This paper examines the processes through which nationalist movements developed among both the Palestinian people and those national communities which made up the late Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia so as to examine the role played by ‘antagonism’ in what the paper terms the ‘nationalist imaginary’. Fundamental to the text's respective analyses of nation formation and state dissolution is the concept that the imagined violence of a national enemy is at the core of the ‘defensive’ mobilisations we call nationalisms. It posits that the ‘inside’ of identity formation is not only shaped by but also grounded on the ‘outside’ of the perceived antagonism of an other.