ABSTRACT
Though nations and nationalism surround us, there is no single way of understanding what they are. Some theorists cite a list of important characteristics – for Anthony D. Smith, for example, a nation is a ‘named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members’. 1 Others place less emphasis on substantive criteria and more on feelings and beliefs. Thus, it is the sense of connection among members of the nation who will never know or meet most of their compatriots that is important; 2 or, more specifically, shared feelings of ‘fraternity, substantial distinctiveness, and exclusivity, as well as beliefs in a common ancestry and a continuous genealogy’. 3 Yet clearly, the modern world is made up not just of communities based on such feelings and beliefs, but of ‘nation-states’, where each nation-state maintains ‘an administrative monopoly over a territory with demarcated boundaries (borders), its rule being sanctioned by law and direct control of the means of internal and external violence’. 4 ‘Nationalism’ can be understood on one level as the ideology that produces and maintains such nation-states. 5
