nation A product of nationalismthat tends nevertheless to be treated by nationalists as the naturalized geo-historical foundation for national community.Such foundational thinking often uses geography and, in particular,imaginative geographies of placeand landscape, to create and consolidate conceptions of primordial nationhood.Sometimes such imaginative geographies of the nation space can also be violently exclusionary, based on racist, ethnicist and/or masculinist phobias about keeping the nation pure by hardening borders(Flint and Fallah, 2004; Gallaher, 2003; Gilroy, 1987; Mayer, 2004; Parker et al., 1992; Radcliffe, 1998; Theweleit, 1987).At other times, formal spatial depictions of the nation operate more subtly to encode and normalize the political geography of the nation-stateas it relates to international and subnational governmental practices (Anderson, 2006; Flint and Taylor, 2007; Schulten, 2002).And in yet other anti-colonial cases of nations without states or with states that have been repeatedly undermined by colonialismand neocolonialism, imaginative geographies of the nation serve to keep alive hopes of a future national state free from occupation and external control (Gregory, 1994; Guibernau, 1999).In all these cases, innumerable geographical representationsfrom official maps to landscape depictions to monumental architecture can be drawn upon to affirm and/or question notions of national identity.
In theoretical work that is less attuned to geography, the division of the world map into a series of parcels defined by a standardized “nation form” tends to be ascribed to more generalized social dynamics. Conservative theorists have tended to fall back on essentializing ideas about ethno-linguistic homelands (e.g. Huntington, 1997).By contrast, liberal theorists have tended to explain the abstract nation form in terms of either the global march of modernity (Gellner, 1983) or the formation of the modern nation-state as a monopolist of administrative information and, in Weberian terms, the so-called legitimate use of violence (Giddens, 1985).Subsequently, post-colonial reflections on global struggles against illegitimate imperial violence have displaced the Eurocentrism of the liberal accounts all the while arguing in one famous case that the assumption of a coherent nation form in the former colonies remains a “derivative discourse” shaped as much by the performance of European nationalist norms as by the cultural complexities of the colonies themselves (Chatterjee, 1986; cf. Amin, 1987; Saïd, 1993).Chatterjee’s arguments are advanced with a view to noticing the hybridity of thehistorical record, but by focusing on the past, his derivative discourse thesis fails to provide much purchase on how the nation form may be challenged and hybridized by extra-national flowsin present and future historical moments.By contrast, Marxist accounts, with their attention to the changing scale of capitalism’s organization (e.g. Harvey, 1999), and Foucauldian accounts, with their interest in the epistemic enframing of the nation as a container for “the economy” amidst twentieth-century fordism(e.g. Mitchell, 1998), seem better placed to theorize the historical contingency of the nation form alongside its discursive performance.This does not mean explaining the nation in economic terms alone. As Marxist philosopher, Etienne Balibar (1991: 89), underlines: “It is quite impossible to‘deduce’the nation form from capitalist relations of production.”But it does mean coming to terms with the overdetermination of the nation as part of modern twentieth-century nation-states that were once territorialized but which now seem increasingly re-territorialized amidst the political geographical tensions of global capitalism (Sparke, 2005).To ignore such changes and to continue to examine global politics with a “methodological nationalism” that treats the nation as a universal norm is to fall into what Agnew calls the “territorial trap” (Agnew, 2003): a trap that exists in the first place because of ignorance of the geographical processes and representations through which nations are constructed.
MS
References
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