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In recent years, discussions in social sciences and postcolonial studies have identified cosmopolitanism and post-nationalism as two major notions that seek to surpass the nation-state. As a framing device for the paradigm of globalization, certain components of the post-national thesis have indeed proved influential in explaining the gradual erosion of the old certainties of nation-state, but do not adequately explain how the nation-state itself is accommodating globalization to preserve, and thereby strengthen, its hegemony. Interestingly, the ascendancy of such ideas has been accompanied by the gradual dislodging of materialist critiques of capitalist expansion (read: globalization) in the postcolonial world. One can discern a certain disquiet that prevails behind the sophistications and subtleties through which the contemporary moment of globalization is being theorized. In postcolonial India, the two ‘cultural systems’, nationalism and globalization, have an enduring influence, and it would be theoretically significant to trace their mutual effects in the context of the music video genre, particularly the procedures through which ideas of patriotism get articulated. Leela Fernandes (2000: 612) probed the post-national thesis by examining ‘the ways in which “globality” is invented through the deployment of nationalist narratives’, while pointing out to the ‘hybrid’ relationship between the national and the global, and the place of gender in such configurations. In addition, Arvind Rajagopal (1998: 16) noted that the national and the global were increasingly being shaped by Hindu themes and idioms, which coincided with the expansion of state-run television thereby creating a single mediated visual regime from the late 1980s. Indeed, for Rajagopal, the confluence of several forces such as economic liberalization facilitated the rise of right-wing politics in India. For Rajagopal, therefore, [the] visual regime was largely shaped in a struggle between the Hindu Right and its secular opponents, where, it is fair to say, the Hindu Right gained most ground. It was from this reformulated political consensus that advertising culture drew its fundamental understandings of the mode of signifying relations between the diverse classes and communities that comprise Indian society. Through advertisements we can see the reflected and changing shape of an increasingly Hinduized public.

The conflict in Palestine has been the subject of numerous international investigative commissions over the past century. These have been dispatched by governments to determine the causes of violent conflicts and how to resolve them. Commissions both produce and reflect political epistemologies, the social processes and categories by which proof and evidence are produced and mobilized in political claim-making. Using archival and ethnographic sources, my analysis focuses on three investigative commissions: the King-Crane (1919), Anglo-American (1946), and Mitchell (2001) commissions. They reveal how “reading affect” has been a diagnostic of political worthiness. Through these investigations, Western colonial agents and “the international community” have given Palestinians false hope that discourse and reason were the appropriate and effective mode of politics. Rather than simply reason, however, what each required was maintenance of an impossible balance between the rational and the emotional. This essay explores the ways that affect as a diagnostic of political worthiness has worked as a technology of rule in imperial orders, and has served as an unspoken legitimating mechanism of domination.

Neo-Kantian political theories, such as those developed by Jeremy Waldron and Anna Stilz, aim to provide an account of state legitimacy and territorial boundaries that avoids the problems faced by rival nationalist theories. Immanuel Kant’s own theory of the state appears to be biased towards the status quo, and therefore has difficulty in explaining what is wrong with rights-respecting colonialism or the annexation of one state by another. Two possible ways forward are explored. One involves making state legitimacy conditional on meeting more stringent standards of distributive justice. The other involves appealing to the idea of a self-determining ‘people’. However the latter must avoid collapsing into either a version of nationalism (if the ‘people’ are identified in cultural terms) or a form of voluntarism (if the ‘people’ are required subjectively to ‘affirm’ the regime that governs them). Thus neo-Kantian theories cannot deliver a plausible account of self-determination without, like Kant himself, tacitly invoking political identities of the kind that they seek to repudiate.

Jewish cosmopolitanism has long assumed a central place in the ideology of anti-Semitism. Well before the publication of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the idea of international Jewish solidarity served as an argument against Jewish emancipation. In Britain, Sir Robert Inglis famously opposed granting the Jews political rights because “[t]he Jews of London have more sympathy with the Jews resident in Berlin or Vienna than with the Christians among whom they reside.” Likewise, in 1840, the ultramontane Univers saw international lobbying on behalf of Jews accused of ritual murder in Damascus as proof that “the Hebrew nationality is not dead … What religious connection is there between the Talmudists of Alsace, Cologne or the East, and the Messrs. Rothschild and Crémieux?” That L'Univers saw this cosmopolitan fellow-feeling as an expression of Jewish national identity is irrelevant. The point is rather that for anti-Semites Jewish ‘nationalism’ was an inherently international force.

Southern Sudanese politicians of the 1950s and 1960s have been criticized for a rivalrous, divisive politics, which left the south disunited and vulnerable. While acknowledging that these men were a tiny, squabbling group, remote from those they sought to represent, this article suggests that they faced an impossible task. The demand to represent ‘the south’ did not come solely, or even largely, from the people who lived in the southern provinces: southern politics was heavily extraverted, pulled by the interests and prejudices of northern Sudanese, Egyptians, Britons, and others. Like other African nationalists of the time, southern Sudanese politicians struggled to weave together different levels of moral community, from the very local to the imagined nation. Yet they did so in uniquely unfavourable circumstances: subject to constant harassment and occasionally lethal violence, unable to secure political compromise, and without patronage resources. Representing the south gave these men space to talk about the increasingly desperate circumstances of those who lived in Sudan's southern provinces; but it gave them almost no space at all to negotiate a civic culture of southern politics.

Introduction In modern nation-states language can function as a marker of individual or political identity. This is particularly true in cases where there is more than one officially recognized language in the community: the choice of which language to speak or write down may reveal not only individuals' relations with and expectations of their audience, but also their self-ascribed political identity and their place within or attitude towards larger power structures, including government or religious groups. The sociolinguistic literature is well served by examples of the various ways in which language in the modern world overlaps with ethnic, cultural or national identities. Language is widely recognized to be a potential marker of identity: groups of speakers or societies may select a shared competency in a particular language as part of the ‘stuff’ out of which their identity is constructed. However, a shared language is not a necessary feature of an ethnic or cultural identity, and there are many examples where identity construction cuts across linguistic divisions. Furthermore, spoken and written forms of the same language may function in different ways in the formation of identities. British citizens are generally not well known for their command of more than a single language, but even so, the constituent parts of the United Kingdom can provide some useful examples of the intersections between language and identity. Consider, for instance, the National Assembly of Wales. Since its inception in 1989, the National Assembly has allowed elected members to speak either Welsh or English in its formal sessions. No member of the Assembly is unable to speak English fluently, but speeches and questions to ministers are regularly made in Welsh by members of all political parties, not just the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru. Moreover, the nationalist members of the Assembly do not all necessarily speak Welsh inside or even outside the Assembly.

Historians and social scientists have typically assumed a conflictual or exploitative relationship between empire and ethnicity. On the one hand, empire might be seen (as perhaps Ernest Gellner saw it in Nations and Nationalism) as a superstructure of coercion to which a group of ethnic units were subject. On the other (according to an influential view), empire fabricated ethnicities (tribes or castes) to divide and rule. This article suggests that both of these views are too crude. In the British case at least (and in the modern history of empire, no generalisation that excludes the British case has much value), ‘imperial ethnicity’ was a much more subtle phenomenon. It existed ‘at home’ as one element in a more complex identity. It was a powerful force in British settler societies, where an indigenous identity could not be imagined. And, perhaps surprisingly, it was deeply attractive to some colonial elites in Asia and Africa – at least for a time.

The growth of institutional capacity in the developing world has become a central theme in twenty-first-century social science. Many studies have shown that public institutions are an important (some would argue the most important) determinant of long-run rates of economic growth. This book argues that to understand the difficulties and pitfalls of state building in the contemporary world, it is necessary to analyze previous efforts to create institutional capacity in conflictive contexts. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the process of state and nation building in Latin America and Spain from independence to the 1930s. The book examines how Latin American countries and Spain tried to build modern and efficient state institutions for more than a century � without much success. The chapters discuss key processes and challenges of state building. To what extent do historical legacies determine the capacity and reach of states? What are the obstacles to and paths toward the effective consolidation of public authority? How can states best design and create the institutions meant to provide the basic services now associated with citizenship? How can we put together notions of community that include diverse groups and cultures within a single identity, while also respecting the integrity of particular traditions? The Spanish and Latin American experience of the nineteenth century was arguably the first regional stage on which the organizational and political dilemmas that still haunt states were faced. This book provides an unprecedented perspective on the development and contemporary outcome of those state and nation building projects.

Nothing appears more ancient, and linked to an immemorial past, than the pageantry which surrounds British monarchy in its public ceremonial manifestations. Yet, as a chapter in this book establishes, in its modern form it is the product of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ‘Traditions’ which appear or claim to be old are often quite recent in origin and sometimes invented. Anyone familiar with the colleges of ancient British universities will be able to think of the institution of such ‘traditions’ on a local scale, though some – like the annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols in the chapel of King's College, Cambridge on Christmas Eve – may become generalized through the modern mass medium of radio. This observation formed the starting-point of a conference organized by the historical journal Past & Present , which in turn forms the basis of the present book. The term ‘invented tradition’ is used in a broad, but not imprecise sense. It includes both ‘ traditions’ actually invented, constructed and formally instituted and those emerging in a less easily traceable manner within a brief and dateable period – a matter of a few years perhaps – and establishing themselves with great rapidity. The royal Christmas broadcast in Britain (instituted in 1932) is an example of the first; the appearance and development of the practices associated with the Cup Final in British Association Football, of the second. It is evident that not all of them are equally permanent, but it is their appearance and establishment rather than their chances of survival which are our primary concern.

Why and how could a concept so remote from the real experience of most human beings as 'national patriotism' become such a powerful political force so quickly? It is plainly not enough to appeal to the universal experience of human beings who belong to groups recognizing one another as members of collectivities or communities, and therefore recognizing others as strangers. The problem before us derives from the fact that the modern nation, either as a state or as a body of people aspiring to form such a state, differs in size, scale and nature from the actual communities with which human beings have identified over most of history, and makes quite different demands on them. It is, in Benedict Anderson's useful phrase, an 'imagined community', and no doubt this can be made to fill the emotional void left by the retreat or disintegration, or the unavailability of real human communities and networks, but the question still remains why, having lost real communities, people should wish to imagine this particular type of replacement. One reason may be that, in many parts of the world, states and national movements could mobilize certain variants of feelings of collective belonging which already existed and which could operate, as it were, potentially on the macro-political scale which could fit in with modern states and nations. I shall call these bonds 'proto-national'.

This article bridges the literatures on nationalist projects and everyday nationhood by elucidating a repertoire of actions shared by both. Analysis of such “nation-work” contributes to the cognitive turn in ethnicity and nationalism research by showing how ethnonational categorization operates. The author distinguishes three types of categorization processes at play: (1) we-they distinctions are made across ethnonational groups, (2) these ethnonational distinctions are further specified by linking them with non-ethnonational categories such as gender and class, and (3) differentiations are made within the same ethnonational category by distinguishing exemplary from less exemplary members of the category. Through historical and ethnographic analyses of the tea ceremony in Japan, the author shows how distinctions drawn across national boundaries help select the characteristics of national membership. Yet while nationalism may project an image of a homogeneous “we,” internal heterogeneity is crucial for refining the experience and performance of membership in the nation.

Introduction: paradoxes of religion and modernity In the modern world, religion and nationalism have often functioned as modes of individual and collective identity in a global political context. Both religious and nationalist modes of self-reference are products of a common process of modernisation, of which globalisation can be regarded as the current phase. Just as nationalism can assume either liberal or reactionary forms (Kohn, 1944), so religion can adopt either an ecumenical/cosmopolitan or an exclusive/fundamentalist orientation. From the late nineteenth century, citizenship became increasingly the dominant juridical framework of civil society as the mode of national membership and individual identity. In Europe and North America, national citizenship emerged as a secular form of solidarity that either competed or combined with the Church to provide a potent channel of nationalist identity and fervour. With growing national assertion and competition, citizenship became primarily an institution of ‘national manhood’ (Nelson, 1998), in which entitlements to citizenship benefits were based on work and warfare. As state sovereignty was territorial, citizenship became an exclusionary principle of identity and membership within a given terrain. With the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and the transformation of China towards authoritarian capitalism, religion can once again blend with nationalism to provide the cultural glue that national citizenship requires to develop common rituals and communal organisation. However, the precise relationship between religion, nation and state is clearly variable.