extent depends upon the imagined or real approval of other nations. Second, there emerges a new strategic alliance between the global and the national, in the sense that globalization gives new ground upon which the nation can be formulated. And finally, by reinforcing certain institutional prerogatives of nations and nation-states, globalization may also lead to an increased desire for nationhood and nation-stateness in cases where the latter two have not been fully realized. (shrink)

This article develops a theoretical framework for analysing the growing public prominence, and rising influence, of transnational religious movements on the contemporary world stage, with specific reference to the case of Agudat Israel, a prominent ‘ultra-Orthodox’ Jewish organization. It first considers the place of ‘religion’ within the context of the historical emergence of the world system of modern nation-states, addressing some of the conceptual ambiguities associated with the ideas of national vs transnational religious formations. The article then provides a historical (...) sketch of the European Jewish encounter with modernity, focusing on the rise of transnational movements like Agudat Israel. Lastly, the article situates Jewish Orthodoxy within a comparative framework for the study of transnational religio-politics. The article concludes by asking whether transnational religious movements might be trapped within the instrumental logic of state governmentality they claim to oppose, and if so, with what consequences. (shrink)

This article examines dominant socio-political questions regarding migration, ‘multiculturalism’, and ‘integration’, as a politics of citizenship (and race) in contemporary (post-colonial) Europe. The argument unfolds through a critique of the nationalist complacencies and racial complicities in Jürgen Habermas’s remarks on ‘multiculturalism’ during the 1990s. With recourse to ‘underclass’ discourse, Habermas’s reflections were themselves a trans-Atlantic metastasis of a distinctly US ‘American’ hegemonic sociological commonsense with regard to, but actively disregarding, the fact of white supremacy. Habermas’s thoughts are critically situated alongside (...) their subsequent metastasis, back across the Atlantic, into Francis Fukuyama’s recent invocations of ‘terrorism’ and his advocacy of the ‘American melting pot’ model as a trans-Atlantic prescription for Europe’s ailments. Treating ‘immigrants’ as a kind of societal illness, both are preoccupied by the same ‘problem’ — non-Europeans (as disaffected ‘minorities’). Thus, these discourses of ‘immigration’ manifest a distinctly post-colonial cancer coursing restlessly through the larger social formation of ‘the West’. (shrink)