ABSTRACT
A nation is also an "imagined community" created, conserved, and modified in response to specific historical circumstances.3 In the Balkans, the conception of nations as "imagined communities" was the product of two partly overlapping phases of historical experience-a positivist enlightenment phase and a romantic phase. In the enlightenment vision, the nation was conceived as a means to "freedom from barbarity.'''! Barbarity itself was defined as localism, provincialism, parochialism, feudalism, and tyranny, or what in western Europe was sometimes called oriental or Asiatic despotism. Like feudalism, oriental despotism let localism thrive.
