INTRODUCTION: NATIONS AND NATIONALISMS IN A ‘POSTNATIONAL’ WORLD

In a globalised world, the notions of neatly defined, homogeneous ethnies or national identities are difficult to sustain, especially if they are construed as organic features of social organisation and historical development. Instead, the present moment is characterised by hybridisation, multiculturalism and all manners of transnational movement, flux and entanglement. It has even been argued that we are now situated in a postnational condition, where the construction of supranationals, such as the European Union, and the transnational, ‘deregulated’, cross-border movement of capital, cultures and people is indicative of a decline of nations and traditional concepts of the national as key factors (Ezra and Rowden 2006: 1f.; see also Habermas 2001). Although the relation between the ‘transnational’ and the ‘postnational’ is not absolutely clear in this line of argument, the terms can be understood as connoting progressive stages in the decline of the national in the face of the challenges of globalisation (for example in Kaapa 2011: 14ff.). However, in the postnational condition more traditional or conservative ways of imagining the nation and national community simply will not make sense (Hedetoft and Hjort 2002). Modernist theories of nationalism hold that feelings of national belonging and community are constructed (‘imagined’) and sustained through mediated social communication (Deutsch 1966: 96–8 and 188; Gellner 1983: 127; Anderson 1991: 122). One implication of this for the contemporary postnational condition seems to be that national community remains a potent fiction; whereas postnational flux is the reality this fiction tries to disavow.

Indeed, on a political level, nations, conceptions of national specificity and nationalisms are still very real, and loom large in the mobilisation of various groups (conceived as, precisely, national, or ethnic, religious or otherwise designated) for political action (Juergensmeyer 2002: 3–8). Current development in Europe and elsewhere makes this abundantly clear.