ABSTRACT
With the imagined community – the nation – people feel that they share bonds of common interest and inherited values with others, most of whom they will never see. It is a vision of people. By contrast, the state is a vision of power, a mixture of myth and procedure that twines itself amidst the sense of community, giving it political structure. In the modern world the state has become the universal unit of supreme organization. No part of the land of planet Earth does not belong to one. Like it or not most people are born members of a state, even if they live in remote and isolated communities. The stateless are the disadvantaged of the world, anachronistic. Its powers have grown so inescapable that, at least in the English language, the word ‘state’ has taken on a sinister overtone.
