In the Name of the Nation: Reflections on Nationalism and

Treating nationhood as a political claim rather than an ethnocultural fact, this paper asks how “nation ” works as a category of practice, a political idiom, a claim. What does it mean to speak “in the name of the nation”? And how should one assess the practice of doing so? Taking issue with the widely held view that “nation ” is an anachronistic and indefensible or at least deeply suspect category, the paper sketches a qualified defence of inclusive forms of nationalism and patriotism in the contemporary American context, arguing that they can help develop more robust forms of citizenship, provide support for redistributive social policies, foster the integration of immigrants, and even serve as a check on the development of an aggressively unilateralist foreign policy. One hundred and twenty years ago, the great French scholar and writer Ernest Renan delivered a lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris on the question ‘what is a nation? ’ Renan was speaking 12 years after the Franco-Prussian war, which resulted in the French loss of Alsace-Lorraine, claimed by German nationalists because of its largely German-speaking population. In response to such claims