Part of ongoing research on the deep structures of racism and nationalism in contemporary politics, the article focuses on the specific sociological and anthropological dimensions of the “Nation Form.” Part I indicates the latent prerequisites that have made the national formation both an obsession and a theoretical blind spot of modern historiography. Marxism itself, while inverting the dominant pattern of explanation, has not escaped this shortcoming. Another step has to be taken in the historicization of such concepts as “social formation,” “reproduction,” and “transition.” Part II proposes a framework to this effect. It is centered on three main ideas: (1) nations are neither universal stages of evolution of the state nor creations of an already given “bourgeois class,” but structures imposed upon societies by one among several “bourgeois political forms,” because of its utility in the class struggle; (2) nationalization of society is a permanent but also an uneven and contradictory process, which achieves a certain stability only insofar as it merges nationalism and social policy within the institutional and imaginary structures of “fictive ethnicity”; (3) fictive ethnicity itself is continuously reproduced (mainly through the operation of the family and the educational system) in two forms–genetic (“racial”) identity and linguistic community. This produces an internal tension which becomes especially acute in the present era of transnationalization of the state and the economy.
