1 See Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), 179ffGoogle Scholar.

2 Only occasionally is this distinction noted. For example, see Ryerson, Stanley B., ‘Quebec: Concepts of Class and Nation’ in Teeple, Gary, ed., Capitalism and the National Question in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1972), 211-27CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ryerson distinguishes ‘a political entity’ from ‘a community of people’ (212).

3 Confusions are compounded by nation-states often being thought of as states with a single nation in the sense of a societal group. Is there any state composed solely of people of one nationality?

4 Notice that ‘nationhood’ (like ‘statehood’) applies to the country as a whole (collectively) rather than to its individual citizens (distributively), contra Miller, David in On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995)Google Scholar, for example on p. 17.

5 The term ‘nationality’ is often applied to citizens of political nations as a modifier designating country of origin, but when it refers to a group it is about a societal nation. I use the term ‘nationality’ to refer to a societal group.

6 Tamir, Yael, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1993).Google Scholar

7 In this context it is especially important to recognize the unscientific nature of the concept of race. Confusions about race have complicated conceptions of a nation or people. On race, see Holmstrom, Nancy, in Matthen, Mohan and Ware, Robert, eds., Biology and Society, Supp. Vol. 20 of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy (Calgary: University of Calgary Press 1994), 69–105.Google Scholar

8 See Tamir, , Liberal Nationalism, 26Google Scholar.

9 Of course, a country can be discontinuous, even encompassing an archipelago, but not through a process of dispersing.

10 Do the individuals partake of the culture that the nationality as a whole has, or is the culture of the nationality the aggregate of the culture of each individual?

11 See Berlin, Isaiah, ‘Nationalism: Past Neglect and Present Power’ in Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1991), 345Google Scholar. See also Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 and Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso 1991)Google Scholar.

12 See Davidson, Basil, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the NationState (New York: Times Books 1992)Google Scholar, especially in his ‘Conclusion,’ on the nationstate as a devil to be overcome in Africa as well as elsewhere.

13 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Monitor 3:8 (Feb. 1997) 12, using ‘The Top 200: The Rise of Global Corporate Power’ by Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, DC. For other relevant figures, see Korten, David C., When Corporations Rule the World (San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler 1995), chap. 17Google Scholar.

14 Berlin, , ‘Nationalism,’ 350Google Scholar. The very change that I am discussing contradicts the idea that there is such a thing as true nationalism.

15 See Davidson, The Black Man's Burden.

16 Davidson, , The Black Man's Burden, 165Google Scholar

17 Joshi, Shashi, The Colonial State, the Left and the National Movement, 1: 1920-1934 (New Delhi: Sage 1992)Google Scholar as quoted in Omvedt, Gail, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution (New Delhi: Sage 1994), 15Google Scholar.

18 Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and Its Fragments (Delhi: Oxford University Press 1995), 9Google Scholar.

19 For a good discussion of this see Chatterjee, ‘Whose Imagined Community?’ in The Nation and Its Fragments. “Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized,” he says. (Chatterjee, 5)

20 It should be obvious that my use of the term ‘theory’ in this context is broad, covering the diverse kinds of understanding that we find in social studies. My inclination is towards rigorous and more specific descriptions of social phenomena and their mechanisms. I would countenance social laws except that the social sciences appear to be like the biological sciences in their paucity of laws. I hope that what I have to say in this discussion of nationalism and related phenomena will be mostly independent of particular theories and meta theories, other than the points about referring to social entities.

21 Taylor, Charles, ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate’ in his Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1995), 202Google Scholar.

22 See Miller, , On Nationality, 17Google Scholar. Of course, many or most of the people in a nation (or nationality) will have beliefs about the nation of which they are members, but the existence of the nation does not depend on the beliefs of its nationals, as is suggested in the passage.

23 I am not sure that nations cannot be observed - countries certainly can be - but I am sure that they do not have to be observed to be known to exist.

24 Different things have to be said about the Queer Nation or the Nation of Islam, although they are real forces to contend with and the structure of their reality is similarly gained through assertiveness, activity, and recognition.

25 There are important suspicions about there even being natural kinds of animals. See Dupré, John, The Disorder of Things (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1993)Google Scholar.

26 See Hacking, Ian, ‘The Looping Effects of Human Kinds’ in Sperber, Dan, Premack, David, and Premack, Ann James, eds., Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995), 351-94Google Scholar.

27 See Hacking, , ‘The Looping Effects of Human Kinds,’ 366-70Google Scholar. A current example that fits Hacking's analysis is that of whiteness. Recent studies try to explain the importance of being white, of thinking about the property of whiteness, as a way of better understanding classifications in a racist society.

28 Norman, Wayne, ‘The Ideology of Shared Values: A Myopic Vision of Unity in the Multi-nation State’ in Carens, Joseph H., ed., Is Quebec Nationalism Just? Perspectives from Anglophone Canada (Montreal: MeGill-Queen's University Press 1995), 137-59Google Scholar.

29 See Kymlicka's, Will review of Carens’ book in ‘The Paradox of Liberal Nationalism,’ The Literary Review of Canada 4:10 (November 1995) 13–15Google Scholar.

30 Anderson, , Imagined Communities, 4Google Scholar. But it should be noted that Anderson also gives weight to the importance of functionaries, the media, and various structures of the state. See, for example, Imagined Communities, 65 and 160. It is not simply a matter of imagination for him.

31 Quoted in Davidson, , Black Man's Burden, 43Google Scholar. Cf. Isaiah Berlin's claim that “no political movement today, at any rate outside the western world, seems likely to succeed unless it allies itself to national sentiment” (Berlin, ‘Nationalism,’ 355).

32 In this context, see Davidson, The Black Man's Burden, and Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments.

33 For a discussion of our ignorance about this social kind, i.e., societies, see Denis, Claude, ‘Quebec-as-distinct-society as Conventional Wisdom: The Constitutional Silence of Anglo-Canadian Sociologists,’ Canadian Journal of Sociology 18:3 (1993) 251-69CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 For critical comments and useful discussions about nationalism and nations, I thank Jocelyne Couture, Diana Hodson, Kai Nielsen, Peter Okeke, and Michel Seymour.