ABSTRACT
In a far-reaching analysis of leading theories of nationalism, Mark Beissinger comments perceptively, concerning Benedict Anderson’s notion of ‘imagined communities’: ‘nationalism is not simply about imagined communities; it is much more fundamentally a struggle for control over defining communities, and particularly a struggle for control over the imagination of community’. 1 At stake is control of what Beissinger terms the ‘substantiation of nations’, or the complex ‘process by which categories of nationhood take on meaning for large numbers of people and become potent frames for political action’ – that is, how people come to ‘behave the nation’ in everyday life, as it were. 2
