Abstract

If contemporary cultural theory has a keen eye for the artificiality of national identities, treated as nothing more than rhetorical inventions, the underlying fact — the construction of the national state as a political unit — remains much more impervious to criticism. A strange omission indeed, as states all around crumble, reunify, and redraw their borders. Is only identity up for grabs or is a scrutiny of the large territorial state itself also overdue? Far from being a natural or necessary frame for politics, the national state was a byproduct of 19th century economy and culture; its persistence today represents the reification of the political imagination, impeding the emergence of more supple, communitarian and democratic forms of social life.