ABSTRACT
National history, the history of a nation-state, always involves exclusions; the heritage that a nation claims is never the whole or undistorted story of its multiple ‘pasts’. As shown in the previous chapter, precisely because its purpose is to provide a (usually) het erogeneous nation-state with a set of homogeneous myths to serve as cultural glue, national history always leaves some people’s sto ries out. However, at least two processes of globalisation pose more severe challenges to the conceit of national homogeneity first, mass migrations of working people (and refugees) are having a two-way effect on identity - bringing visible Others within national commu nities, and making nationals into Others in distant lands, thereby breaking the nexus between a deep sense of belonging and place of residence. Second, and not unrelated, discourses of international human rights, including self-determination for indigenous peoples and other sub-or extra-national communities, are gaining greater pur chase around the world, straining the familial model of the nation. Under these conditions, the challenge for the contemporary state - and its political opponents - is to imagine an identity for the na tional community based on something other than a heritage that is not shared by all the nation-state’s citizens. In this chapter, we discuss how the Filipino state at the end of the 1990s attempted to meet this challenge and then in the final chapter show, through an
analysis of Expo Pilipino, how, in the Philippines, the state and the fictive nation are trapped in a dialectical relationship that repro duces the weaknesses of both.
