IN DEFENSE OF THE NATION-STATE

Arguments...
 Nation-state continues to be the major player on the global stage (Gilpin 2001), that it
remains at least some power in the face of globalization (Conley 2002), that nation-
states vary greatly in their efficacy in the face of globalization (Mann 2007).
 Daniel Beland argues that “ The role of the state is enduring and even increasing in
advanced industrial societies. ”
FOUR MAJOR SOURCES OF COLLECTIVE INSECURITY:
1. Terrorism
2. Economic globalization, leading to problems such as outsourcing and pressures
toward downsizing as well as the current economic crisis
3. Threats to national identity due to immigration
4. And the spread of global diseases such as AIDS
 Nation-state is that global processes of various kinds are just not as powerful as many
believe.
 It would be a mistake simply to see globalization as a threat to a constraint on, the
nation-state; it can also be an opportunity for the nation-state (Conley 2002)

IMAGINED COMMUNITY
Benedict Anderson's (2006)
 Defines the nation as “an imagined political community.”
 Nation exists primarily within the realm of ideas, subjectively within people's
minds as an image.
FOUR CHARACTERISTICS TO AN IMAGINED NATION
1. It is imagined because it is impossible in all but the smallest communities to have
face-to-face contact with more than a few of one's peers.
2. It is imagined to be limited, “because even the largest of them, encompassing
perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond
which lie other nations.
3. Nation-state is imagined to be sovereign, that is as being free.
4. It is imagined to be a community, “because, regardless of the actual inequality
and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a
deep, horizontal comradeship.
 He also sees the eighteenth century as the beginning of the dawn of the nation and
nationalism.
 There are two key of development the modern novel and the modern newspaper
which he includes under the heading of “print capitalism”.
 Print Capitalism also gave a new fixity to language that helped give solidity and
long - term continuity to the notion of the nation.
 Globalization it provided them with newer technologies that allow them to be part of
truly (global) imagined communities.