ABSTRACT
Nationalism today is both under pressure and under suspicion. The forces of globalization create the pressure. Worries about the global spread of xenophobic violence fuel the suspicion. Yet nationalism has frequently been a source of high normative hopes, of popular struggles for freedom and of reliable contexts for the provision of justice and security for many human beings. This positive face of nationalism is still with us in, for example, the optimism of Mandela’s South Africa. This dual biography of nationalism raises a large interpretive question. Has there been some set of inexorable developments which dooms nationalism to be repressive, xenophobic and anti-liberal, or is there still a place for the nation as a way of organizing new ways of imagining civility, justice and security? Since much of this chapter is a critique of what I call predatory nationalism, I will return to the question of what might be called emancipatory nationalism in the conclusion.
