ABSTRACT
Nationalism is easily underestimated. To start with, in its most pervasive forms it is often not noticed. Analysts focus on eruptions of violence, waves of racial or ethnic discrimination, and mass social movements. They fail to see the everyday nationalism that organizes people’s sense of belonging in the world and to particular states, and the methodological nationalism that leads historians to organize history as stories in or of nations and social scientists to approach comparative research with data sets in which the units are almost always nations. It is important not to start inquiries into nationalism by selecting only its most extreme or problematic forms for attention. Equally, it is important not to imagine it as exceptional, about to vanish, a holdover from an earlier era lacking in contemporary basis; it is hardly good scholarship to wish nationalism away.
