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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: state

Pro Patria aut Pro Natio?

23 Tue Feb 2016

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Opinion and Response, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on Pro Patria aut Pro Natio?

Tags

banal nationalism, constitutional patriotism, India, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jürgen Habermas, JNU, jus constitutio, jus sanguinis, jus soli, Michael Billig, nation, nationalism, patriotism, state

On the sidelines of the greater debate about freedom of speech and limits to state power, there is a tango of polemics going on regarding patriotism and nationalism. This is a recurring exchange in India, the latest round of sonic warfare being sparked by the drama at Jawaharlal Nehru University; an earlier episode occurred when a junior minister was perceived as chest-thumping about an Indian incusion into Burma in pursuit of terrorists. The hanging of terrorists Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru in November 2012 and February 2013 also stirred this topic, albeit in the background of a debate on the death penalty.

In this rather boring dispute, the lazy thinking of one side is matched only by the inarticulate stumbling of the other. Patriotism, we are to understand, is the love of one’s country without harbouring ill-will or hatred against any other country. Nationalism, on the other hand, is an aggressive monster we should all know better than to indulge in after the horrific lessons of early 20th century Europe. The implicit re-verification of Godwin’s law not withstanding, this strikes as a rather restricted view. First, it assumes under patriotism, questionably, qualities of the nation in their milder and more positive manifestation, and second, it limits nationalism to only its extreme elements, making it easier to dismiss intellectually by making the fringe mainstream .

What does ‘love of one’s country’ mean? Strictly speaking, ‘country’ implies land or territory. With no additional implication of culture or bonding with other citizens in an imagined community, patriotism comes off as cold, impersonal, and somehow incomplete. What is there to love about a land without its people? Does an Italian patriot love the boot-shaped geography of his land or the words of Boccaccio and Dante, the wines of Piedmont, and the music of Verdi that bind him to that land incidentally? Furthermore, a loyalty to territory alone comes off as anachronistic in a globalised and multicultural world wherein international bodies, corporations and other non-governmental organisations increasingly exist fluidly across borders.

A phrase that is sometimes thrown up is constitutional patriotism. Coined by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas in the mid- to late 1980s, it essentially holds that people should form a political attachment to liberal democratic principles rather than to the cultural nation. Patriotism, understood thus, is not nationalism-lite: it is a political grouping of an entirely different dynamic, one that is not rooted in the historical specificity of a group but is an imposition of values marketed as universal.

Such ideas of civic nationalism are not new – the American Revolution and Revolutionary France were among the first to declare such ideals. However, practice was different from theory and the new universalism found few takers; Napoleon’s Jewish emancipation was reversed and the United States controlled immigration and maintained slavery. Today, it is only in the Americas that citizenship is by jus soli – place of birth – rather than jus sanguinis – bloodline. In this, they were aided by genocide and a whole new hemisphere in which to settle without the ties of the Old World to influence new beginnings. Most states, however liberal, have found cultural ties of language, faith, and ethnicity to be better bonds between citizens than abstract principles. Constitutional patriotism would take us further into abstraction to jus constitutio which is unlikely to find any subscribers.

Nationalism, on the other hand, is a feeling of group identity based on kinship, faith, language, or other cultural markers. These nebulous sentiments are made concrete not just via the cultural creation of the nation – the national anthem, the national flag, national epics, national heroes – but also mundane and quotidian acts such as the recitation of the Saraswati vandana in school, the casual display of the national flag on buildings and in offices, sporting events and national teams, and interactions with other shared symbols such as currency, stamps, and road names.

Nationalism has suffered from a negative reputation, perhaps a tad unfairly. Though the catastrophe of two world wars has been indelibly imprinted on the world’s psyche, the body count of other -isms, arguably far more horrendous, has received a generous wave off. There is no reason for the intellectual opprobrium towards nationalism alone given the nastier tendencies of other political and cultural movements. In the fear over its explosive divisiveness, the power of nationalism to bring people together is completely overlooked, a power so profound and overwhelming that it inspires solidarity among strangers and even sacrifice. It is doubtful if a modern state can be built on less.

Historically, a community of ideas has not been able to wrest belonging from the nation. Lenin famously claimed that he was betrayed by European communists on the eve of World War I as they gathered under nationalist banners. Mao had a similar grievance with Soviet communism post Stalin, that Moscow’s belief in its leadership of the Communist movement stemmed from Russian nationalism rather than any true internationalism. Today, the European Union struggles to fashion Europeans out of Englishmen, Netherlanders, and Czechs. Interestingly, the EU is also an example of how it has been easier to share sovereignty than dilute national identity – despite repeated rumours of its demise, the supranational grouping has clung on as an important yet secondary identity, perhaps bound by common history and faith more than the memoranda out of Brussels.

In India, the Leftist fear of nationalism is that the country’s overwhelmingly Hindu past would have to be conceded. For a state that has so far extended special privileges to select communities in the guise of minority rights, this would fundamentally alter the idea of India, so much so that it might even be called the birth of the Second Republic. Though it is stated with pride that multiple nations reside within the Indian state, it ought to be considered how many such experiments have been successful in the past – none come to mind. Perhaps the weakness of Indian democracy lies in the inevitable and constant pandering to these national identities?

Instead of trying to be fashionably post-national, it is better to harness the communitarian nature of nationalism to forge a more stable union wherein no group is threatened but neither is any given special dispensation. A confident nation will be a mature state, one which may not only see better governance at home but also be a more valuable member of the international community. As for the excesses of nationalism in the past, what idea have men not abused? Perchance the fault is not in our stars or ideas, dear Brutus, but in ourselves.


This post appeared on FirstPost on February 25, 2016.

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Riflessioni: Modernity And Its Parochialism

14 Wed May 2014

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, South Asia, Theory & Philosophy

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

Ancient Greece, Church, classical modernity, dharma, early modernity, Enlightenment, Europe, freedom of religion, Hinduism, homo socialis, India, Industrial Revolution, ISIS, Jainism, Kızıl Avlu, late modernity, materialism, nation, post-modernity, proselytism, Ptolemy I, Reformation, religion, Renaissance, Rome, secularism, Serapis, Shaivite, Shintoism, Sikhism, state, Vaishnavite

One of the fundamental questions many scholars of 19th and 20th century Europe and Empire ponder about is if the nature of modernity might have been different without the ascent of European imperialism. Not just the structure but even the vocabulary of modernity compromises the scope of inquiry by privileging and normatising forms of experiential knowledge peculiar to the European history. Measured against a European norm, other regions of the globe often appear to be lacking, incomplete, or failed, further propagating the idea of “first in the West, then the Rest.”

In Europe, modernity has meant a transition from a period of feudalism, “divine right of kings,” and the central role of religion in public life to an era of capitalism, the nation-state, and rationality. In essence, it has meant the spread of doubt made easy by improvements in communication; first came the printing press and the birth of newspapers, then the telegraph, and finally the internet. The sureties of religion were steadily eroded via the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the Age of Physics. The authority of the Church in royal succession, law, inter-state relations, education, and of course, spirituality, was challenged by old ideas resurfacing during the Renaissance and new ideas on the administration of the faith itself during the Reformation. An investigative spirit, combined with material advancement that could advance curiosity and scepticism, moved society out of the grasp of the Church and its traditions.

Despite its claims to universalism, the recession of the sacred in public life is a historical particularity of medieval Europe. Unlike Europe, large parts of the Orient escaped domination by exclusivist, monotheistic cults. In Japan, Shintoism held sway and India saw the flowering of dharmic faiths like Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism despite invasions and aggressive missionary activity from foreign lands. Though, from a modern perspective, Asian non-exclusive belief systems did have their own grotesque social problems, they did not claim a monopoly on interpretation of the world and the battles between theology and science were largely avoided; for example, Ramanujan’s belief in astrology or CV Raman’s fear of the occult powers of a solar eclipse did not interfere in their practice of the rational sciences.

The lack of a central authority in dharmic religions gave an institutional guarantee against widespread zealotry. As a result, an official profession of faith by a state did not give rise to inter-state strife; in India, the notion of advaitins going to war against dvaitins, or Shaivites against Vaishnavites, over theological differences would seem absurd.

The parochialism of modernity is not necessarily a function of geography but of time; Asia has a few examples of societies that did not need secularisation to modernise but examples exist closer to home too; this is not a tale of East vs. West.  The Ancient Greeks and the Roman Empire exhibited a similar pluralism of faith and tolerance to doubt as Shintoism or the dharmic faiths of India did. The ruins of several Roman temples to the gods of their conquered subjects stand testimony around the Mediterranean. The Kızıl Avlu in Bergama, for example, was built by Emperor Hadrian in the early 2nd century in honour of the Egyptian goddess Isis and the Graeco-Egyptian god Serapis. The very creation of Serapis in the 3rd century BCE by Ptolemy I also speaks to the relative religious harmony in ancient Europe.

The link between modernity and secularism is, outside a defined bubble of time and space, tenuous at best. Yet the vehemence with which secularism is peddled in societies it is alien to leads one to wonder whether the formal process and the content have been conflated with Europe standing in as the universal. Secularism was a solution to Europe’s problem with missionary zeal and the lack of freedom of inquiry; outside these parameters, its usefulness as a feature of modernity is questionable.

One defence of secularism might be to cite the social problems in religious societies, particularly the subjugation of women and the control over sexual functions and orientation. In a theocratic state, who will lend voice to the subaltern? Strictly speaking, this is not a problem of secularism but of orthodox customs that have accreted in communities over time. Such dilemma exist even in a liberal state that allows freedom of religion; for example, would a secular, liberal state remain neutral and allow girls that have attained puberty to be married off as per religious customs or would it insist that a “modern morality” prohibits marriage before attaining adulthood?

These problems cannot be escaped by professing faith in a legal abstraction like secularism. What is necessary is an ability to reflect upon custom critically and maintain, modify, or abandon them. This is not easy in systems that are based upon revelation but more open systems of inquiry are not affronted at the mention of reform. As Adi Shankaracharya argues, if experience differs from shruti, then the shruti must be discarded. In fact, Hinduism views dharma as a function of kaala, desha and paristhiti – this is the true content of secularism and not the legalistic, contractual understanding citizens have with the modern state.

Unfortunately, the Raj seeded the idea of a consolidated Hinduism akin to the Abrahamic faiths. The rationalisation and ordering of knowledge – another modern phenomenon – could not grasp the plurality of Indic religions and customs within an Abrahamic template. Yet the projected similarity has falsified many analyses of religion and politics in society when comparing Europe with other societies.

One might argue that a principle that does not fit with India’s past may be well suited to its present reality – the country today harbours not just Indic faiths but Abrahamic ones too. However, India remains a nation-state with an undisputedly Indic identity. To acknowledge this would only be as sectarian as Christmas being a national holiday in several Western states – secular or otherwise, Europe and the western hemisphere have strong Judaeo-Christian roots that cannot be denied any more than India’s links to its past.

To argue that rejecting secularism would transform India into a Hindu theocracy again makes the mistake of grafting a concept foreign to the Indian experience onto its landscape. The decentralised nature of the religion, not to mention the diversity of the faith itself, makes it virtually impossible to develop a strong and centralised theocracy. Furthermore, the role of Hindu priests was never as overarching as that of a Pope or Caliph; even though Hinduism put the priestly class at the top of the social order, actual political and financial power rested with other groups.

Even when implemented with textbook perfection, secularism remains an unwise idea for several Asian societies. In a secular state, the relationship between faiths that practice proselytism and those that do not would be the same as that of a fox on the jury at a goose’s trial. Both sides assert the same right of religious freedom albeit expressed in a manner antithetical to the other and any position the state takes will advantage one over the other.

The question is if a non-secular – in the formal sense – modernity can give us meaning and a humane existence without losing freedom or truth. Can modernity escape becoming, as David Kolb describes it in The Critique of Pure Modernity, a dilemma of rootless freedom versus oppressive tradition? Is there place for tradition and rational inquiry in the same pantheon? Ramanujan and Raman certainly thought so.


This post appeared on FirstPost on May 27, 2014.

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Thinking about Nationalism

02 Mon Apr 2012

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Theory & Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on Thinking about Nationalism

Tags

Adrian Hastings, ancestry, Anthony Smith, Antonio Negri, Arjun Appadurai, Benedict Anderson, culture, David Goodblatt, Eric Hobsbawm, Ernst Gellner, ethnies, Eugen Weber, Herman Lebovics, homeland, John Breuilly, memory, Michael Hardt, Miroslav Hroch, myth, nation, nation-state, nationalism, Partha Chatterjee, Prasenjit Duara, print, race, state

Nations, like G-d, have proven to be quite elusive: intellectuals and scholars have proclaimed both to be dead, both have found ingenious ways of resurfacing in mainstream society, and yet nobody can seem to come to an agreement as to what either one exactly is. By 1900, nations-states, amorphous as they were, had become the standard unit of play in international politics, representing the aims and aspirations of a group of people that had, as Benedict Anderson aptly put it, imagined themselves into convenient groups. However, other criteria for separating groups had also been floated, primarily class and religion. These did not, however, inspire the bonds that would control territory or secure the political interests of a group. The death of the nation-state was proclaimed, perhaps in the backdrop of the two World Wars and the Holocaust, optimistically hoping that men would finally beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. The decolonisation that occurred in the aftermath of the Second World War, however, was fuelled by fierce nationalist sentiment. If anything, the wars only underscored the necessity for each imagined community to control its own destiny. The world distracted by the Cold War, this went unnoticed with the proclamation of universal ideals like democracy and socialism. For Anderson, it was only in 1979 with the Chinese invasion of Vietnam that burning yet under-emphasised nationalism was revealed. The fall of the Soviet Union also rekindled the embers of nationalism within the Soviet republics as well as in Eastern Europe. Although the recent rise of fundamentalism has been under the guise of religion, there exist, in fact, fractures within the movement along national and sectarian lines. Thus, nation-states seem more prevalent than scholars have posited or hoped for.

Indeed, while the meaning of nation has been hotly contested in academic debates on the nature of nationalism, it seems possible to discern three distinct trends.  The first is characterized not by a consensus on what constitutes the nation but by the agreement that such a thing exists extra-referentially and whose antecedents can be located in past social and cultural groupings. In contrast, scholars of the second trend, while also affirming the subjecthood of the nation, define it as a distinctively modern development that could only have emerged as a corollary of industrialization and the emergence of large-scale capitalism. Finally, adherents of the third trend, who are in the minority, argue that the nation is not a subject or object but a set of relationships and thus constitutes a dynamic network cluster in which power is created and through which it is channelled.  The nation, in this view, does not possess an actual moment-to-moment existence but must be reconstituted at the instant of each power transaction.  Thus it is a phenomenological object whose existence is contingent on the viewpoints and relationships of those who construct its boundaries.

A well-known scholar of European nationalism, Miroslav Hroch, defines nation as a large social group integrated by a combination of several kinds of objective relationships and their subjective reflection in collective consciousness. These relationships include a memory of some common past, treated as a ‘destiny’ of the group, a density of linguistic or cultural ties enabling a higher degree of social communication within the group than beyond it, and a conception of the equality of all members of the group organized as a civil society. Although the national unit is here characterized by social and political relationships, it is still a subject that exists a priori and must be endowed with the characteristics of nationhood.  In fact, Hroch’s dynamic account of nation-development presupposes the nation as the subject of a linear, teleological model of Enlightenment History and implies the inevitability of its development in the modern era.  In a similar way, Anthony Smith also affirms the existence of the nation as an subject, situating its origins in the existence of ethnic communities (ethnies) that share the following attributes: 1. a collective proper name, 2. a myth of common ancestry, 3. shared historical memories, 4. one or more differentiating elements of common culture, 5. an association with a specific homeland, and 6. a sense of solidarity for significant portions of the population. Clearly both Hroch and Smith locate the materials for the building of a nation in its mythic past and, while not denying the createdness of the nation, they affirm the nation’s continuity and its material existence.  For Smith and Hroch, then, the nation seems to represent continuity rather than rupture with the past. This school obviously sees a steady presence of nations even through the twentieth century since the criteria by which they evaluate nationhood was hardly ever eroded despite occasional ideological movements.

In contrast, scholars of the second group, such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, John Breuilly and Eric Hobsbawm, characterize the nation as an artifact of modernity, to which it is inextricably linked. Gellner defines in Nations and Nationalism a nation as a body of individuals that have been initiated into a common high culture by the processes of industrialization and the institutions of modernity. This primarily cultural definition emphasizes the crucial role of the transition from agrarian to industrial society as the key constitutive event in the life of the nation since it is only then that culture ceases to be the device that defines specific social positions and becomes, instead, the boundary demarcation of large and internally mobile social unity, within which individuals have no fixed position and are rotated in the light of the requirements of production. Anderson echoes Gellner’s description of the nation, characterizing it, famously, as a limited, sovereign imagined community that came into being with the advent of print capitalism, the death of traditional religions and their idioms, and the shared colonial experience that provided a cement of sorts for new national groups as well as the colonizer nations themselves.

Another strand of scholars in this group emphasize the political rather than the cultural characteristics of the nation.  For example, Breuilly argues that the nation is a distinct, politically autonomous group the identity of whose adherents is primarily defined through their political allegiance to the nation.  He goes on to argue that a nation and its attendant nationalisms should primarily be viewed as a matter of performance through politics, particularly through the functions of coordination, mobilization and legitimacy.  Similarly, Hobsbawm describes the nation and nationalism as a political program that holds that groups defined as ‘nations’ have the right to, and therefore ought to, form territorial states of the kind that have become standard since the French Revolution. In addition to their insistence on the modern nature of the national phenomenon, what all of these scholars share is their unconscious confirmation of the nation’s essential Being in the Heideggerian sense, that is, as something that is bounded, however imperfectly, and that constitutes an internally consistent subject of study despite its immense complexity. This line of thought opens up the possibility for the death of the nation—the erosion of political authority would necessarily imply for these scholars an erosion of nationhood. Thus, the growth of NGOs and supranational entities is at the expense of national cohesiveness; political sovereignty is a zero-sum game.

Conversely, the scholars in the third group describe the nation in terms of its effects rather than its essences or antecedents.  In his seminal work, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, Subaltern Studies historian Partha Chatterjee characterizes the modern capitalist nation-state as a procession of Gramscian “moments” each defined by a different type of power relation.  The moment of departure lies in the encounter of a nationalist consciousness with the framework of knowledge created by post-Enlightenment rationalist thought and (re)produces within the national bourgeoisie the dichotomy between the East and West.  The next stage, the moment of manoeuvre, requires the mobilization of popular elements in the cause of an anti-colonial struggle and, at the same time, a distancing of those elements from the structure of the state.  Finally, in the moment of arrival, the nationalist discourse attempts and generally succeeds in glossing over all earlier contradictions, divergences and differences and incorporating within the body of a unified discourse every aspect and stage in the history of its formation.  In a later work, Chatterjee further elaborates on the notion of the nation as a process of power-producing contradictions, in which the Indian nation-state came into being by dividing the world of social institutions and practices into two domains—the material and the spiritual.  The material domain is the “outside,” the world of public life in which the colonized are forced to interact with the colonizers who shape the public discourse to conform to their vision(s) of reality.  However, in the privacy of the spiritual domain, the nationalist discourse had the breathing space to begin to develop its own narrative, since it is in the private space that nationalism launches its most powerful, creative, and historically significant project: to fashion a “modern” national culture that is nevertheless not Western. After independence, the colonial nationalist contradiction between public and private was reproduced in the newly independent state and continued, in a fundamental way, to define the very being of the nation as a set of cultural, legal, political and social processes.

In an even stronger critique of the nation as a subject, Prasenjit Duara in his work, Rescuing History From the Nation, argues that it is the creation of a linear history based on Enlightenment ideas of progress that secures for the contested and contingent nation the false unity of a self-same national subject evolving through time.  Rather than a false unity, Duara proposes that national identity be reconceptualized as an often-conflicting “fluid network of representations” through which the national self is constructed.  In this schema, nationalism is rarely the nationalism of the nation, but rather marks the site where different representations of the nation contest and negotiate with each other. Finally, in Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai posits a new set of identity relationships that transcend the national.  He suggests that thinking about modern identity requires a profound reformulation of the ways in which we construct the idea of the self. He proposes the idea of identity landscapes or “–scapes” as a framework for exploring the identity disjunctures that result from modern phenomena, such as mass migration, global capitalism, the juxtaposition of global and local perspectives, and the worldwide dissemination of information on an unprecedented scale.  These landscapes are thus posited as the building blocks of multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe. In this paradigm the nation is an imagined set of relations that transcends physical boundaries and is reformulated in each instance according to the context of a given situation.  It is an association, an exchange of will and affect, and a node of power dynamics rather than a thing or a subject—this simple observation might seem obvious, but it is crucial to developing an understanding of where the nation comes from and how it structures and functions in both society and the individual.

Along the lines of Appadurai’s “–scapes,” one of the central works that have tried to re-imagine the international order is Michael Hardt’s and Antonio Negri’s Empire. The authors do well to distinguish between nation-states and political sovereignty: in the era of globalisation, although nation-states have weakened, political sovereignty has not. Hardt and Negri argue that because the primary factors of production and exchange—money, technology, people and goods—move with increasing ease across national boundaries, the nation-state has less power to regulate these flows and impose its authority over the economy. Despite this transformation, political controls, state functions, and regulatory mechanisms continue to rule the realm of economic and social production and exchange. The nation-state is weakened, according to Hardt and Negri, not because of ideology as was posited earlier, but because of the appearance of multiple supranational power structures such as the World Trade Organisation, United Nations, and most poignantly, the European Union.

Although these authors put their faith in a delocalised global order that at once preserves local difference and maximises global economic potential, their claims are more based on assessments and projections of trends into the future rather than historical evidence. Their claims that the nation-state has been weakened because of emergent supranationality and global economic interdependence, because rulers no longer can oppress their subjects with impunity as they used to because of growing internationalism, fails on multiple accounts. First, historical evidence is scant in supporting their claims—similar arguments were made before the outbreak of World War I, and the economic interdependence and the presence of international treaties and bodies did nothing to lessen the carnage of 1914 – 1918. Second, Hardt and Negri assume that international bodies can and will act against rogue nation-states. The League of Nations and its orphan child, the United Nations, is a sad reminder of the limitations of internationalism. Nation-states do remain the sole arbiters of their subjects’ collective destiny in most cases. Furthermore, in a nuclear world, the atomic bomb gives a nation-state sufficient power to withstand international pressure.North Koreais an excellent example of this. In all this flouting of international order, the primary actor has remained the nation-state. For better or for worse, the nation-state system has been the most enduring model for international security. Third, fourth-world nationalisms, i.e., the unrealised nationalism of an imagined group, have yet to move the international community. The plight of the Jewish people until 1948, or that of the Kurds today, despite brutal massacres, does not gain the required opprobrium from the international community. However, the successful establishment of a nation-state gives groups a voice in the international system; hence Ho Chi Minh’s trip to Versailles in 1919.

It is not our purpose to discuss the antiquity of nations but their persistence. As to the former, few stellar works have been recently written, notably by David Goodblatt and Adrian Hastings. Herman Lebovics has in his latest two works, True France and Bringing the Empire Back Home, exposed in the French case the resilience and weakness of the French national project over multiple changes in the world order. Although he seems to imply it, he never explicitly states the obvious: the amorphous nature of the nation is the source of its strength. The different aspects of France that are exposed in the dialogue between Eugen Weber’s Peasants into Frenchmen and Jane Kramer’s Europeans highlight this further. While Weber strives to bring out the late modernisation of the French interior, its induction into “Frenchness,” Kramer exposes the innumerable fissures that run through Europe’s communities and yet keep European nations together. Although Kramer does not intend to argue for the resilience of nations, that is in fact exactly what she does, particularly in her masterful essay of the rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his xenophobes. In having the ability to adapt to circumstances—imperialism, decolonisation, globalisation—nationalism revitalises itself every generation. The mistake of scholars trying to forecast its demise is that the image of the nation-state is too static in their minds. In all likelihood, the nation-state will continue despite—because of—its definition being in a state of constant flux, to be the fundamental unit of political sovereignty in the 21st century.

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