Abstract

The resurgence of ethnicity and nationalism with the end of Cold War mobilization challenges liberal conventional wisdom concerning both the rapid fading of “premodern” cultural formations and the very possibility of “completing” modernity anywhere soon — at least in the way the project has been formulated since the Enlightenment. As Johnstone convincingly argues, far from accelerating the spread of a vague, capitalist-driven cosmopolitanism within which nation-states are gradually “absorbed or dislocated by the new supranational restructuring of the globe,” as projected by Panglossian liberals and Marxists, the 21st century seems to increasingly prefigure the rediscovery of the political and cultural autonomy of various particular groups and regions.