Nationalism, Intervention and Redistribution

We live in a world of states. We also live in a world of nations. These are both important facts, though of different orders. States are legal entities. Even if the government is incapable of the most elementary state function - maintaining public order within its territory - a state exists so long as it is recognized by other states (see Jackson 1990). Nations are institutionally embodied only contingently. Ultimately, the existence of a nation turns on what goes on inside people"s heads. This remark is not intended to be disparaging to the potency of the national idea. It is capable of tearing apart states, as in Bosnia; and it is capable of eliciting enormous sacrifices in the pursuit of national autonomy, as in East Timor or among the Kurds in Turkey at the present time. Three points seem to me most interesting about the state system and the idea of nationality: that each is associated with a supporting ideology; that these two ideologies are in a curious way parallel to one another; yet that they are necessarily in competition with one another because they occupy the same conceptual space, in a way that I shall explain