ABSTRACT
One of the central tasks to be resolved by all complex societies is the management of infinitely possible connections between people, the vast majority of whom remain anonymous to one another. The nation state as a territorially bounded community of people who identify with each other as common members of a ‘national’ civic culture has become one of the ways modern societies have organized a binary divide of inclusion/exclusion and established a space within which to organize social, cultural, communicative, administrative and economic life. Some nations achieved this more successfully than others, of course, and these organizational principles were never based on the exclusion of multiple exchanges (both peaceful and violent) with other nations. In the modern period there have always been possible bases of commonality that called into question loyalty to the nation state, such as those that appealed to solidarities across national borders – notably the international socialist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – and those that appealed to alternative national communities. The latter could aim at transcending existing divisions (e.g. pan-Arab nationalism) or ceding from an existing state as with Québécois nationalism. Nonetheless the nation state became one of the major forms of social solidarity in national communities and the aspiration of ‘peoples’ mobilized around sentiments of common ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious or other belonging. We have seen how some globalization theorists
suggest that nation states are imploding under the dual pulls of devolution of functions to local or sub-national levels and the transfer of sovereignty ‘upwards’ to international institutions and processes. According to this view, if there is a role left for the territorially based state, it is one of regulation of flows of capital, people, images commodities and risks across its borders. It is suggested that the global begins to replace the nation state as the ‘decisive framework for social life’ (Featherstone and Lash 1995: 2). But ‘replace’ in what sense? Mostly people continue to live within nationally bounded governmental systems, taxation regimes, educational and welfare systems, banking and finance regulations, planning and development regulations and so forth. They live in communities of shared language and history and participate in national public festivals and banal rituals, among which sporting allegiance, in particular, tends to play an important part.
