The End of the Nation State? The Disarticulation of Power and Identity

Abstract

The nation state was the institutional colossus of the modern age. The power of the nation state was the prized possession of ruling classes and the target for hungry revolutionaries. The nation state institutionalized the universalizing Enlightenment values of liberalism and democracy on the basis of territorially defined nationhood. In the modern era, ideologies were state ideologies. The nation state provided a universalizing and internally consistent set of ideas about the role of the state in the process of human development, an essentialist view of human nature or the human condition and a utopian vision of the future. The nation state played a central role in the maintenance of fixed and stable political cultures and stable identities around universal and essentialist categories. This was achieved through either the repression of insurrectionary cultures and identities emerging from the dispositional power of the marginalized and oppressed or the co-option of oppositional movements into the dominant culture through the power of dominant ideologies and the ‘imagined community’ of national citizenship. The nation state thus articulated power and identity through the institutionalization of modern ideologies. In the previous chapter, I highlighted how intense processes of social and political change in recent decades have resulted in the increasing disarticulation of power and the nation state and the ways in which the ‘cultural’, ‘global’ and ‘complexity’ turns have conceptualized this as the decentring, decomposition and de-territorialization of the nation state and the emergence of new forms of power that are increasingly dispositional, fluid and non-linear.