Nationalism,globalization and glocalization

Globalization: The enemy of the nation?

According to most socio-historical interpretations, nation formation is a facet of modernization, which in turn is conceived as a linear process whereby societies transition from tradition to modernity (for examples see Hobsbawm 1990; Gellner 1983; Breuilly 1993; Greenfeld 1992). Either explicitly or implicitly, European modernization is considered to be the template for nation formation worldwide. For example, Gellner’s (1983) theory accounts for nationalism as a necessary phenomenon that is born out of the transformation of agricultural into industrial societies. But nationalism is present among peripheral, semi-agricultural, and less developed societies (such as in Latin America and the Balkans) that do not meet that theory’s conceptual requirements but rather directly contradict Gellner’s interpretation (Mouzelis 1998; see also, Smith 1998: 36; Hastings 1997: 10–11).

In spite of this contradiction, for decades the debate has focused on the disagreement between Anthony D. Smith and Ernest Gellner over the modernity of nations and nationalism (see Smith 1998 for an overview). Smith (1986) has argued that modern nations are born out of an ethnic core under conditions of modernization or as a reaction to challenges posed by modernization. This thesis is set against Gellner’s argument that nationalism invents nations ‘where they do not exist’, thereby causing a long-lasting debate over whether ‘nations have navels’ (i.e. an ethnic core that is of importance to their coming into being) or not (see Gellner and Smith 1996). But Smith’s interpretation does not question the broader narrative of social change and modernization. Smith (1995: viii) argues that ‘the key to an understanding of nations and nationalism as general phenomena of the modern world lies more with the persisting frameworks and legacies of historical cultures and ethnic ties than with the consequences of global interdependence’.

Smith’s statement reflects broader scholarly interpretations. Unlike pre-1989 discussions of globalization in sociological literature, the post-1989 end of the Cold War offered the opportunity to promote a different version of globalization (Roudometof 2009). For Giddens (1990: 64), globalization is ‘essentially … a stretching process, in so far as the modes of connection between different social contexts or regions become networked across the earth’s surface as a whole’. This ‘stretching’ is what Giddens (1990: 63) means when he talks about modernity being ‘inherently globalizing’. Modernity, in turn, refers to ‘modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from about the 17th century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence’ (Giddens 1990: 1). While this rather explicitly Eurocentric interpretation has been the subject of several criticisms (see, for example, Lewis and Wigen 1997: 52–3), it offered a powerful means to interpret the trauma of communism’s collapse (Alexander, 2007). Throughout the 1990s the triumphant ‘West’ was widely viewed as the indisputable model for the rest of the globe. As a result, the erosion of the nation-state model through the multiplication of international treaties and/or the emergence of a post-Second World War regime of international law, rules, and conventions were viewed as indicators of a rising cosmopolitan internationalism. Accordingly, globalization signified the ‘end of nation-state’ (Ohmae 1995) or the reconfiguration of state sovereignty (Sassen 1996).

The image of globalization invoked in such interpretations is that of global social integration (see Held et al. 1999; for a critical assessment see Roudometof 2003). To the extent that nationalism is a particularistic force, a force that divides up the world into unique cultural universes (‘nations’), global social integration is eroding the conceptual and institutional underpinnings of the very idea of a nation. Subsequently, globalization has been viewed as a destabilizing force for most theories that rely on nationality as a conceptual category (for a review see Wiley 2004). As Connell (2007: 379) writes: ‘Theory insists that globalization is something new’. This view is shared by numerous authors who view globalization as a relatively recent contemporary phenomenon – most often an extension or phase of capitalism. ²

Although for some contemporary scholars nationalism is a particularistic force set against the forces of global homogenization (for example Castells 1997; Smith 1995), for others the victory of these forces and the coming of post-nationalism is inevitable. With its most explicit statement famously made by Hobsbawm (1990) in the concluding chapter of his Nations and Nationalisms since 1780, there are numerous variations of this perspective, and all of them endorse the proposition that the era of the nation-state is coming to an end. In fact, some cosmopolitan theorists have called nationalism the enemy of European nations (Beck and Giddens 2005) and have speculated over whether ‘the earthly religion of the nation could be replaced by that of cosmopolitanism’ (Beck 2004: 309).

However, even in contemporary Europe, and despite the presence of extensive transnational connections, the post-national thesis appears insufficiently grounded in contemporary policy-making and cultural trends (Roudometof 2008; Smith 2007). Theoretically speaking, however, A.D. Smith’s (1986, 1995, 1998, 2001) interpretation does not question this broader narrative of post-1989 triumphant (and conceptually recent) ‘globalization’. In spite of A.D. Smith’s (1998, 2001) eloquent and extensive critiques of modernism, then, his line of interpretation still accepts a linear master narrative of modernization – and, therefore, it is not sufficiently separated from the paradigm of modernity.

More broadly, the current recalcitrance and perseverance of the nation-form (so evident in the various national crusades that emerged in the aftermath of 9/11) cast doubt on whether nations are declining as a reference point for individuals and collectivities worldwide (Delanty and O’Mahoney 2002; Young et al. 2007). Some contemporary scholarship has come to realize the dependency of nation-state formation upon broader social processes and institutions (see, for example, Hutchinson 2011; Walby 2003; McNeely 1995). Hence, contrary to the conventional wisdom of much of contemporary scholarship, the proposition explored in the next two sections is that historical globalization involves (rather than excludes) the very emergence of the nation as a cultural form.

Nationalism alongside globalization: Concepts and relations

From within this perspective, then, the central research question is to locate the theoretical and substantive links between the historical emergence and articulation of the nation as a cultural and institutional form (e.g. the nation-form) and the processes of historical globalization and cultural glocalization. In order to clearly flesh out these links, however, it is necessary to re-think these concepts (globalization, glocalization, modernity and modernization) and their relationship to the emergence of the nation-form.

First, it is important to note that, unlike the aforementioned version of a recent ‘globalization’ that has only belatedly appeared on the historical record and that is typically appended on top of modernist historical narratives, there is an established body of research and theorizing on historical globalization. For the majority of the scholarship in that subfield, globalization is viewed autonomously as a world historical process or transformation (for some influential statements see Wolf 1982; Albrow 1997; Therborn 2000; Hobson 2006; Bentley 1996; Geyer and Bright 1995; O’Brien 2006). For example, Therborn (2000: 158–66) argues that globalization operates in a wave-like format, whereby in different historical eras there is a greater (or lesser) push towards global integration. He proposes six waves of globalization, dating the beginning of the process to back in the Axial Age (fourth to seventh centuries CE), the era that witnessed the growth and spread of universalistic religions throughout Eurasia. Robertson (2003: 49–77), in contrast, traces globalizing trends to a much earlier time. In large part, this is because he considers commerce, migration and military conquest to represent mechanisms of globalization in pre-modern times. The aforementioned examples could be multiplied. Currently, there are several different and competing interpretations of the stages and layers of historical globalization (for an overview see Pieterse 2012). However, for our purposes, these examples are sufficient to show that the waves of historical globalization pre-date Western European modernity itself and contributed to its very emergence.

In addition to the clearly broader scope of historical globalization, it is further necessary to differentiate between the processes of social integration (e.g. globalization) and those of hybridization that can result from such an intense and increased cross-cultural contact (e.g. glocalization). Conventionally, globalization is viewed in terms of integration, of the construction of (inter-) regional or planetary networks of economic, political and cultural interactions (for example Held et al. 1999; Scholte 2000). However, this is but one aspect of a broader process – as a matter of fact, ‘assumptions that globalization means homogenization and secularization are rooted in conceptions of modernity more than evidence’ (Grew 2007: 279). Subsequently, the necessity of finding a linguistic expression capable of capturing the fact that cross-cultural interaction does not lead to homogeneity but can also produce cultural heterogeneity gave birth to the neologism of glocalization. ³ As shown later in this article, the conceptual distinction between globalization and glocalization is of critical importance for understanding the global articulation of the nation-form.

In contrast to theories that view nation formation as a corollary of modernization alone, I argue that the nation-form has been influenced by both modernity and modernization, as well as globality and globalization. The emergence of the nation-form as a feature of the post-1500 cultural universe does not necessarily mean that this form is exclusively modernist in its origins – if by the term ‘modernist’ one means the cultural, economic and political forms that emerged in Western Europe. ⁴ To fully illuminate this thesis, let me briefly describe these terms. First, modernity should not be viewed as an exclusively European project, for contemporary theories postulate the existence of multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2002, 2003; Grew 2007). Reinterpreting modernity to mean both European and non-European projects entails displacing the concept from its master status in the narrative of social change. In this respect, nation formation should be viewed as an indispensable component of the articulation of multiple modernities around the globe. By definition, such an approach ought to take into account not only the Western European and North American experiences of nation formation but also Latin American and other European as well as non-European ‘peripheral varieties’ of modernity.

Second, the waves of historical globalization involve both the transmission of cultural forms from one region to the other as well as ongoing processes of cultural reinterpretation, decoding and selective incorporation. These processes should not be viewed in a one-dimensional manner, that is, as illustrations of the global diffusion of European cultural forms. Such an interpretation negates human agency (Bayly 2004: 68–70). It also negates the existence of historical globalization in the longue durée, for it ignores the existence of the pre-modern waves of historical globalization (Therborn 2000; Robertson 2003; Bayly 2004: 27–48). Consequently, multiple modernities emerge within this broader framework, and they are entangled – that is, their shape and evolution depend on their synchronic interaction as well as their diachronic development (Roudometof 2003; Therborn 2003).

Third, the process of globalization leads to the condition of globality. Globality refers to the awareness of the post-1500 time-space compression (and the experience of the communication technologies that made it possible), the awareness of the Other generated by the European ‘Age of Discoveries’ (social, cultural and scientific), the synchronous nature of cross-cultural comparison and the relativization of the pre-1500 religious worldviews that were characteristic of earlier waves of historical globalization. Perhaps no better example of the significance of globality for some of the scientific breakthroughs of European modernity exists than the pan-European quest for solving the ‘longitude question’ in the 17th century (Landes 2000: 109–17). Navigational safety dictated the necessity for a method of calculating longitude – for a mistaken assessment of location was the main danger at sea. No such method existed, and for centuries the longitude question was the subject of an international scientific race to find its solution. ⁵ The longitude question was a major scientific problem that came into being precisely because of the new reality enshrined by post-1492 navigation.

Globality is therefore a product of historical globalization’s post-1500 growing ‘thickness’, that is, its growing penetration into individual life worlds (Held et al. 1999). ⁶ Initially, the colonial empires of Spain, Portugal and Britain (like those of Imperial Russia, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans) made no reference to any meaningful connections between ‘people’ and ‘soil’ but instead sought a close symbiotic relationship with various religions (Bayly 2004: 32–5). In pre-national narratives, people are united with a particular patria (i.e. hometown or village or region) and a religious community. The gradual articulation of globality drove a ‘harsh wedge between cosmology and history’ (Anderson 1991: 36), causing the dissolution of script languages and of societies organized around divinely ordained monarchs.

This shift was not confined to Europe or ‘the West’ (e.g. Western Europe and North America). ‘In several world regions, including non-European societies, such as northern Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and Ethiopia, leaderships steadily and over long periods transformed older sentiments of patriotic attachment to land into more aggressive and exclusive understandings of nationality’ (Bayly 2004: 218). The experience of globality forced people to re-think their conceptual categories of belonging. In this sense, the articulation of globality as a social condition bears a conceptual affinity to the re-imagining of the world necessary for the emergence of the nation as a discursive field or conceptual category – usually constructed out of pre-existing categories of religious membership (Gorski 2000). The coming of the Western European and North American versions of modernity was articulated within this overarching global context. The various modernization processes pursued in several of the world’s regions coalesced in gradually replacing the older imperial forms of social organization with a novel cultural and political form – that of the nation.

This line of inquiry is implicit in Anderson’s (1991) analysis, in which feelings of nostalgia, the experience of globality and ‘print capitalism’ (i.e. the combination of printing with post-1500 merchant capitalism) are viewed as factors responsible for the emergence of nationalism in the New World. Anderson suggests that it is in the New World that nationalism originated and draws a strong connection between anti-colonialism and nationalism. ⁷ When the emergence of the nation-form became evidently impossible to refute, several empires (inclusive of the British and the Ottomans) attempted to construct their own imperial notions of identity as a means of fostering national cohesion among their populations.

While this interpretation allows a clear-cut theoretical link between historical globalization (and globality) and nation formation, it is important to stress the extent to which nation formation was a process connected to a gradually articulated condition (e.g. globality). For example, consider Hastings’ (1997: 22–3) criticism of Anderson’s (1991) argument about print capitalism: ‘It is hard to see, on [Anderson’s] own admission about the numerical growth of books in the sixteenth century, why this effect [i.e. the rise of nationalism] of print capitalism should be postponed until the end of the eighteenth’. Of course Hastings himself points out the gradual dispersion of printing (in terms of translations of the Bible), as well as the fact that both oral and written traditions predate print capitalism.

What Hastings’s remarks point toward is the fact that those ‘revolutions’ we often locate historically in the 15th and 16th centuries – such as printing or the effects of the European encounter with the New World – have been in reality social processes, the duration of which stretched over several centuries. This is but an illustration of the extent to which the effects of globality are not sufficiently understood; just as the numerical growth of books did not have an immediate effect in the 16th century, the Age of Discoveries lasted a fairly long period of time. In fact, it was not until 1778 – 286 years after Columbus’s first encounter with the Bahamas – that the Europeans became fully convinced that what he had discovered beyond the Atlantic was a previously unknown continent, distinct and separate from the others (Zerubavel 1992: 5).

Contrary to mythical interpretations of ‘1492’, the full picture of that discovery, so apparent to people in the world today, was not available to anyone in Europe in the year of Columbus’s landing in the Bahamas. Columbus believed that he had reached India, although his contemporaries viewed this claim with great scepticism. However, it was not until the legendary voyages of Magellan and Balboa in the first half of the 16th century that Europeans were able to categorically reject Columbus’s own interpretation and establish convincingly that this was, after all, a ‘new world’ (Zerubavel 1992: 49–58). ⁸ In a classic study on the impact of the discovery of America, Elliott (1992: 28) notes that the assimilation of the facts about the New World took more than a century. It was only after 1650 that the Europeans’ mental boundaries began to fully grasp the monumental shifts caused by 1492.

Two conceptual links: The glocal and the transnational

As the aforementioned examples illustrate, the effects of historical globalization on nation formation have to be sought in the historical record as well as analytically. It is clear that the task of tracing the connection between the rise of the nation as a category of cultural classification, on the one hand, and the process of historical globalization, on the other hand, cannot possibly be pursued within the confines of this discussion. Instead, within the broad contours of the interpretation outlined here, let me pursue in this section the second task of analytically articulating conceptual links between globalization and nation formation. In the following, I present two conceptual links among globalization, glocalization and nationalism that pertain to key aspects of the emergence and evolution of the nation-form. In presenting these connections, no claim is made that these are the only possible ones.

The first conceptual link pertains to the global articulation of the nation as the dominant cultural form of social organization of the post-1500 period. In that period, processes of cross-societal emulation and the selective incorporation of organizational models developed elsewhere provided a significant impetus for the universalization of the nation-form. The conceptual distinction between globalization and glocalization is quite relevant for discussing the difference between the formal and substantive elements of the ‘nation’. The standardization of the formal aspects of nationhood – ranging from flags to national anthems to uniforms, textbooks, national celebrations, and numerous other cultural artefacts – has been well documented in the literature (Cerulo 1995; Meyer et al. 1997; Boli and Thomas 1999). In fact, the nation-states’ remarkable uniformity in a whole array of institutional aspects – ranging from national symbols to bureaucratic organization – has provided the foundation for the thesis of a world culture (Lechner and Boli 2005). Although this culture is certainly far from over-determining the actions of an individual state, it nevertheless provides differential rewards and punishment for states worldwide. Accounting for this uniformity is explained in terms of the cultural and institutional isomorphism responsible for the creation of contemporary world culture (McNeely 1995).

This isomorphism is but the generalized and cumulative effect of centuries of cross-cultural and inter-societal emulation and selective incorporation of various cultural elements from one society into the other. Following the Age of Discoveries, Koselleck, (1985: 247) observes:

the geographical opening up of the globe … brought to light various but coexisting cultural levels which were, through the process of synchronous comparison, then ordered diachronically. Looking from backward Europe to a barbaric America was a glance backward.

This form of synchronous comparison has played an important role in the construction and shape of the nation-form worldwide and has been duly noted in the literature. Bendix (1978: 292) highlights the importance of ‘reference societies’ for nation-building efforts, and Greenfeld (1992) employs the notion of cross-societal emulation to account for the differences in the content of the ‘nation’ in European and American societies. Therefore, if globalization is responsible for cultural homogeneity or the contemporary commercial monoculture of McDonalds, Nike, and other similar goods (Ritzer 2004), it is also responsible for the articulation of the common formal elements of nationhood.

But this is only one aspect of this process. National symbols, flags, international sports competitions, and other similar media provide good examples of sites that bring together the form and the content of the nation. For example, although sports competitions – like the World Cup or the European Champions’ League – attract a worldwide audience, they simultaneously affirm the nationalistic impulses of each participating nation (Giulianotti and Robertson 2007). Therefore, if globalization accounts for the cultural uniformity of the formal aspects of nationhood, glocalization is about realizing (and accounting for) the specificity and ‘uniqueness’ of each national experience. Glocalization is involved in nation formation precisely because the purely formal elements of nationhood are clearly insufficient to differentiate one nation from the other: There is considerable difference in the emotions felt toward the flag of one’s own nation versus the emotions felt toward the flag of a third nation or even a rival nation (for examples see Cobley 2004; Billig 1995). The articulation of the nation-form cannot be accounted for only through the processes of globalization (viewed as a process of social integration and linked to mechanisms of homogenization). Rather, it needs to take into account the experience of glocalization, of the production of hybrid forms, cross-societal emulation and differences constructed through cross-cultural encounters: As Short (2001: 18) puts it, ‘nationalism, community consciousness, and the self-conscious construction of ethnic identity are as much part of globalization as 24-hr. markets and global travel’.

A second major conceptual link between the nation-form and globalization lies in the numerous cases of long-distance or transnational nationalism. These concepts have become particularly popular over the last 20 years, as researchers have argued that post-Second World War transnational communities are differentiated from past immigrant communities exactly on the basis of maintaining their ties to the home country (see Basch et al. 1994; Glick Schiller et al. 1995; Glick Schiller and Fourton 2001; M.P. Smith 2001). No longer forced to acculturate into the host culture and empowered by new media of instant communication, the post-Second World War generations of ‘transmigrants’ have the opportunity to inhabit both the world of the home country and that of the host country. The case of Haiti, where expatriate communities facilitated the return of President Aristide to power, and the involvement of US-based Mexican immigrants in Mexican domestic politics are classic examples. In this respect, contemporary diasporas are constructing real or imaginary homelands and are producing de-territorialized nationalisms, e.g. nationalisms that lack a hitherto taken-for-granted territoriality (see Tololyan 1996; Safran 1991). The Armenian communities’ mobilization to force Turkey to admit the 1915–16 genocide provides a good example of such a transnational project, but it is far from the only one: Irish, Palestinian, Lebanese, Indian, and Chinese communities provide additional cases.

Whereas scholarship often views such phenomena as exemplars of a recent, post-Second World War globalization (see Anderson 1993), long-distance nationalism has been constitutive of the articulation of the nation-form even before 1945. During the pre-Second World War period, for example, US immigrants of European descent harboured dreams of liberty for their homelands (Jacobson 1995; Morawska 2001). Going further back into the 19th century, there are the cases of Southern European immigrants (Gabaccia 2000; Roudometof 2000). Groups of immigrants from Southern Europe contributed considerably to the articulation of nationalism in their respective homelands, and in this regard they provide classic examples of transnational nation-state building. In the course of the 20th century, these processes’ strength, duration and stretch intensified thanks to massive population movements and improvement in communication technologies. The concept of ‘diaspora’ is increasingly employed as a means of making a claim to form a dispersed and underprivileged group – and this has allowed the multiplication of the groups claiming such a status (Brubaker 2005).

However, although conventional arguments about long distance or transnational nationalisms relate the emergence of such phenomena to communication technology or mass migration, it is necessary to go beyond mere technological determinism or demographic accounts and realize that the construction of the object of migration has traditionally naturalized the existence of the nation-state, while it simultaneously problematized immigration. ⁹ To make sense of the historical record then requires turning the conventional line of argument on its head: Gradually, as nation-states assumed the tasks of border control and surveillance, a new reality came into existence whereby transnational people (including exiles, émigrés and refugees, and various minorities) were ‘invented’ as residual categories, as people who were ‘out of place’ (Roudometof 2000: 384). The thousands of émigrés who fled the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and were unable to return to their homelands following the conclusion of the Russian civil war offer a major 20th-century example. By far the most well known case, though, concerns the thousands of exiles and refugees who fled France in the aftermath of the 1789 French revolution – of whom perhaps François-René de Chateaubriand is the most familiar name. These accidental cosmopolitans were wanderers who had their lives marked by unwarranted mobility (for a discussion see Fritzsche 2004). Nostalgia haunted them, leading European doctors to diagnose it as a medical condition, and dominated their thoughts – Chateaubriand’s accounts are filled with a sense of loss, wreckage and mourning for the lost world of the ‘ancient regime’.

Since the 19th century, the global institutionalization of the nation-form has led to growing demands for the effective policing of the national borders and for exerting the effective control of the state over national space. Harnessing the powers of space involves the employment of territoriality as a means of establishing connections between people and land. ¹⁰ In the context of nationalist thought, territoriality promotes the image of divisions of the earth’s space as ‘natural’ divisions; it conceptualizes the relationship between groups of people and their habitat as ‘natural’ or biological, whereby people’s personal attachment to places is transformed into a commitment to a (typically broader) territory; and, finally, it reinforces human ties to a place through history, memory and myth (Penrose 2002: 280–2; White 2004: 53–61).

Accordingly, the employment of territoriality as a means of nation formation becomes an effective mechanism through both material and symbolic means. In practical terms, the state’s control over territory, the erection of continuous surveillance of national boundaries and the issuing of specific documents (for example, national currency as well as passports and other similar forms of ID) delineate a particular space as a concrete and governed region that belongs to the citizens who can successfully claim ownership of it (see, for example, Torpey 2000; Helleiner 2003). The construction of ‘aliens’ or ‘transnational’ people or of diasporic communities is but the flipside of nationalization policies (Waldinger and Fitzgerald 2004). In turn, such communities are often propelled to either accept the nationalization process or to look for another territory that they can claim as their own – as in the case of Zionism, for example. In this regard, as Fitzgerald (2004) argues, transnationality can have two distinct facets. On the one hand, it can lead to dual nationalism, whereby immigrants and their communities identify with both the home and the host nations; on the other hand, it can lead to trans-state or long-distance nationalism. No matter the conceptual route chosen, long-distance or transnational nationalism contributes to the articulation of nationalist projects independently of physical presence at a locale.

Conclusions

This article sought to provide a reassessment of the relationship among globalization, glocalization and nationalism. Modernist theories view globalization as post-1989 globalization, that is, as a recent scholarly trend characterized by rhetoric and perfomativity (Connell 2007), and therefore fail to move beyond the often-cited cliché of setting the one against the other. Instead, I have suggested that, when globalization is viewed as an autonomous historical process (and not a recent contemporary phase appended to a pre-existing paradigm of modernity), then it becomes possible to rethink the relationship among globalization, glocalization and nationalism. Instead of thinking of the global and the national in terms of opposition, it becomes possible to discern the outlines of a symbiotic relationship or an elective affinity between post-1500 historical globalization, the articulation of globality as a social condition and the emergence of the nation-form.

Against interpretations that view nation formation as a corollary of modernity alone, I suggested that the nation-form has been shaped by successive waves of historical globalization and the multiple modernities that have emerged historically within that broader historical canvas. Furthermore, I argued that the process of globalization leads to the condition of globality – which gradually has been becoming more visible as the effects of historical globalization become ‘thicker’ in human lives. In concluding a lengthy review of historically oriented studies of globalization, Grew (2007: 281) posed the following research question: ‘What difference in practice does globality make?’ The argument presented here has sought to theoretically provide at least a partial answer – insofar as nation formation is concerned – to this question.

Needless to say, a full historical account of such a transformation is clearly beyond the scope of the current discussion. Still, the analysis performed here has sought to illustrate the theoretical connections between historical globalization and nation formation by presenting two conceptual links. First, the nation-form is developed both in terms of universal uniformity as well as in terms of local particularity. Through institutional and cultural isomorphism, globalization is responsible for the construction of uniformity in the formal aspects of nations worldwide. The flipside of this tendency are the processes of hybridization that contribute to the uniqueness of each nation. They point to glocalization as a necessary counterpart to processes of cultural homogenization.

Second, long-distance or transnational nationalisms provide indispensable components for the processes of nation formation. Although these nationalisms are typically conceived as a post-Second World War phenomenon, I argued that it is necessary to extend our historical view into the past and to realize that these have been constitutive of the process of nation formation in a twofold manner. On the one hand, effective policing of space and of people within a nation-state constructed the very notion of the ‘transnational’ in a way quite different from that of earlier world empires; on the other hand, the designation of people in the categories of ‘diasporas’ or ‘transnational people’ provided an impetus for the construction of transnational national projects. Hence, the processes of nationalization and transnationalization historically have mutually constituted each of the two categories of cultural classification: To this day, our world remains both a world of nations and of transnational connections.