Forget the ‘Nation’: Post-nationalist Understanding of Nationalism
Author(s)
Tishkov, Valery A.
Abstract
There is a great failure and mental morass concerning theory and political practice of nation and nationalism, including not only traditional approaches but late nationalism studies as well. Nation is a powerful metaphor which two forms of social groupings – polity (state) and ethnic entity (the people) – are fighting to have as their exclusive property. In its latest manifestation, it is an argument for geopolitical engineering and for questioning the legitimacy of weaker collective actors on the part of the winners. There is no sense in defining states and ethnic groups by the category of a nation. The latter is a ghost word, escalated to a level of meta-category through historic accident and inertia of intellectual prescription. The process of dismantling the non-operational category should be started with the intellectual courage to forget the nation as an academic definition and extend this logic into the domain of politics and everyday discourse.
