ABSTRACT
Modernity has “stripped” people “of every trace of national character”, and “national differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing”. The weakening of the nation-state as an effective political force is, as Williams insists, a reality in “the politics of now”. Williams acknowledges that re-thinking political institutions in an age of the declining power of the nation-state has only just begun, and regards his own thinking on this as “only a gesture to the direction in which one might think”. The grand narratives of the nineteenth century will have typically been articulated in terms of “progress” for a people in a land. Europe's modernity gave rise to a resistance movement that has freed itself from faith in the old Greco-Biblical archeo-teleo-eschatological understanding of world history and Europe's centrality.
