The Nation-State After Globalism

This paper, the text of a keynote talk given at the AESA 2000 Annual Conference in Vancouver, argues that we have an opportunity and responsibility to explore with students ways of strengthening the civil, democratic basis of the nation-state, given how post-coldwar globalism has reduced, however slightly, the nation’s critical economic and ideological role, while drawing classrooms into a greater global community in which traditional nationalist notions of who-belongs-where are only greater sources of inequity and miseducation. After the talk, Bernardo Gallegos, who was in invited to give a response, raised a series of helpful challenges to this effort to hold the nation to its democratic promise and to my manner of setting the nation into question, especially after I had written so earnestly in Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empires End (1998a) about the depth of European imperial intent contained, for example, in aboriginal exhibitions and in the West’s particular use of nationhood within its moral economy. In light of his comments, readers need to judge whether the educational proposal expressed here to stop treating nationhood as a means o