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The Renaissance of Nationalism
Nuala C. Johnson
Introduction
December 1989 was a month of monumental change for the world political map in general and for Eastern Europe in particular. It precipitated the most significant changes in the map of Europe since World War II. The Brandenburg Gate, dividing East and West Berlin, was opened on December 22 after 28 years of closure and this symbolic act prefaced the unification of East and West Germany in October 1990. The former dissident Czech writer Vaclav Havel became the non-communist leader of Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989 (later to be divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia), and Romania's dictatorial leader Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed on Christmas Day of that year. The initiation of glasnost and perestroika under Gorbachev's leadership of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s eventually resulted in the break-up of that union, with the establishment of independent states in the Baltic in 1991 and the evolution of the loose confederation of states comprising the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
In long-established states, the 1980s and 1990s also witnessed a rejuvenated sense of national identity and patriotism, culminating in Britain with the Falklands War and in the USA with the Gulf crisis. As Anderson (1983: 12) comments, "the 'end of the era of nationalism,' so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight." As the geopolitical blocs that characterized the Cold War have evaporated, nationalism has reemerged as one of the dominant discourses of recent times. Although global processes appear to be eliding the role of the national, and postmodernism is emphasizing the fractured basis of political and cultural identities, the national state continues to exercise power as a mediating link between the local and the global. Indeed David Harvey (1989: 306) has located the renewed popularity of a nationalist politics in the insecurity generated by capitalist globalization. He claims that "there arc abundant signs that localism and nationalism have become stronger precisely because of the quest for the security that place offers in the midst of all the shifting that flexible accu-
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initiation implies." Whether this insecurity may be more perceived than real, the appeal of place-based national identities in the face of rapid economic transformations endures.
This chapter will treat nationalism not just as an ideology and practice that has recently experienced a revival (Smith 1986), but also as one of the most enduring ideologies that has structured political life over the last two hundred years. As such, nationalism - the desire to bring cultural and territorial imperatives together - will be analyzed by examining key concepts in the lexicon of nationalist discourse, both the symbolic and the literal, to elucidate some of the ways in which we can forge a better understanding of the changes being "mapped out" in the global political landscape.
Imagined Communities
Although there is a huge literature on nationalism (see Hobsbawm 1990), proffering definitions, typologies, explanations, and case studies of the phenomenon, from a theoretical viewpoint Anderson's claim that the nation is an "imagined community," in which there is an assumed cultural communality in spite of class, or geographical and social distance, continues to be a persuasive framework from which to analyze nationalism. Anderson ([1983] 1991) suggests that this imagining emerged in the context of the rise of capitalism in the sixteenth century, the replacement of religious and dynastic orthodoxies with new political and social formations associated with the Reformation and the Enlightenment. These changes were located in an era when there was an extension of the world capitalist economy, which centered on national states (Wallcrstein 1974; Agnew and Knox 1989). The invention of the printing press resulting in the production of cheap books and newspapers, written in the vernacular, enabled geographically dispersed peoples to recognize the existence of others with the same language and to unite culturally as a result. While by the sixteenth century the printing press and its products were experiencing a boom, books were still only available to a small, literate minority. It was increasingly with the introduction of mass education in the nineteenth century that widespread literacy was attained, thus making possible the "mass" imaginings underlying nationalist sentiments (Fishman 1972), and allowing for the break-up of poly-vernacular empires and the unification of localized territorial kingdoms. National newspapers, for instance, provide a daily, visible, and shared image of the nation, while the singing of national anthems facilitates horizontal bonding where "people wholly unknown to each other utter the same verses to the same melody" (Anderson |1983] 1991: 145). This image of unity that transcends class, gender, or "racial" difference is important to the exercise of nation-building.
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Nation-Building
The "imaginative discourse" surrounding the nation can assume many forms (Bhabha 1990), variously centered on conceptions of history, collective memory, habitat and folk culture, traditions, poetic spaces, and symbolic landscapes (Smith 1986; Williams and Smith 1983; Hobsbawm 1990; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1986; Cosgrove and Daniels 1988). In the drive to achieve territorial and cultural consolidation, exercises in nation-building are necessary and are constantly subject to renewal and rejuvenation. These can be overt exercises (even coercive), such as a state's education policy, or they can be much more subtle processes, such as the gradual promotion of particular landscapes as representations of national identity. Daniels (1993: 5) points out that "Landscapes, whether focusing on single monuments or framing stretches of scenery provide visible shape; they picture the nation." Cultural legitimacy must be achieved by the national state which, as Gramsci noted more than half a century ago, seeks to "raise the great mass of the population to a particular cultural and moral level" (Gramsci 1971: 258). In Lastern Europe the evidence suggests that "national" cultural legitimacy was not achieved under communism and that these states today are struggling to grapple with diffuse political and cultural allegiances (e.g., Bosnia). Similarly in postcolonial Africa (e.g., Nigeria) the construction of unified nation-states has proved difficult: linguistic, religious and ethnic tensions have persisted. The remainder of this chapter will examine, with examples, the process of nation-building and some of the challenges that have been raised against the nation-state.
Linguistic Imaginings
Has nationality anything dearer than the speech of its fathers? In its speech resides its whole thought domain, its tradition, history, religion, and basis of life, all its heart and soul . . . With language is created the heart of a people. (Herder 1968 117831)
The cultural definition of identity has frequently rested, as Herder asserts, on linguistic differentiation. Fishman (1972) contends that there are four main reasons why language is useful and often intrinsic to the nationalist cause. First, functionally it can arouse ideas of a common identity. Second, it forms a link with the past; it can safeguard the "sentiment and behavioral links between the speech community of today and its (real or imaginary) counterparts yesterday and in antiquity" (ibid: 44). Third, language becomes a link with authenticity. It provides a secular source of mass communication in modern society and yet can lay claim to uniqueness. I'ourth, a vernacular literature can allow elites to become central to ••> i-i-irinnalist- movement. The politicization of language requires planning.
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The standardization of spelling, grammar and so forth, and a mass education system, achieves a degree of uniformity, at least as far as the written word is concerned. Language planning is crucial for the breaking down of old and the construction of new spatial barriers at the scale of the state. To take an example, the adoption of the Francien dialect of the Paris region as the national dialect evolved through various stages of language planning. The Edict of Villiers-Cotterets by the Paris authorities in 1539 made Parisian French the official language of the royal domains and the edict was facilitated by the first publication of a French dictionary and French grammar text in 1531. The solidification of this process through the revolutionary period and into modern-day France diminished the importance of other languages and dialects spoken within French territory (e.g., Breton, Flemish, and Occitan) and created a general uniformity within the national boundaries. Where language planning is unsuccessful, tensions between linguistic communities forming a state can lead to a separatist politics.
A classic example of linguistic tensions is to be found in Belgium. Created as a state in 1 830, with a merging of Flemish areas in the north and French-speaking lands in the south, Belgium has experienced a series ol constitutional and linguistic crises centered around divisions between the Flemish and Francophone communities (Senelle 1989; Frognier, Quevit, and Stenbock 1982). Although the state has endeavored to overcome some of these divisions by moving toward a federal system of government and by the allocation of limited autonomous powers to the four regions making up the state, cultural tensions continue to affect the Belgian political scene, despite Brus-sels's status as the administrative capital of the transnational liuropcan Union. The cultural conflict has a micro-geography as well as a regional geography. This micro-geography has been expressed in the suburbs of Brussels, where Flemings have feared for their linguistic future as Francophone Bruxellois move to the suburb of Ovcrijsc. This trend stimulated the local Flemish MP to try to quell Francophone migration legally to protect the linguistic and economic well-being of the Flemish population living there: "it is regional not national politics which attracts the Belgian political talent, the language question dominates and permeates all political questions" {Independent on Sunday, October 10, 1993). Similarly the constitutional status of Quebec, in the Canadian context, has dominated the politics of that region since the 1980s (Laponce 1984). After the 1993 general election Lucien Bouchard, leader of the main opposition party, the Bloc Québecois, claimed "No longer, will English-speaking Canada be able to pretend the constitutional quagmire is a thing of the past" (quoted in the Independent, October 27, 1993). Although historically language served as one of the defining characteristics in nation-building projects, today language is an important cause of cultural conflict within many states where communities speaking minority languages arc challenging the hegemony of majority-language cultures (e.g., Spain, France).
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In Hastern Europe, since the liberalization of the political regimes, the rights of linguistic minorities have firmly reentered the political agenda. In Slovakia, for instance, the Hungarian minority have claimed that the Slovaks have systematically pursued an assimilation policy of "educating Hungarians into state-patriotism towards the Czechoslovak nation-state, and a campaign for Hungarians to learn Slovak" (Carter 1993: 247).
Postcolonial states have also had to make the choice of "whose" language to use in the context of independence. The revival of a local language can be an important legitimation for independence. In the case of Ireland's independence from Britain, the state declared Irish the national language and instituted a scries of cultural and educational policies to maintain and extend its usage (Johnson 1992). In the case of a multilingual state such as India, the adoption of an official language (Hindi) has presented great problems, allowing English to remain the official language of administration and government (Scton-Watson 1977). Not only may the language of the colonizer be entrenched in the social relations of independent states, but the landscape can be named in the fashion of the colonizer. Duncan (1989) has highlighted how after independence the Sri Lankan nationalist party renamed the streets of Kandy in the vernacular, an exercise in "symbolic decolonization." Decolonization, however, is rarely a simple process, and just as the naming of streets, towns, and villages in the language of the colonizer is part of the colonial endeavor, the response of the colonized to negotiate their own cultural space after independence is fraught with difficulties. The place of Russian in the context of the Commonwealth of Independent States is a case in point.
Heroic Pasts
While nationalism has a territorial imperative in the acquisition of space or territory for a "nation" to inhabit, the imagined community of nationhood also has a temporal dimension, in which previous periods of "past glory" are resurrected lor present self-aggrandizement (Smith 1986). Hobsbawm and Ranger refer to this process as the "invention of tradition," where the chronology of the historical imagination is eschewed in favor of a focus on particular historical or quasi-historical epochs, when the cultural effervescence of the "nation" was particularly heroic. The geographical and the historical merge in the context of these imaginings as particular places and landscapes become centers for the rituals of collective cultural memory (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1986). McCronc (1992), in the context of Scottish nationalism, argues that the tartanization of Scottish culture involved a selective reading of the "national" past which ignored the real political forces that produced such imaginings. The popularization of the tartan kilt and of tartan patterns associated w'th different clans corresponds with a period of changing economic fortunes in Scotland in relation to the British and the world economy. Not
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only is the constitution of Scottish identity place-based, but the articulation of separatist politics is embedded in the histories and geographies of particular regions in Scotland, for instance the Highlands (Agnew 1987).
The compelling appeal of "invented traditions" is not confined to minority groups within larger states, but is also found in well-established majority cultures. The contemporary nostalgia for the past has been tentatively linked to public dismay with the purported anonymity of high modernity, where identities are increasingly being fragmented in favor of more situated and flexible ones (Urry 1990). The abandonment of some older myths and traditions associated with national cultures has seen their replacement with new or reconstructed ones. Tourism and the heritage industry frequently reinforce images of a heroic national past, packaged lor public, popular consumption (Hewison 1987; Wright 1985). New technologies, new forms of museum display, and the "theme-parking" of historical narratives may have replaced the older traditions of popular ritual (e.g., parades), but the history purported to be represented through these installations often merely anchors conceptions of national identity on new terrains (Lowcnthal 1991). While, in the nineteenth century, national languages, school history textbooks, and religion formed the nexus of national imaginings, in the late twentieth century the heritage industry and the associated historicizing of interior design and architecture play a similar role.
In Britain the resurgence of national feeling over the past two decades is attributed to a number of factors: to the decline of Britain in the world economy as the stockmarkets of New York and Tokyo overtake that of London; to challenges from Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland to English cultural hegemony through devolved government; and to immigration from non-European states (Samuel 1989). One reaction to these processes is a rcassertion of "national" cultural values. The Prince of Wales, in A Vision of Britain, published in 1989, articulated this loss of national prowess in postwar Britain and especially in London. The image envisioned by the prince "is a London restored, re-visioned as landscape, framed by lavish reproductions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century oil paintings" (Daniels 1993: 1 1). Using Canaletto's painting of London as a blueprint and looking today at St. Paul's Cathedral and environs, where towers disrupt "the symbolic exchange between St. Paul's and the City, the solid image of a community of interest which framed London's supremacy as the centre of world trade" (ibid: 13), the prince is imagining the city being recast in the image of London as glorious, and by inference Britain as supreme. Daniels illustrates that the cathedral had been subject to various interpretations over the centuries and that it was not always eulogized on architectural or civic grounds, yet the prince's view eschews the historical record for a more heroic view of St. Paul's in the history of the nation. The emergence of royal interest in the architecture of the city corresponds with the revival of royal pageantry in the 1970s and early 1980s. The furore generated in the USA in 1991 by the exhibition "The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the
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Frontier 1820-1920" at the National Museum of American Art, underlines the unwillingness of many, and of state representatives in particular, to have their nation-building mythologies challenged. As Watts (1992b: 116) claims, the exhibition's "unflinching account of the brutality of the frontier - a space that . . . has been ideologically formative in the construction of a particular national identity - did not lie well with the jingoistic and nationalist sentiments rampant on the Hill [Capitol Hill]."
The potency of a heroic history rejuvenated for current political reasons can be particularly skewed in the context of civil strife. The historical memory is continually jogged to assert cultural legitimacy and it is incorporated into the iconography of everyday life. In Northern Ireland, where there has been a failure to establish an agreed history and an agreed interpretation of the past, history is a source of constant dispute. Northern Ireland is not so much an exceptional case but an example of more general processes writ large. Varying interpretations of history are popularly consumed through graffiti, street parades, carpet painting of pavements, and wall murals adorning the housing estates there. While street festivals such as London's Notting Hill Carnival may be celebrations of local cultural resistance to dominant groups (Jackson 1988), in Northern Ireland they are heavily politicized dramas of binary opposition carrying important symbolic and material consequences. For the Loyalist population of Northern Ireland, the historic moment that links present-day political strife with past antecedents is the accession of William of Orange to the crown. Wall murals of "King Billy" and his victories assert for Unionists a legitimation of their current political existence (Rolston 1991), and the painting of such murals has a long history in Northern Ireland (Loftus 1990). The murals are principally "concerned with the entrenchment of existing structures and beliefs" (Jarman 1992: 161) and these beliefs rely upon a particular view of the past. The annual celebration of July 12 in Northern Ireland's commemorative calendar and the annual disputes surrounding the routing of Orange parades (e.g., at Drumcree) underscore the significance of space in the representation of cultural memory.
Mythical figures as well as historical ones can also articulate conceptions of national identity (Smith 1986). In Belfast, members of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) have appropriated the figure of Cuchulain in their wall murals. Traditionally Cuchulain represented "early valour, miraculous feats, generosity, self-sacrifice, beauty and loyalty - evoked an archaic epoch of nobility and liberty, in which the full potential of Irishmen was realized" (ibid: 195). The use of Cuchulain in Loyalist wall murals is an attempt, according to Rolston, "to retrieve a history beyond 1690, and the Battle of the Boync" (quoted in The Irish Times, January 19, 1993). Rather than viewing this mythical figure as a Gael, Loyalists have redefined him as one defending Ulster from the Gaelic queen Maeve. Ironically, then, the interpretations awarded to "golden ages" vary across political communities and create tensions in the discursive practice of myth-making.
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While heroic histories form an important part in the establishment of an "imagined community," these pasts arc also intimately linked with heroic people in nationalist discourse, and these people are embodied in monuments and statuary that adorn the towns and cities of national states.
Monuments and Nationalism
If nationalism appropriates periods of the past to represent its continuity, it also appropriates historical persons, events, and allegorical figures to reinforce its cultural existence. In the nineteenth century public statuary had firmly entered the public domain (Johnson 1994). Monuments dedicated to important figures in the nation's history began to emerge on a large scale, and such a process was fraught with dissension and disturbance. In Eastern Europe historic figures associated with the evolution of these states arc being gradually replaced. Statues of Lenin and Stalin have been systematically removed from the public sphere in towns and cities of the former Eastern bloc - "Moscow has set up a Commission on Cultural Heritage to deal with the statues . . . Few [of the 123 Lenins] will be kept; most will go to the Museum of Totalitarian Art" (quoted in Bonifice and Fowler 1993: 126).
The erection of public monuments often is an intrinsic part of the nation-building process. As Mossc (1975: 8) effectively posits, "The national monument as a means of self-expression served to anchor national myths and symbols in the consciousness of the people, and some have retained their effectiveness to the present day." They commemorate real historical figures such as political leaders, writers, adventurers, and military leaders. Statues also commemorate war or arc used to personify for the national community abstract concepts such as justice and liberty (Warner 1985). Statues articulate in a material and ideological fashion the collective memories of a nation's past, but the choice of "whose" heroes and "which" events to commemorate reveals the process by which groups achieve hegemonic positions within a state. The geography of monuments articulates a hierarchy of the sites of memory within a nation and the relative power of different groups.
While the nation-state remembers its founding heroes, it also commemorates its wars - they can be wars of independence, international conflict, or even civil strife. The war memorial varies in iconography depending on whether it is commemorating defeat or victory. Smith (1986: 206) notes that "Creating nations is a recurrent activity, which has to be renewed periodically," and the construction of public monuments is one way in which this renewal and rcinterpretation of the national past is articulated.
War memorials that personify particular military leaders tend to be heroic in proportion and may use iconography from previous eras to convey the strength and national importance attached to an individual. The Nelson Column, in London's Trafalgar Square, adopts a design drawn from the iconography of ancient Roman imperial victories (Mace 1976). While it
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took a long period finally to execute the design of the column and the ancillary figures surrounding the monument, the square itself has frequently been the focus of political protest in London. As a site for lobbying collective memory, Trafalgar Square has simultaneously played an ambiguous role as a center of public protest where the national state has been challenged (ibid). Memorials to World Wars I and II vary considerably in scale and iconography. They can be simple commemorative plaques placed in towns and villages listing local people who were killed, or they can be colossal national monuments located in prestige positions within capital cities (e.g., the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London). Annual pilgrimages to these memorials and the laying of wreaths at their feet reinforces the states' recognition of the importance of war and the losses it incurs, but these occasions also enable the mass of the population to participate openly in a national event (K4osse 1975). The tone of the inscriptions on war memorials replicates those found on headstones in cemeteries, but unlike the latter they tend to conceal the class and gender divisions of the people they represent. In this sense they function as "nationalized" monuments.
Not all war memorials are heroic in their symbolism, nor is popular support for their construction universal. Where the support for war is contested and ambiguous, the building of a memorial can highlight some of the underlying fissures within the national community. The case of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington is a notable example. As a result of the public's antipathy to America's involvement in Vietnam the conception of a monument proved difficult and raised several issues for the collective memory (Wagner-Pacifini and Schwartz 1991). Rather than being a unifying process, the debates surrounding the construction of a memorial reflected in the popular consciousness the dissension from and ambiguity toward the state's policy in Vietnam. The eventual design of the monument conspicuously deviated from other memorials. First the architect, chosen through public tender, was a female student of Chinese-American descent. She was not an architect with an established record, she was female, and the choice of someone with her ancestry was questioned given that the memorial was commemorating a war which took place in Southeast Asia (Sturken 1991). The politics underlying the commission reflected differing attitudes toward the war. Although the positioning of the monument on the Mall in Washington reinforced it as a national icon and part of the nation's history, the iconography of the design deviated radically from that of other memorials in the capital. The listing of each individual soldier killed in the conflict, and represented in chronological order rather than in order of rank, made it non-hierarchical in conception. Both these features offered an interpretation of the war which treated each casualty as equal in significance and which suggested that the war was not a heroic event in the nation's history (Sturken 1991; Wagner-Pacifini and Schwartz 1991). The monument functioned at both an allegorical and a literal level, and in nationalist discourse it served to heal the wounds of a nation in mourning, a nation that did not offer
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unequivocal support for the state's actions. In contrast to more heroic depictions of war the iconography and ritual associated with visiting the monument centered the story of Vietnam on individual suffering within the broader framework of a national army. It differs therefore from memorials to the "unknown soldier" where the collective loss is embedded in the anonymity of a dead soldier. The design of the Vietnam Memorial did not satisfy all interests in the US and a more conventional war memorial was erected beside the "wailing" wall (Sturken 1991). Three bronze statues of soldiers, two white and one black, framed the wall in a more orthodox form, masculine, heroic, and anonymous. The recent addition of a new monument dedicated to the women/nurses in Vietnam underlines the gendered division of labor in a war context, and reclaims a more active role for women in the war effort.
The nationalist discourse in which war memorials are conceived is confirmed by the fact that they rarely acknowledge the loss experienced by the "enemy." They are not memorials to all those lost in war, but arc interpreted in terms of "national" losses and "national" geopolitical considerations. War memorials commemorate "our" dead not just "the" victims of conllict.
For separatist groups within larger states statuary also articulates the divisions within the national polity, and competing public monuments can be erected to reflect this division. Pierre Nora argues that there are dominant and dominated sites of memory. The dominant "spectacular and triumphant, imposing, and generally imposed - either by a national authority or by an established interest... The second are places of refuge, sanctuaries of spontaneous devotion and silent pilgrimage" (quoted in Flung 1991: 107). In China the symbolic meaning of Tiananmen Square and its monuments encompasses the ongoing history of China itself and the competing political ideologies that the state has experienced. The inscription on the monument to the People's Heroes links "separate historical phases into a continuum" (ibid: 99) from the older revolutions of the 1840s to the new revolution of the 1940s. The protest by students in Tiananmen Square and their erection of a statue of the Goddess of Democracy "signified consecutive stages in a pursuit for a visual symbolic of the new public" (ibid: 109). The suppression of that protest and the removal of the monument confirms the hegemony of the state over sections of the population within its territory (Hershkovitz 1993).
Gender and Nationalism
To a large degree analyses of nationalism have been presented as gender-neutral discourses. The imperatives of creating a national "imagined community" have excluded a discussion of gender cleavages, where the desire to create a national imagined community disguises other sources ol identity such
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as class, gender, and "race". Yet, as Warner (1985) points out, pictorial representations of nations have generally been expressed through female allegorical figures: Britannia, Marianne, and Lady Liberty are all examples. Female iconography frequently features in public commissions "because the language of female allegory suits the voices of those in command" (ibid: 37). That the female body has been used to personify concepts such as justice, equality, and liberty is ironic given women's lack of access to such freedoms, especially as nations emerge. Today "feminine" characteristics continue to be ascribed to powerful female political figures. In the case of Margaret Thatcher, where the label "Iron Lady" was used to highlight her tough, resolute, and determinedly "masculine" approach to politics, she was simultaneously depicted as mother, housewife, and her father's daughter (ibid).
In nationalist discourse men arc active agents and women are typically passive onlookers. Although feminist critiques and histories of nationalist movements have emphasized the role of women revolutionaries as active, determined participants in particular contexts (Ward 1983), dominant theories of nationalism continue to ignore the ways in which gender relations inform conceptions of national identity. The ways in which women's voices arc frequently silenced in nation-building projects, despite their role in the achievement of independence, underlines the conventional hegemony of the male voice. That women's role as homemakers was enshrined in the 1937 Irish constitution aptly demonstrates this silencing process. A consideration of the relationship between women and the state in the construction of national citizenship reveals some of the ways in which nation-building practices view men's and women's roles differently. Women's role in the development of national consciousness has often taken specific routes. First as the biological reproducers of a nation's population, encouragement to reproduce often links nationalistic arguments with a duty to motherhood. In Croatia, for example, abortion was abolished by the nationalist party in 1992 for fear that a falling birthrate would threaten the stability of the new nation. Second, women have been regarded as reproducing the boundaries of the national group and thus intcr-cthnic marriage has been periodically discouraged because it might dilute the ethnic purity of nation. In Nazi Germany extreme forms of this racialized way of thinking existed, although antipathy towards intermarriage still finds expression across a range of cultural contexts. Finally, as the principal sociali/ers of small children women have been accorded the responsibility of acting as the ideological purveyors of a nation's culture through transmitting it to their young offspring in songs, fairy-tales, and so forth. Thus although, in Eugene Delacroix's painting Liberty Leading the People, a female allegory is pointing the path to freedom in revolutionary France (Agulhon 1981), in analyses of nationalism women arc seldom leading but loyally following their male protagonists. While the achievement of political independence in no way necessarily leads to the emancipation of women (Kandiyoti 1991), the dearth of studies that deal with gender relations and nationalism makes ucncrali/.ations difficult.
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Nationalism and Territory
While issues of language, symbolic landscape, cultural icon, and gender all play a role in the articulation of a nationalist politics, they also serve to delimit, solidify, or negotiate the boundaries of national space. The marking of the territorial expanse of the nation has been crucial both to the definition and disputation of national borders. Connecting historical processes of nation-building with a specific delineated territory has been central to the geography of nationalism. Anderson (1988: 24) noted this when he claimed that "The nation's unique history is embodied in the nation's unique piece of territory - its 'homeland' . .. The time has passed but the space is still there." Confirming the link between a specific people and a place has been hotly disputed, however, as the cultural geography of places rarely represents an ethnically homogeneous piece of land. Consequently the demarcation of national territory has been fraught with difficulties which at times has resulted in the most violent of territorial disputes. The redrawing of Europe's political map after World War I highlighted the problems of attempting to draw boundaries that would "contain" individual ethnic groups. In the instance of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, created in 1919, the multi-ethnic character of the new state survived while a powerful, centralized form of government maintained control. However, the collapse of Yugoslav government in the 1980s and Serbs' desire for territorial control over the region precipitated violent confrontation, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina which comprised an ethnically diverse set of regions containing Croats, Serbs, and Muslims. The multi-layering of different linguistic, religious, and ethnic groupings in the region, when confronted with a dominant group which sought to achieve ethnic purity within the region through the "cleansing" of those deemed culturally different, led to the most ferocious and bitter dispute over territory, citizenship, and human rights. At the regional and local scale bitter confrontation ensued and as clashes between the different ethnic groups escalated into wholesale war the international community intervened in an effort to resolve the territorial dispute and cease the fighting (Johnston 1999a). The territorial dimension of nationalism cannot be underestimated in any discussions of the building of an "imagined community" of nationhood. The occupation of, and control over, space and the delineation of boundaries has been the source of many regional, national, and international conflicts.
Conclusion
At the beginning of the twenty-first century the decline of the nation-state as the basic structure of global political organization would appear to be nowhere in sight. While local and global processes are increasingly challenging the national state, and the notion of "multiculturalism" is gaining
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some ground, the evidence suggests that political and cultural identities are still articulated broadly within a national "imagined community."
This chapter has emphasized the ways in which the "imaginings" that consolidate the nation-state occur and can change through time. Whether the basis of nationalist imaginings be linguistic, historical, or symbolic (or combined), the global restructuring that has taken place since the end of the Cold War appears to have raised nationalist discourse more profoundly than ever on the global political stage.
f\ Global Regulation and ^ Trans-State Organization
Susan M. Roberts
Introduction
When, in 1994, 1 wrote this chapter for the first edition of this book, I am sure that the political geography of trans-state organization was far from gripping stuff for most readers. Since then, so much has changed. The politics of global regulation and trans-state organization have become key issues mobilizing thousands around the world. The now infamous "Battle in Seattle" that accompanied the 1999 World Trade Organization meetings marked the dawn of a new era in public awareness of the power of trans-state institutions currently regulating the global economy. Since Seattle, there have been high-profile protests accompanying almost every meeting of any institution formally or informally associated with regulating global affairs. Many people in many different places, often with vastly different agendas, have become concerned and angry about the shape global regulation is taking. Indeed, in this chapter I argue that currently we are witnessing and participating in the establishment of a new order of global regulation. Struggles over the nature and operations of trans-state regulatory institutions are bringing into focus the question of how regulation at the global level may or may not function in a democratic way, given the huge imbalances in the political and economic power of different states, and given the growing salience of internationalized capital - for example in the form of transnational corporations.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is a most significant trans-state organization, but it is far from being the only trans-state organization engaged in global regulation. There arc many organizations set up to regulate particular aspects of trans-state activity. For example, since I 875 there has been an organization to coordinate and regulate international mail services (now the Universal Postal Union). Since World War II (1939-45) though, attempts have been made to establish an institutional framework of organizations that would regulate key areas of international economic and political relations. The resultant institutions served to regulate and in a sense