ABSTRACT
Ironically, the renaissance of nationalism studies coincided with the rise of globalism in the early 1980s. As global flows of goods, people, ideas, and images enhanced the permeability of national borders, social thinkers debated the continued viability of a national imagination rooted in the modern nation-state system of the eighteenth century. For example, Ernest Gellner reformulated the relationship between industrialization, cultural homogeneity, and nationalism (1983, 1994); Benedict Anderson characterized the nation as an ‘imagined political community’ (1991); and Eric Hobsbawm criticized the divisive inventions of ethno-linguistic nationalisms (Hobsbawn and Ranger 1983; Hobsbawm 1990). Exhibiting a growing awareness of the dawning global imagination and its myriad social manifestations and ramifications, proponents and detractors of these new perspectives have crossed swords in an intensified way over the last two decades. In the process they have extended the discussion on nationalism to issues of international political economy, postcolonialism, global governance, global forms of social solidarity, multiculturalism, gender, and political violence.
