Abstract
For as long as there have been public schools in the West, with their flagpoles and colored maps on the wall, the nation has functioned as an educational apparatus for positioning people, for teaching the young and old not only who’s who, but who-belongs-where. If we have indeed entered into a new, postimperial age of globalism, then it may be a good time to contemplate not only possible futures for the nation, but for considering our educational responsibilities in directing that future toward what has always been promised in the name of the nation, namely the right to join together in the making of a better world. I want to consider the schools are to do with this idea of the nation. What is to be made of this critical juncture of multinational, transnational, and post-national globalism? Among recent signs of a the shift are the debates of the United Nations that weigh human rights against national rights, which challenge the UN’s traditional protection of national interests. Canada’s Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy has commissioned an international study on how to begin thinking beyond the nation in protecting human rights: “Our take has been that since the end of the cold war we have to focus on the individuals, on the people. That is as much in the charter as sovereignty.”1
An earlier version of this essay appeared as “The Nation-State after Globalism,” Educational Studies 15 (2001). This work has benefited from both the work of and helpful discussions with Kara Macdonald and Airini, and was supported, in part, by the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia.
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Notes
John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p. 175.
See Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno, NE: University of Nevada Press, 1991) for a detailed discussion of the elements of national identity.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 125.
Sunera Thobani, “Closing Ranks: Racism and Sexism in Canada’s Immigrant Policy,” Race & Class 42:1 (2000): 34.
The liberal principles of free association and informed consent among equals gathered together to protect the rights and liberties of all are secured in the Western tradition through Locke and Mill: “That which begins and actually constitutes any political society,” John Locke held, as the very voice of reason in the seventeenth century, “is nothing but the consent of any number of freemen, capable of majority, to unite and incorporate into such a society,” in Of Civil Government: Two Treatises (London: J. M. Dent, 1924, originally 1690), p. 166. Or as John Stuart Mills had it nearly two centuries later: “The ideally best form of government is that in which the sovereignty or supreme controlling power in the last resort is vested in the entire aggregate of the community every citizen not only having a voice in the exercise of that ultimate sovereignty, but bring at least occasionally, called on to take an actual part in the government, by the personal discharge of some public function, local or general.” Mills, John Stuart, “Of Representative Government,” in Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government (London: Dent, 1910, originally 1861), p. 207.
Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” in Narration and Nation, ed. H. K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990, originally 1882), p. 11.
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 6.
Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 170.
Mohammed Bamyeh, The Ends of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 2.
I discuss these issues of the public sphere elsewhere, in If Only We Knew: Increasing the Public Value of Social Science Research (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 195–220; Technologies of Knowing: A Proposal for the Human Sciences (Boston: Beacon, 1999), pp. 126–152. See also Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
Martha Nussbasum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country: Debating the limits of Patriotism, ed. J. Cohen (Boston: Beacon, 1996), p. 7.
Martha Nussbasum, Women and Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Michael Walzer, “Spheres of Affection,” in For Love of Country: Debating the limits of Patriotism, ed. J. Cohen (Boston: Beacon, 1996);
Hilary Putman, “Must We Choose between Patriotism and Universal Reason,” in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. J. Cohen (Boston: Beacon, 1996).
William I. Robinson and Jerry Harris, “Toward a Global Ruling Class: Globalization and the Transnational Capital Class,” Science and Society 64: 1 (2000): 11–54.
Linda Basch, Nina Click Schiller, and Cristina Szanton Blanc, Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States (Basel: Gordon and Breach, 1994), p. 4.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Soul of Black Folk (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1989, originally 1903).
Dorothy Smith, “The Ruling Relations,” Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp. 93–94.
S. J. Pharr, Robert D. Putman, and R. J. Dalton, “A Quarter Century of Declining Confidence,” Journal of Democracy 11: 2 (2000): 5–21.
The bowling hypothesis, which addresses a more general decline in civic participation, is found in Robert D. Putman, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000).
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© 2005 Peter Pericles Trifonas
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Willinsky, J. (2005). Our Political State in an Age of Globalization. In: Trifonas, P.P. (eds) Communities of Difference. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981356_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981356_3
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