ABSTRACT
It is clear that the multiple phenomena now increasingly categorized under the rubric of globalization have both universalizing and fragmenting tendencies. Emphasizing the simultaneity of the homogenizing and heterogenizing thrusts of globalization in the late twentieth-century world, Roland Robertson points to the twin processes embodied in “the particularization of universalism (the rendering of the world as a single place) and the universalization of particularism (the globalized expectation that societies … should have distinct identities)” (Beyer 1994: 28).1 It becomes possible through Robertson’s analysis to see the universalization of the nation-state as an ideal cultural-political form of collective identity, one aspect of the homogenizing thrusts embodied in “the particularization of universalism,” and in that sense very much a product of globalization. The now globalized expectation that nations exist and deserve their states provides the normative foundations for most contemporary international organizations as well as embodying the aspirations and political demands of many disenfranchised people around the world, despite the recent badgering the nation-state has taken from many quarters. It is then perhaps less curious that a vast literature in international relations has accepted so unproblematically this nation-state framework and has been so notoriously oblivious to the constant and ongoing production and reproduction of the nation-state as a unique historical entity. Yet one of the most striking outcomes of this lack of attention to processes of nation and state production has been the neglect of the other side of globalization – the heterogenizing thrusts that Robertson has described as the “universalization of particularism.” We live in a world, Robertson claims, in which not only has the “expectation of uniqueness” become institutionalized and globally widespread, but the local and the particular itself is produced on the basis of global norms (Robertson 1995: 28). In other words, the globalization of international norms has produced not just the legitimacy of the idea of the nation-state, but also the expectation that such nation-states should embody unique and distinct identities. But it is only recently with critical constructivist, postmodern, and feminist writing in international relations that identity – and in particular the
cultural constitution of particular nation-state forms – has begun to be theorized.
