Notes on the Political Economy of Nationalism

Notes on the Political Economy of Nationalism The resurgence of nationalism all over the world in the last few years can be said to arise, in every case, from a lack of congruence between "state " and "nation. " While each of these terms is highly complex and controversial, we all know the main difference between them. The state is a political and administrative unit, claiming the "monopoly of the legitimate use of force " over all the inhabitants of a given territory. The nation, on the other hand, is an "imagined community," including the dead and the unborn, who are bound together by the ties of kinship, language, custom and shared myths that separate it from other similar collectivities.-7 Thus we can have a nation without a state, as in the case of the Kurds, or states that comprise many nations, such as the former USSR and Yugoslavia, and a nation divided between several states, as i