Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History

Rethinking the Modular Nation Form: Toward a Sociohistorical Conception of Nationalism Author(s): Manu Goswami Reviewed work(s): Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 44, No. 4 (Oct., 2002), pp. 770-799 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3879522 . Accessed: 16/01/2012 13:22
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Rethinkingthe ModularNation Form: Towarda SociohistoricalConception of Nationalism

MANU GOSWAMI
History and East Asian Studies,New YorkUniversity Our currenthistorical conjunctureis markedby a global proliferationof nationalismsthathave fundamentally, often violently, transformed inherthe and ited geopolitical configurationof the post-warera. The apparent resurgenceof nationalismhas been matchedby a growingconvergenceacrossdisciplinarydivides on the problematicof nationalism.A few salient prior works notwithstanding,it is mainly in the last two decades thatnationalismhas emergedas a centralpreoccupation contemporary of historicaland social-scientificanalyses. the Remarkably, stubbornpersistence of nationalismin the currentcontext of neo-liberalglobal restructuring the dizzying expansion of nationalismreand searchhave not enhancedanalyticalconsensus on core theoreticaland methodological issues. Indeed,the rushfor an analytical"fix"on nationalismhas tended to fortify ratherthan resolve inheritedmethodological divides, especially thatbetween objectivist and subjectivistapproachesto nationalism. This essay critically reconstructsBenedict Anderson'sconcept of modular nationalismthroughthe optic of recent calls to mediate the canonical opposition between objectivityand subjectivity.If this is a familiarcall, it is also one usually more honored in the breach than in the observance.Recent works by social theoristshave at once stressedthe limits of this classical opposition and identified its socially generatedcharacter.'According to these works, an adequateaccountof such modernsocial forms as nationalismmust capturethe dynamic interplaybetween sociohistoricalprocesses and the embodied, constiof tutingcharacter everydaypracticesand culturalcategoriesof understanding.
Earlier versions thisessaywerepresented theSocialTheory of and at Workshop the Nationand Nationalism at Center Adfor of in Workshop theUniversity Chicago 1997,andattheInternational vancedStudy, New YorkUniversity 2000. I am especially indebted Neil Brenner, to in Rogers and Moishe and Sewellfortheircritical Brubaker, Calhoun, Postone, William Craig insights suggestions. Benedict Anderson, Thomas Bender, FrederickCooper, Harry Harootunian,Michael Kennedy,MaryNolan, and RonaldSuny providedvaluablecommentson differentversions of this

thanks duetoThomas are Trautmann David and Akin,as wellas thetwoanonymous essay.Special CSSH reviewers thisessay. of Bourdieu (1977, 1988, 1990);Calhoun (1987, 1990a, (1993, 1994);Elias(1978);Giddens
1990b); Postone (1993); Sewell (1992). 0010-4175/02/770-799$9.50 ? 2002 Societyfor Comparative Studyof SocietyandHistory

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However, social-theoreticaldiscussions about the problem of mediating beon tween objectivistand subjectivistapproachesand the literature nationalism have tended to operate as parallelratherthan intersectingfields of inquiry.A that centraltask for scholarsof nationalismis to fashion a framework integrates and treatsas methodologicallyinseparablethe objective and subjectivedimensions of nationalismas a modernsocial form.The objective and subjectivedimensions of nationalismshouldbe placed in a single analyticalfield, treatedas PierreBourdieuobserves, as "two translationsof the same sentence.'"2 This essay begins with a critical elaborationof what I regardas one of the most sustainedattemptsto bridge the gap between objectivist and subjectivist approaches-Benedict Anderson's account of modularnationalismas develreview of oped in his 1983 work, Imagined Communities.In a programmatic recent studies of nationalism,the historiansGeoff Eley and Ronald Suny idenmethoda as tify Anderson'sImaginedCommunities inaugurating fundamental and materialist"to "culturalstudies" ological reorientationfrom "structural perspectives on nationalism.3Notwithstandingsignificant exceptions to this trendaway from "structural materialist" and approachesto nationalismamong state-centricand neo-institutionalist sociologists,4this mappingof nationalism researchcapturesthe dominantreceptionof Anderson'swork amonghistorians as well as literary-critical culturaltheorists.From an interdisciplinary and perspective, his work marksthe genealogical locus of contemporarysubjectivist approachesto nationalism.Many recent works have adoptedAnderson's anthropologicalconceptionof the nationas an "imaginedcommunity"andthe focus on the representational structureand affective dimensions of nationalism. However, these works have largely ignored or consciously repudiatedhis argument aboutthe modularcharacterof nationalism,thatis, the ways in which it "is capable of being transplanted" across regional, socio-cultural,and institutionalcontexts.5Whateverits deficiencies, Anderson'stheoryof nationalism of sought to elucidatethe historicallynovel discursivestructure nationalimagIt inings and embed them within broaderhistoricaltransformations. attempted to theorize in tandem shifts in technological institutions,cultural categories, and categoricalidentities. More particularly, account of the modularcharhis nationalismdirectedattenacter of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century tion to the transregionalcirculation and transplantationof nationalist discourses, symbols, and strategies.And in so doing, it underlinedthe importance of the global and comparative-historical aspects of nationalism.I shall suggest that the concept of modularnationalism-reworked in ways that I shall specify below-is central to the attemptto combine the insights of objective and subjective approaches.
2
3

Bourdieuand Wacquant (1992:105). Eley and Suny (1996: 24). Also see Parker(1999) and Culler (1999).

4 Brubaker (1996); Calhoun (1998); Hall (1998); Mann (1995).

5 Anderson(1991:4). Also see Anderson(1998, 2001).

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At the same time thatAnderson'sframeworkpoints to the gaps in studies of nationalismbetween objectivistand subjectivistapproaches-and thus potentially to theirproductiveintegration-it also suffersfrom a weakness or gap of its own. This stems from an insufficient specification of the historical speciof ficity andconstitutionof the modularcharacter nationalism.I shall arguethat Anderson's attemptto close the gap between objectivist and subjectivist approachesis underminedby a centraltension between what I call sociohistorical versus ideal-typicalconceptions of modularnationalism.This unresolved tension resultsin a narrowing the multiplesocial causalitiesthatconditioned of the modularcharacterof nationalismduring the modern global era. By conceptualizing modularityas a universal process of mimesis (of self-identical repetitionthroughtime and across space) ratherthan a historicallyconstituted systemic dimension of the modernnation form, Andersonprivileges the subjectivist dimensionsof nationalismand does not pay sufficientattentionto the of dynamic and "eventful"reconfigurations nationalism.6 or of Againstthe background the so-called "cultural" subjectivistturnin conarticleelaboratesan alternativeconceptunationalismresearch,this temporary alization of modularnationalismthatseeks to overcome the weaknesses of the concept as it is deployed in Anderson'swork. I rethinkmodularityas the transposable, dynamic, durable,and doubled characterof the modernnation form. This theorizationis intendedto: (1) navigatekey aspectsof the riftbetween objectivist and subjectivistapproachesto nationalism;(2) refocus attentionon the global articulationof the nation as a social form ratherthan the particularistic content of specific nationalistmovements;and (3) specify key processes that conditionedthe constitutionof a modularnation form within a specific historical conjunctureand transnational field. My argument proceedsas follows. First,I elaborateAnderson'sintervention in debateson nationalismindicatingthe limits of contemporary subjectivistapAnderson'sconcept of modular proaches.On this basis, I criticallyreconstruct of nationalism,and propose an alternativeconceptualization modularitythatis between diverse attentiveto the historicallyconstituted"familyresemblances" that conditionedthe nationalistmovements. Second, I elucidatekey processes emergenceof a modularnationformduringthe late nineteenthandearlyto midA era twentieth-century of colonial andcapitalistglobalrestructuring. briefconof the modular nation cluding section suggests how a reworked conception of form can provideinsight into the form and trajectory nationalismin the current era of neo-liberalglobal restructuring.
THE LIMITS OF SUBJECTIVIST APPROACHES

Benedict Anderson's conception of the nation as an "imaginedcommunity" cleared a path throughtwo impasses generatedby priorapproachesto nation6 See Sewell (1996, 1997) for an accountof eventful temporalities.

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alism.7 First, against the quest for a positivist, definitional determinationof the nation, he directed attentionto the affectively resonantdiscursive "style" throughwhich nationsareimagined.By engagingthe discursiveelaborationof nationhood,he directed analysis away from attemptingto uncover the objective and structural constituentsof the nation. Second, Anderson'sconceptualization of the nation as an "imaginedcommunity"moved discussions beyond the previous bind of adjudicatingbetween the reality versus the fiction of the concept of nation.8I shall examineAnderson'sargumentin detail below, payattentionto his accountof the modularcharacterof nationalism. ing particular central concern here is to examine critically the growing prominenceof My subjectivistapproachesthathave largely followed Anderson'swork on nationalism.9 Geoff Eley and Ronald Suny identify Anderson'swork as "anemblematic text"thatmarksthe momentof "transition the literature in from structural and materialistanalyses of nationalismto an approachstressingthe meanings and effects of a 'sense of nationality'and intimate connections between personhood and belonging to a nation."'1While Eley and Suny positively affirm the trajectoryof contemporary discussions of nationalismfrom "sociohistorical" to post-Anderson"culturalstudies"perspectives," I shall suggest certain deficiencies in subjectivistapproaches. Many recent works on nationalismindicate a shift of emphasis away from the sociohistoricalmatrixof nationalismtowardan almost exclusive focus on its subjectiveand discursivecontours,especially the internalheterogeneityand difference that nationalismsseek to subsume and contain.12While one major strandof nationalistresearchprimarilyfocuses on the objective determinants and first causes of nationalism,a growing numberof recent works have been 13 preoccupiedwith the discursiveprovenanceof nationalism. Conscious of the
7 Anderson(1991). thesis that gained broadcurrency importancehere is the "inventionof tradition" 8 Of particular duringthe early 1980s. AlthoughEric Hobsbawmand TerenceRanger(1983) explicitly elaborated this thesis, it was a widely sharedtenet of priorworks by Gellner (1983), Seton-Watson(1977), Kedourie(1960, 1971), andNairn(1975, 1977). Articulatedwithinthe termsof modernistandconstructivistapproaches,the "inventionof nationhood"thesis sought to historicize and materialize nationalism.However, intrinsicto the notion of the invention was the assumedexistence of a real nationalhistoryor nationobscuredby disingenuousor dupedpolitical andeconomic elites. By conforeclosed the task of accountingfor the soceptualizingnationalismas ideology, such approaches cial processes thatengenderreified conceptionsof nationand nationhood.While the "inventionof nationhood"thesis broke from approachesthat took nationalismas its own word, it tended to fix nationalism,in the last instance, on one side of the divide between ideology and objectivity. 9 For an extended critiqueof objectivist approaches,see Brubaker(1996) and Verdery(1996). See also Goswami (1998a). 10 Eley and Suny (1996: 24). 11 Ibid., 24. 12 Bhabha(1990); Borneman(1992); Chatterjee(1993); Falk-Moore(1993); Parkerand Russo (1992); Skurski(1996); Tambiah(1992); Yuval-DavisandAnthias (1989). 13 Theoristsworking within objectivist frameworkshave primarilyfocused on the first causes or origins of nationalism,understoodas a productof long-runsocial processes andhistoricaltransformations.Withinthe rubricof objectivistapproaches,nationalismhas been variouslyunderstood as the productof expanding communicationand transportation networks (Deutsch 1953; Seton-

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ideological circularity of nationalist discourse, various recent works have arguedthatnationalismresists not only a priori,positivist, and abstractdefinibetions, but all definitional attempts.In this view, the incommensurability tween cultural-ideologicalarticulationsof nationalisms,across widely divergent contexts, is methodologicallyconclusive. In an exemplaryinstanceof this broadassumption,Eve Sedgwick arguesthatthereareno affinitiesbetweenthe: [N]ationness Canada, different of the nation-ness Mexico,of thePhilippines, the of of Nation[within UnitedStates], theSix Nations the of the States[across United Navajo Canada the of the of border], nationalism thenon-nation Quebec, non-nationalism the non-nation Hawaii... andso forth[thus] there ... no existsfornations simply nor... malway to partake the categorical of of no definitiveness the national, singlekindof other whata nation to whichall canby thesamestructuration definitionally of is be opin posed(brackets original).14 This perspective informs, for instance, many recent anthropologicalengagements with nationalism.15 However, in its most popularvariantthis acute perception of the difficulty of defining nationalism,has taken the form of substituting for the sociohistoricalproblematicof nationalismthat of its symbolic, semantic,and discursive aspects. Condensedin the analyticalshift from nationalismas a sociohistoricalproblematic to the view of "nation"as a discursiveconstructwe find a consequential, if subtle, elision of the sociohistorical processes and institutional constraintsthat attendthe productionand circulationof meaning. Homi Bhabha's influentialessays on nationalismpresent,in a distilledform,this move fromnationalism to nation, from a sociological to a discursive optic, and from the identity of the nation to its difference.16PushingAnderson's anthropological conception of the nation as a system of culturalsignification even further,he stressesthe "impossibleunityof the nationas a symbolicforce.""17 Bhabhaurges scholarsof nationalismto focus on the "particular ambivalencethathauntsthe idea of the nation,the language of those who write of it and the lives of those who live it."'8 The methodologicaljustification of an exclusive focus on the of "interruptive interiority" nationalistdiscourse is premisedon the claim that thereis no "nationalism general."19 this view, the source of nationalism's in In
Watson as of 1977); a functional 1983,1994);as a legitimat(Gellner requirement modernization of domination (Hobsbawm 1990);as an outgrowth the homogenizing ing ideologyof bourgeois

practices associated with the creation of centralized,unitaryterritorialstates (Tilly 1975, 1990;

Mann1993,1995);as a separatist elitesagainst structurally the of generated response peripheral of and of Nairn1975,1977); asanexpression thepol1975; process uneven (Hechter development itics of resentment socialgroupsandstates(Greenfeld 1992).Objectivist amongmarginal aphave its of to afto proaches paidless attention theemotive power nationalism, capacity summon fectiveattachment collective and that a the sacrifice, discursive practices helpsecure tie between individuals anabstract and national transformationsnationalism. of and collectivity, eventful
Sedgwick (1992:241). Borneman(1992); Falk-Moore(1993); Herzfeld (1982); Kapferer(1988); Ivy (1995); Tambiah (1992). 16 Bhabha(1990). 19 Ibid., 297-302, 303. 17 Ibid., 1. 18 Ibid.
15
14

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ambivalence rests in its constitutiveundecidabilityand its lack of discursive closure. However, an acknowledgementof the ambivalentcharacterof nationalist discourseneed not entail the strongassumptionthatnationalism'sdistinction lies primarilyor solely in its undecidability. An exclusive focus on the undecidability and particularityof nationalism threatensto jettison the valuable comparative-historical insights garneredby materialistand objectivist approaches.The discourse of nationhood, as it is played out in divergentmovements,testifies to the statusof the nation as both one of the most universallylegitimate articulationsof group identity and one It of the most enduringand pervasive forms of modernparticularism. is precisely the doubledform of nationalismas simultaneouslyuniversalandparticularthat allows both for objectivist,programmatic theories of nationalismand subjectivistdenunciationsof such attempts.Recent injunctionsto engage the promiscuouspluralityand unruly disseminationof the concept "nation"usehas fully cautionus againstwhatRogers Brubaker identifiedas "substantialist" conceptions of nations as "real,enduringcollectivities" that implicitly inform many objectivist accounts of nationalism.20 However, they do not provide analytical purchaseon the global articulationof the nation as both an objective and subjectivesocial form. Many recent subjectivistapproachesto nationalismhave sharpenedour understandingof the internaltensions within nationalistdiscourse,especially its fraughtmanagementof race, gender,and class differences;the disperseddisciplinaryregimes that shape nationalistpractices;and the interpellationof individuals and collectivities into normativenational subjects.21However, these works have paid less attentionto the ways in which broadersocial processes and institutions-such as the dynamics of the modern inter-statesystem, the tie universalizinglogic of capital,the institutionalized between nationhoodand statehood-shape the sociopolitical and discursive structureof nationalism. Theorists working within subjectivistframeworksfail to adequatelyexamine the socio-historicalconditions that mediate the universallylegitimate form of the nation and the conditions of its global (re)production.By relegating nationalism to a discursive domain,these works rehearse,ratherthan overcome, such classical dichotomiesas objectivity/subjectivity universality/particuand larity. The protean,polyphonic, and shape-shiftingcharacterof nationalism,the fact thatis at once irredeemably and particular solidly universal,rendersa general or comprehensivetheory of nationalismas such illusory.Yet, at the same character nationalismcalls for analyticallexicons of time, the multidimensional attentive to its simultaneously objective/subjective and universal/particular and on character, its instantiation a global scale as the dominantpolitical form.
20 Brubaker (1996:16). 21 Chatterjee(1986, 1993); Gilroy (1987, 1993); Hall (1997); Handler (1988); Jayawardena (1986); Parkerand Russo (1992); Yuval-DavisandAnthias (1989); Verdery(1991, 1996).

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An exclusive focus on the localized dimensionsof nationalismand the discursive constitutionof nationhoodbracketsa fundamentalaspect of the modern nation form: the historical regularitiesor "family resemblance"between diverse modem nationalistmovements, despite their highly variegatedregional and culturalcontexts of production.The historically constituted "family resemblances"between modem nationalismsincludethe pervasivelyinstitutionalized tie between nationhoodand statehood;the principleof territorial nationand juridical sovereignty; the understandingof culture, history, and ality the territoryas the "frontiersigns" of the modernnation;22 emphaseson a territorialcorrespondence between people, culture,economy, and state;the claim to a collective archaicpast and a linear,developmentalconception of the future;the conceptof "directmembership" accordingto which individualsareunderstoodas integralpartsof a nationalcollective and as formally equivalent;23 and what I shall sketch in the following sections as the relationsof interdependence, path-dependency,formal equivalence, and discursive co-constitution thathave definedthe field of nationalismandnation-states the late nineteenth in and early twentiethcenturyera.
IMAGINED COMMUNITIES AND MODULAR NATIONALISM

Benedict Andersondoes not explicitly elaboratehis theory of modularnationalism with reference to the problematicof mediating between its objective and subjectivedimensions.However,I believe thathis framework containssustained moments of a challenge both to objectivism (which he explicitly repudiates) and to subjectivism (a position that has, as indicated above, gained prominencesince his interventionin studies of nationalism).In my view, Andersonmakestwo crucialanalyticalmoves. First,he attemptsto specify the discursive formof nationalismandto situateit in relationto social andinstitutional transformations. Second, he directs attentionto the dualistic characterof nationalismas bothuniversalandparticular. shallfirstsketchAnderson'sattempt I to embed the specific discursivematrixof nationalimaginingsandhis analysis of modularnationalism.On this basis, I shall identify and analyze his equivocation between an ideal-typicaland sociohistoricalnotion of modularity. Anderson'sImaginedCommunities concernedless with the origins andtrais of specific nationalistmovements than with the conditions that made jectory possible conceptionsof the nation.He locates the constitutionof the concept of nationin a set of historicaland culturalprocesses mediatedvia the novel institutional structureof print-capitalism. Taking as his point of departurea conof "nationality, he nation-nessand nationalism"as "culturalartifacts," ception identifies the main contoursof his argumentas follows: "I will be tryingto argue that the creation of these artifacts [i.e., 'nationality,nation-ness and nationalism'] towardthe end of the eighteenthcenturywas the spontaneousdis22 Poulantzas (1978:97). 23 Calhoun (1998:5).

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tillationof a complex 'crossing'of discretehistoricalforces; butthat, once crewith varying deated, they became 'modular,'capable of being transplanted, grees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains,to merge and be mergedwith a correspondingly wide varietyof political andideological constellations."24 reconstituAndersonposits a constitutivenexus between the print-capitalist tion of language,the novel apprehension temporalityit engendered,and the of discursive matrix of national imaginings. Print languages reconfiguredrelations of power, affect, and language along three crucial axes: they produced "unifiedfields of exchange and communication"; they endowed a "new fixity to language"that enabled transhistorical conceptions of the nation as at once naturaland eternal; and they created a hierarchicalorder of "languages-ofThese shifts at power"thatreconfiguredthe terrainof political contestation.25 once expressedand helped producethe novel temporalform of "homogenous, empty time" which shapedthe substantivecontent of the new nationalframework of consciousness.26 Andersonarguesthatthe universalizinglogic of "homogenous empty time"linked togetherdiverse andphysically separatedactors who, while unawareof each other'spresence,were placed collectively on a singularnationalspace and within a collective, unitarytime.27These technologiof led cally mediatedculturaltransformations to the rearticulation "fraternity, power,andtime"frompracticesassociatedwith inheritedkingships,sacrallan(exemplified guages, andcosmological time towardthe discursivepresentation in the modernrealist novel) and existential experience of fellow nationals as existing in a national"communaltemporalsimultaneity."28 that These observationsabout the transformations generatedthe distinctive culturalmatrixof the nationset the stage forAnderson'sanalysis of whathe reThe idea thatnationgardsas its distinguishingaspect-its modularcharacter. alism is modularor "capableof being transplanted" occupies a central place Yet within Anderson's historical account of nationalism.29 the term modular remains remarkablyand frustratinglyunder-specified:its meaning is presupposed ratherthan self-consciously theorized. It has the status of a pervasive metaphorratherthan a clearly elaboratedconceptualcategory.Insofaras Anderson's strategyis to "show ratherthan tell," he develops his argumentabout the modularcharacterof nationalismwith referenceto three distinct nationalist movements. These are identified as "Creole nationalism" in late eighin teenth-andearlynineteenth-century Americas;"linguisticnationalism" midnineteenth-century Europe; and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Be"official nationalism" linked with BritishimperialismandRussification.30 cause I regardthis as a key juncturein Anderson'sargument,I want to consider more closely his accountof these three distinctnationalisms.
24 Anderson (1991:4). 25 Ibid., 44-45. 30 29 Ibid., 4. Ibid., 47-141. 26 Ibid., 24. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 36, 24-26.

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marksthe historicalorigins of Accordingto Anderson"Creole-nationalism" nationalismas well as its normativepromise. He argues that Creole nationalists forged inclusive genealogies of civic and territorial belonging thattranslated the historicalaccidentsof race, religion, kinship,and birthinto an imagined national whole. However, he argues that Creole nationalismwas not modular because it failed to generatea nationalistmovementco-extensive with the geThe modularcharacter naof ographicalreach of colonial SpanishAmerica.31 tionalism emergedonly in the mid- to late nineteenthcentury. Anderson identifies nineteenth-century as print-capitalism the crucible for the circulationand linguistically mediatedreificationof the nation on a transregional scale. The accumulatedprint-memoryof the Frenchrevolution and nationalistmovements in the Americas assumedby the mid-nineteenthcentury the statusof a globally available "concept,model, and indeed blueprint."32 made possible both the acceleratedmigrationof the concept of Print-capitalism the nation and its reification as a self-understoodnaturalentity. Entrenched within everyday print-languages political consciousness as such, the conand of the nation as developed by popular-linguistic official nationalisms and cept was "aninventionon which it was impossible to secure a patent."33 Carriedon the back of communicationtechnologies and new representational media (novel, newspaper,and pamphlet), these nationalist movements became "formal models to be imitated,and, where expedient,consciously exploited in a Machiavellian fashion."34 Anderson's narrativeabout the modular nature of nationalism contains a that strong, if implicit, assumptionof their "path-dependency," is, the notion that temporallyprior nationalistmovements significantly shape the dynamic and trajectory of later nationalist movements. He notes that by the midnineteenthcentury,"amodel of the independent nationalstatewas availablefor But precisely because it was by then a known model, it imposed cerpirating. tain 'standards' from which too-markeddeviations were impermissible."35 In this view, the institutions,strategies,and ideologies associated with popularlinguistic and official nationalismsbecame objects of "piracy,"transfer,and In "transplantation." a passage worthquoting at length,Andersonunderscores this path-dependent characterof nationalistmovements: a modular nationalisms [T]wentieth have,as I havebeenarguing, profoundly century character. can,anddo,draw ... earlier models nationalism. of Nationalist leadon They ers arethusin a position educational to consciously deploycivil andmilitary systems modeled officialnationalisms; on and celebraelections, partyorganizations, cultural tionsmodeled thepopular on and nationalisms nineteenth-century of Europe; the citiidea in In into zen-republican brought theworld theAmericas. a world whichthenaby tionalstate theoverwhelming is that can all norm, of thismeans nations nowbe imagined to of ... out of a generalawareness whatmodemhistoryhas demonstrated be possible.36
31

Ibid., 63.

32

Ibid., 81.

33 Ibid., 67.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid., 81.

36 Ibid., 135.

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Though Andersondoes not theorize explicitly the term modular,it is possible to glean its principalconceptualco-ordinatesthrougha close readingof the historicalnarrativesummarizedhere. In sum, for Anderson,modularrefersto the and translocaltransplantation particularnationalistmodels of path-dependent time and across space. through
MODULARITY: IDEAL-TYPICAL VERSUS SOCIOHISTORICAL CONCEPTIONS

Anderson'sconceptof modularnationalismhas been criticizedfrom two closely relatedperspectives.First, some scholarshave claimed that the conception of modularnationalismprivileges the role of large-scalestructural shifts at the expense of a concrete analysis of which social groups were most invested in discoursesof nationhood.37 Second, variousothertheoristshave arguedthatthe idea of modularnationalismerasesthe specificity of nationalistmovements,especially anti-colonialnationalism,and sets up an hierarchicaldistinctionbetween origin and copy.38Both of the above-mentionedargumentsare formally similar in two respects. First, they both take issue with the homogenizing imAs plicationsof Anderson'sanalysisof nationalism. I shall elaboratebelow, certain tensions within Anderson'stheory leave him open to this line of critique. Second, both lines of critiquepresuppose,and rhetoricallyoverstate,the particularityof nationalistimaginings.In an attemptto directattentionto the local contoursof specific nationalistmovements,they tend to overlook the transnational and global productionof the local. An exclusive focus on the particularistic content of specific nationalistmovements rendersinvisible the relations of interdependence, formal equivalence, and discursive copath-dependency, constitutionthat,as I shall argue,characterize modernworld of nationalism the and nation-states.Against recent calls to discard the concept of modularnaof tionalism,39I arguefor a substantivereformulation the concept ratherthan its abolition. There is a centraltension withinAnderson'sframeworkbetween an attempt to foregroundthe social conditions of possibility of thinking the nation and what I term his ideal-typicalrenderingof the termmodular.A methodological stress on the historical processes that made nationalismpossible takes as ax37 Breuilly (1985); Duara(1995). (1993); Guha(1985); Skurski(1996). See also Calhoun(1998:107-9). Chatterjee, 38 Chatterjee the most forceful of Anderson'scritics, observes: "If nationalismsin the rest of the world have to choose theirimaginedcommunityfrom certainmodularforms alreadymade availableto them by Europeand the Americans,what do they have left to imagine?"In a veiled responseto this line of critique,Anderson'smost recent work, The Spectreof Comparisons,attemptsto "disposeof such the bogeys as derivativediscourses and imitationin understanding remarkableplanetaryspread, not merely of nationalisms,but of a profoundly standardizedconception of politics" Anderson (1998:29). See also Harootunian's(1999) powerful critique of the problematicepistemology of comparisonthathauntsboth Chatterjee'scritiqueof modularnationalismandAnderson'sSpectre
of Comparisons. 39 Calhoun(1998:107-9); Chatterjee(1993); Guha(1985).

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iomatic an intrinsicrelationbetween social relations and forms of subjectiviand ty.40In this view, categoriesof self-understanding practicebear a dialectical relationshipto the social contexts of their generation and reproduction. However,Anderson'sdelineationof the universaldiffusion of nationalistdiscourse-of the ease with which particularmodels of nationhoodwere transplantedin diverse social, cultural,andpoliticalcontexts-is in tensionwith this framework.Anderson's account of the migration of popular-linguisticand official-nationalist models proceedswithoutreferenceto on-going sociocultural shifts, institutionalcomplexes, or local-regionalconfigurationsduring the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries. The issue here is not only that post-Creolenationalistmodels are presentedas conceptualabstractionsoperfrictionless arenaof global flows. Rather,the point ating within an apparently is that the circulationof nationalistmodels, as elaboratedbelow, are delinked causally and temporallyfrom their on-going contexts of production. ratherthanthe new form Anderson'salmost exclusive focus on print-media of social relations established by capitalism overlooks the multiple causal registers that shape nationalism and privileges processes of circulation over processes of production.This leads to a conceptual narrowingof the social of causalitiesthatproducedthe modularcharacter nationalism.This issue is reenforcedby the analyticaldivide between the first and second half of Imagined Communities. first half (chapters1-5) sketchesthe processes by which the The nationcame to be imagined,whereasthe second half (chapters6-11) examines division of the circulationand transplantation nationalism.This organizational between is basedupon,andperformatively re-enforces,an analyticalseparation processes of productionand processes of circulation. Anderson'sanalysis of so-called "last wave" nationalismsin the era of decolonization exemplifies this separation.Indeed, he representsthe disjuncture of between the context of the productionand the reproduction nationalismas definitive: being whichnonethehavetheirowncharacter, War Thenew statesof post-World II period we of of less is incomprehensible exceptin terms thesuccession models havebeenconthat ourselves ... theytook is this One sidering. wayof underlining ancestry to remind and its nationalism ardent fromlinguistic populism, fromofficialnationalism European had and Americans Europeans its Russifying They policy-orientation. didso because
lived throughcomplex historical experiences which were now everywheremodularly imagined.41

This formulationassumes-without providing an adequatebasis for-an in ontological separationbetween objective and subjectivetransformations the issue here is not only the denial of temAt worldplaced outsideEuro-America. poral and spatialcoevalness that underliesthis teleological mappingof global
40 Bourdieu(1977, 1988, 1990);Calhoun(1993, 1994);Giddens(1987, 1990a);Postone(1993); Sewell (1992). 41 Anderson(1991:113), emphasis added.

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theoristsand space-time,and the relatedassumption,sharedby modernization traditionalMarxists alike, of the linear diffusion of nationalistmodels from Euro-Americato the rest of the world. The point here is the deep tension between Anderson'sindictmentof "lastwave"or "official"nationalismsas a case of "reactionary, secondarymodeling"of the "largelyspontaneouspopularnationalismsthatprecededthem,"andthe effortin the firsthalf of the work to analyze the co-constitutionof subjective and objective forms.42Anderson's account of "last wave" nationalisms implies that following their moment of constitution;nationalistmodels exist in an inert continuum.In other words, once a particular historicalthresholdis reached,modularitybecomes a fixed, frozen formationforever pointing in the directionof a single model. Without an adequatespecification of the conditions of possibility of the circulationof nationalistmodels, however,this perspectiveretainsa strongsubjecparticular tivist bias. More crucially,Andersondoes not distinguishconsistentlybetween the analytically separate,if closely related,logical and historicalaspects of modularity. He conflates a narrativeof the way particularnational imaginings were with the analyticallyseparateissue of the historicallyconditioned transplanted of transposability nationalimaginings.Andersonuses the termmodular,as notmimesis and "transplantaed above, to refer to a process of path-dependent tion."43However,the notion of mimesis and "transplantation" suggests, in the without reiteration mannerof diffusionmodels dearto modernization theorists, between origin andcopy. Such andestablishesa problematichierarchy change, an ideal-typicalunderstanding modularityas a universalprocess of mimesis of leaves unexploreda set of questions that are fundamentalto an understanding of the circulationof nationalisms.What conditions shape the openness of actors to particular nationalistmodels and visions of nationhood?What accounts for the felt salience of particular nationalistimaginingsin diverse political and culturalfields? What is the role of unintendedconsequences and historically specific misrecognitionsin the circulationof nationalistparadigms?Finally,if modularityrefersto a universalprocess of mimesis, what accountsfor the historical clustering of nationalistmovements at particularsociohistorical conjunctures such as 1848, the 1870s, 1914-1915, the 1960s, and 1989-1991? These questions cannot be addressedthroughabstracttheoreticalframeworks without doing violence to the realities of multiple causalities, contingentconthat junctures,and"eventfultransformations" informsocial andpoliticallife.44 The point here is that, insofar as ideal-typicalconceptions assume a universal and transhistorical process of mimesis, they are unable to pose, let alone adsuch questions. dress, By renderingmodularityas the mimetic diffusion of nationalistmodels, Anderson's schema forecloses the possibility of the dynamic and qualitativere42 Ibid., 86-87.

43 Ibid., 4.

44 Sewell (1996:245-81).

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constitutionof nationalimaginings. The static assumptionsintrinsicto an unof in derstanding modularityas mimesis areespecially apparent Anderson'sselective appropriation WalterBenjamin'saccount of capitalisthistoricity as of "homogenous,empty time."Benjaminemploys the categoryof "homogenous, empty time"to refer to the leveling of historicalpossibilities by the "stubborn belief in progress"and teleological constructionsof historicaltime particular to moderncapitalism.45 Homogenousempty time signifies the closed and evoof has lutionaryself-presentation capitalthata traditional historiography all too often uncriticallyreproduced.Against historicist conceptions that affirm the whose site given, Benjaminsuggests that "historyis the subjectof a structure is not homogenous,emptytime, buttime filled by the presenceof the now (JetzAlthoughAndersoncreativelyextends Benjamin'sconceptionof "hotzeit).'"46 distinctiveof the mogenous, empty time"to specify the civil contemporaneity nation,he elides its critical content.What dropsout of this account is modem Benjamin's emphasis on the contradictorycharacterof historical change and social imaginingswithin capitalistmodernity. relegatingthe constitutionof By a "homogenous,empty time" to the representational logic of print-capitalism ratherthan the historically novel form of social relationsestablishedby capiwithin capitalism and talism, Andersonoverlooks qualitativetransformations nationalist movements and assumes a uniformity of causal structures.His causal temporalnarrativecorresponds,in this regard,to teleological conceptions of temporality assumethe path-dependent that of character social processes but represent social causality as "temporallyhomogenous" rather than As "temporally heterogeneous."47 a result,Anderson'saccountof modularnationalism approximates theory of reproduction a tout court. received notions of historicalchange, esBenjamin,by contrast,challenges pecially historicist notions of replication.He argues that an adequateunderstandingof the historicallynovel requiresthe adoptionof a historicalmaterialist frameworkorientedtowardthe appropriation the suppresseddimensions of of past struggles that contain within themselves the possibility of their retrospective redemptionin a discontinuouspresent.According to Benjamin, historicist conceptions of imitation as repetitiondomesticatethe shocks and the possibilities of the present(the filled time of discontinuity)by subsumingthem within a "homogenous,empty time." Benjamin'squarrelwith the conception of a "homogenous,empty time"lead him to refashionthe motif of imitationas rememberinga suppressedpast. Acts of collective, critical rememberingcontain the potential of breaking the perceived homogenous, empty flow of progress,of seizing the possibilities of the present,and mediatingbetween the past and the present,the actualand the possible. Against teleological and nondialectical notions of history as mere replication, Benjamin observes: "[To] Robespierreancient Rome was a past chargedwith the time of the now which
46 Ibid. 47 For a discussion of distinctcausal temporalities,see Sewell (1996:262-64).

45 Benjamin(1968:261).

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he blastedout of the continuumof history.The Frenchrevolutionviewed itself as Rome incarnate.It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matterwhere it stirs in the thickets of the past; it is the tiger's leap into the past ... the same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one."48 However, an ideal-typicalnotion of modularityas self-identicalreplication forecloses the possibility of "regulatedimprovisations"of received national A models within specific sociohistorical conjunctures.49 sociohistorical conof modularitywould emphasize the possibility of reconstitutionbased ception upon a historically constituted range of possibilities and the contradictory spatio-temporal dynamicof capitalism.In this view, nationalistmovementsare but constitutedthrougha path-dependent "temporallyheterogedynamically of neous"process of the reconstellationand transformation both objective and forms.50 subjective The preceding discussion has underlined the limits of Anderson's idealof typical understanding modularity.On the other hand, by emphasizing the modularcharacterof nationalism,Anderson'sframeworkcontainsunexplored possibilities that can begin to assimilatethe insights of objectivist and subjecthe In tivist approaches. whatfollows, I attemptto reformulate conceptof modcharin a way thatretainsAnderson'sinsight aboutthe path-dependent ularity acterof nationalism,but abandonsits teleological and static assumptions.This approachtakes seriously the dynamiccharacterof nationalismand attemptsto socially embed the constitutionof the nationform as modular.
TOWARD A SOCIOHISTORICAL NATION CONCEPTION FORM OF THE MODULAR

I conceive modularityas the historically constituted transposable,dynamic, nation form. doubled, and durable characterof the post-nineteenth-century While Andersonties the notion of modularityexclusively to the transplantation of particular nationalistmodels andframeworksof consciousness, I proposean of alternativeunderstanding modularityas a historicallyspecific systemic feature of the nation form. Before outlining the historical constitutionof the nation form as modularduringthe late nineteenthand early twentiethcenturies,I shall sketch four constitutivedimensions of the modularnation form. (1) The transposabilityof the nationform. A sociohistoricalunderstanding of of modularitysignifies the historicallyconstitutedtransposability the modof or attribute speern nationform as such, ratherthanthe particular trajectory cific nationalistmovements. The circulation of particularnationalistmodels constitutionof the nation form cannotbe understoodapartfrom the structural as transposablewithin the modern inter-statesystem. This understandingof modularitymaintainsthe distinctionbetween its historicalversus its logical as48

Benjamin (1968:261).

49 Bourdieu (1977).

5o Sewell (1996:262-65).

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pects. The very possibility of a distinctionbetween the logical andhistoricalasbetweendiversenapects of modularity hingesuponthe "familyresemblances" tionalistmovementsandthe pervasiveinstitutionalization the nationform in of the moderninter-statesystem. The conceptionof modularitysketchedabove, as the historicallyconfigured transposabledimension of the nation form, converges with recent attemptsto theorize repertoiresof collective action. Sydney Tarrowhas self-consciously extendedAnderson'snotion of the modularnatureof nationalismto the field of social movementsand collective action.5'Tarrow employs the termmodularas distinctionbetweenwhathe calls traditional versusmodernreppartof a broader ertoiresof contention.He arguesthatby the late eighteenthcenturya new repertoire of collective action emerged in Europe and North America. This new was "cosmopolitan ratherthanparochial;autonomousrather thanderepertoire on inheritedritualsor occasions;andmodularratherthanparticular."52 pendent Such modularrepertoires protestas strikes,barricades, of boycotts, mass meetsit-ins and the like were embeddedwithin broadersociohistoricaltransings, formations.Tarrowenvisions modularityas the transposabilityof collective of forms repertoires contentionratherthanas the mimeticdiffusionof particular of collective action. However,therearetwo differencesbetween his accountof modularforms of collective action and the theorizationthat I propose here. First, strikes,barricades,sit-ins, boycotts and the like are betterunderstoodas modularstrategiesratherthan as modularsocialforms such as nationalismand the nation-state.In this view, modularsocial forms such as nationalismandthe nation form are defined not only by their transposability, theirremarkably but durable, dynamic, and doubled character.Second, whereas Tarrowuses the terms modularand universalinterchangeably, will emphasize the doubled or I the simultaneouslyuniversal/particular objective/subjectivecharacterof and the nationform.
(2) The dynamic character of the nation form. As argued previously, con-

and ceptions of modularityas transplantation mimesis assume a homogenizing of sameness or replication without change. However, a conception of logic modularityas transposabilityilluminates the dynamic structureof the nation form. William Sewell's dualistic conception of social structuresand the related theorizationof agency as the capacity to "transpose and extend schemas to new contexts"has particular relevance for graspingthe path-dependent circulation of the nation form.53Indeed, the various definitions of the verb "transpose"-from its Oxford English Dictionarydefinitions, "to remove from one place or time to another;to transfer,shift";to its original meaning in French, "to cause somethingto change in form or contentby causing it to pass into another domain"-connote a dynamic process of transformation.54 Sewell's account of the duality of modern structuresilluminates the ways in which the
51

Tarrow(1993, 1998).

52

Tarrow(1998:37).

3 Sewell (1992:19).

54 Ibid., 7.

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of transposition strategies,culturalschemas,andsocial resourcesfromtheirinitial contexts of productionto new and diverse arenasoccurs throughthe creative capacities of social actors and entails a dynamicprocess of the reconfiguration of social structures.Inherentto the transposition--as opposed to the of transplantation-of social forms is the agentic and dynamicreconfiguration cultural categories, institutionalrepertoires,and meanings. A conception of modularityas transposabilityimplies a process of on-going, path-dependent, and "eventful"t:ransformations ratherthanthe staticreplicationof received social and culturalforms.55 (3) The doubledcharacterof the nationform. A centralaspect of the moduand lar nationform is its doubledcharacteras at once universaland particular, and subjective.Nationalismis not only among the most universally objective of legitimate articulations collective identity,but it is also one of the most perIn vasive and entrenchedforms of modernparticularism. an astute aside, Etienne Balibarobservesthatnationalisms"donot workeverywherethe sameway: in a sense they must work in a differentway everywhere,as part of 'national identity."56The representational grammarof modem nationalismexpresses a doubled understanding identity and difference.Nationalistdiscourse works of in andthroughthe simultaneousassertionof similaritywith anddifferencefrom other nation-statesand nations. The universallanguage of self-determination, for instance,has been routinelymobilized to make claims for a particularized nationalcommunity.Nationalistmovements and nation-statesclaim the patriboundednationalcommunitythat,in mony of a culturallysingular,territorially is represented an instantiation a universalpolitical and culturalform. of as turn, mirThe doubledcharacterof the nationform as both universaland particular in this respect,the spatialpartitioning the moderninter-state of rors, system into a series of mutuallyexclusive, formallyequivalent,sovereign states. Nationalist movements and nationalizing states present themselves as universalistic withinthe confinesof the nationalcommunity, as particularistic but without,that in relationto other nations and nation-states.Likewise, nationalizingstates is, claim to representthe universalinterestof a boundedcitizenrywithin a delimited national space. Yet these universal interests are configured as particular within the context of the inter-statesystem. Nationalistclaims of particularity and the imagined singularityof national formationsonly become intelligible a againstand wit]hin global grid of formallysimilarnationsand nation-states. The durabilityof the nationform. A key dimension of the modularityof (4) the nation form lies in its remarkabledurability.The durabilityof the nation form is evinced notjust in the longue durdeof nationalismas a political and social phenomenonon a global scale, but also in qualitativeterms. The nation 57 in form is a paradigmatic instance of a "deepstructure" threerespects. First,
55 Sewell (1997). 57 Sewell (1992).
56

Balibar(1994a:202). Also see Balibar(1991 and 1994b).

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the modularnationformunderliesandhas spawneda rangeof practicesandinmatricesof social andpolitical life. the stitutionsthatstructure spatio-temporal Examples include the institutions associated with national economies (e.g., regimes of economic planning,nationaltaxationand welfare systems, national currencies,tariffs, import quotas, nationalbanks, national debts), the constructionof culturalfields (standardized languages,educationalinstitutes,museums, the systematizationof expressive and folk traditions,and the formation of nationalpublic spheresand literarytraditions),institutionsthatregulatecultural and political belonging and territorialmobility (citizenship, passports, built environmentsthat serve as the spatioborders),the creationof particular locus of state-mediated collective memoryand commemoration(natemporal tional capitals, nationalmemorials)and the like. Second, the nation form is a because it has a pervasivepresencein a rangeof social andpo"deepstructure" litical institutionsand categories of thoughtand action. Not only is the nationstatethe dominantpolitical form on a global scale, but nationalistcategoriesof permeateinterpretiveframes and social practices in everyday understanding life and the public sphere.The durabilityof the nationform has been bound, in part,with its provision of an everyday normativegrammarfor the articulation of collective identities and political projectsand as a centrallocus of affective identification.Third,the durabilityand depthof the nationform stems from its socially producedreified status, that is, from the ways in which many of the practices, institutions, and conceptual categories associated with the nationThese stateandnationalismhave become second natureor areseen as natural.58 isothe conceptionof a territorial include the principleof territorial nationality, between a national culture, people, language, territoryand state, morphism ideas about popularsovereignty,assumptionsof a distinctive nationalhistory andmission, andthe practicesof territorial democracy.The durabilityof the nation form has thus both objective and subjectivedimensions.
THE HISTORICAL PRODUCTION OF A MODULAR NATION FORM

I now want to elaboratekey processes thathelped constitutea modularnation form duringthe late nineteenthand early to mid twentiethcenturies, and furtherspecify some methodologicalimplicationsthatfollow from a reworkednoand tion of modularity. conceptualizedhere, modularitywas the structural As to discursivecounterpart the changes initiatedby the deepening,widening, and intensificationof multi-scalarand multi-temporal processes of global capitalof The structuration the nation form as modular ist and colonial restructuring. duringthis period was made possible by a range of interlockingprocesses: (a) of the increasing "superimpositionand interpenetration" socioeconomic and culturalrelations, and the competitive rescaling of social relations along national-territorial lines; (b) the formation of states as spatio-temporalframe58 Brubaker (1996); Calhoun (1998); Malkii (1992).

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works of powerin conjunctionwith the emergenceof a dynamic,relational,and structured field of inter-state relations;(c) the discursiveco-constitutionandthe of nationalistdiscoursein a rangeof regionalcontexts; growing intertextuality and (d) the nationalizationand naturalization social and culturalcategories of of practiceand understanding. Global space-time and the nationform. The era of the late nineteenth-and was earlytwentieth-centuries definedby a structured dynamicbetweenhigh nationalismandhigh imperialism; was an age simultaneouslyof empireandnait tion. Colonial expansion and the spatialwidening and deepening of the world economy were the crucible for the formation of a densely interdependent, deeply uneven, and multiformglobal space-time.Vast concentrationsof capital and labor coalesced in particular regions while globe-spanningtransportation and communicationstructuresspurredthe mobility of capital, peoples, aesthetics, and culturalflows.59 Colonial and capitalistexpansionwas characof and terized by an intensificationof the "superimposition interpenetration" socioeconomic and culturalrelationson local, regional, national,and transnational scales.60 On the one hand, colonial and capitalist expansion was the source of novel forms of universalizationthat shapedboth objective and subjective processes. These includedan emergentworld economy and a particular international division of labor; the consolidation of an inter-state system throughinter-imperial rivalry;a dense network of socio-economic flows and cultural interconnectedness;the reconstitutionof conceptions of space and time; and the dialectical interweavingof regional, particularhistories into a trend global, interactiveterrain.On the otherhand,therewas a complementary toward particularization: rise of nationaliststruggles within metropolitan the Europe (Ruthenianand Croatmovements in the Habsburgempire, Macedonian and Albanian struggles in the Balkans, Welsh nationalismin Britain,and Germanand Italiannationalismsin the late nineteenthcentury);the proliferation of various anti-Western, pan-Asian movements in Japanand China, the of economic nationalistand protectionistpolicies in national-imperial spread states (The United States, Germany,Japan),colonial formations(the counterhegemonic swadeshi movement in colonial India that sought to foster indigenous enterprisesandboycottforeigncommoditiesin an effortto fashion an economic and cultural national space against the British-colonial regime), and semi-colonial regional states (the boycott movement in China againstWestern commoditiesandproducts);and the deepeningand widening of economic, political, and culturalunevenness.61
59 Amin(1996); and (1995);Harvey (1994);Arrighi Silver(1999);GeyerandBright Arrighi Wolf(1990). (1990);Hobsbawm (1989);Maier (2000);Polanyi (1957); 60 Lefebvre (1991:81). 61 Forthespread nationalism of of within see Europe, Hobsbawm (1990).Foranaccount panAsian civilizational discourses see Duara (1999). For anti-Westernnarrativesin Japan see Harootunianand Najita (1988). For a transnational perspectiveon swadeshi practices see Goswami

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During the last thirdof the nineteenthcentury,processes of global territorial and economic restructuring were indissolubly part of the crisis of Britain's political-economichegemony. By the 1870s, therewas a reciprocalexpansion of strugglesto constituteautonomous,spatiallyboundednationalsocieties and economies in a number of regional contexts. States such as Germany,Italy, Japan, the United States, and Russia, confronted with the world territorial and economic hegemony of metropolitan-imperial Britain,adoptedroughly in tandem neo-mercantiliststrategies toward securing a relatively closed, statedefined and protectednationaleconomic space. This occurredeven as the substantive (ratherthan merely geographical)boundariesof these states extended outwardsto subsumenew colonial territories.62 Fromthe last thirdof the nineteenth century onward, the developmentalist orientationof these states demandeda novel degree of closure from the Britain-centered global economy, to typically securedthroughthe erectionof protectionistbarriers tradeandcapital.63 National-economy making mandatedthe reorganizationof economic blocs throughthe inspace into distinct, mutuallyexclusive national-imperial troductionnot only of protectivetariffs and quotas, but also of massive statedirected investments in developmentalist projects such as railroads, ports, canals, and educationalsystems.64During the last decades of the nineteenth centuryand the early twentiethcentury,therewas a deliberateeffort to forge a regulativeboundarybetween an internal,domestic economy enclosed within stateboundaries,and an external,world economy thatexisted beyond stateterritorial boundariesin a range of national-imperial contexts. These struggles were not confinedto an economic domain,butalso underlaysuch formallysimilar discoursesas "manifestdestiny"(United States);"thewhite man'sburden" (United Kingdom); "mission civilisatrice" (France);and Pan-Asian civilizational missions (Japan,China). What bears emphasishere is the temporaland institutionalsynchronicityof strugglesto establishan internallyhomogenous,sovereign space of nationness in a numberof imperial-national United States,Japan)andcolonial/ (Germany, semi-colonial contexts (swadeshi in India, the boycott movement in China, staterationalization Thailand).65 in While these movementswere fashionedby local social relations and power struggles, their temporalsimultaneity,structuralsimilarities,and competitivelogic was conditionedby theirlocationwithin a single, increasingly interdependent,and hierarchicallyorganized global space-time.
For of of see and Amin (1998b). analyses thedeepening uneven (1987); development Bright Geyer (1996);Wolf(1990). 62 Colonial linesduring period bounded this spaceswerealsoreconfigured alongterritorially

networks stateinstitutions. of panding 63

65

infrastructures, throughthe extension of communicationand transport political, juridical,and administrativehomogenization,and the increasingpenetrationof colonial societies throughan ex64 Arrighi (1994); Hobsbawm (1990); Mann (1993). Polanyi (1957). Geyer and Bright (1995:1046).

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nationform The transposability durabilityof the post-nineteenth-century and has hinged on its statusas an interstitialframeworkthatmediatedbetween the global (the global economic system andthe inter-state system) andthe local (the and internallines of culturaland historical differences) in both structural disdid cursive senses. The dynamicsof global capitalistrestructuring not bear directly on local actors and institutionsbut did come to affect them throughthe specific field of state-territorial political, cultural,and economic institutionsin the case of colonial spaces, and nationalpolitical-economicinstitutionsin the discoursesin Eurocase of imperialnation-states. this context, state-centered In America, anti-colonial nationalism in South Asia, and statist civilizational projectsin East Asia (China,Japan)sought to secure individualand collective to identificationwith the abstractform of the nation,in contradistinction interrelations.Against the perceived ablocal, regional, and transnational personal, stract, deterritorializingdynamic of colonial and capitalist expansion, discourses of nationhood(especially in colonial worlds) presentedthe nation as historicallycontinuous,spatiallybounded,and internallyhomogenous. In this context, nationalidentitieswere increasinglyfigured, if not precisely lived, as "still points in a turningworld."66 The actualinstantiationof a modularnationform on a global scale (and the hegemonic status of its normativeimaginary)did not fall into place until the creationof the League of Nations, the aftermath the GreatWar,andthe Banof era of decolonizationin the mid-twentiethcentury.However, the widendung ing and deepeningof the multi-scalarand multi-temporal processes of capitalera ist and colonial restructuring the turn-of-the-century spawned the during fundamental lineamentsof the modularnationform. In otherwords, therewas a relation of "ontological complicity" between the incipient formation of a modularnation form and the creationof an uneven, differentiated,and multiform global space-time.67 National territorialityand the inter-statesystem. As suggested, there was a mutuallydependentrelationshipbetween the emergenceof the modularnation form and specific transnational fields. The former entailed a recursive logic, rethatis, the generalizationof particular practicesthat,once institutionalized, the largertransnational field of their constitution.A central dimenproduced sion of this processwas the attempted of territorial "encaging" social, economic, and culturalrelationswithin delimited stateterritorial boundariesthatenabled, as I suggest below, the structuration the nation form as modular.68 of the Fromthe last thirdof the nineteenthcentury,states throughout inter-state became active participants and key sites for, a "territoin, system increasingly The rial rescaling"of political, economic, technological,and social relations.69 of of modernstatesas "spatialframeworks power"70 hingedupon configuration
66 Hall (1997:22). 67 Bourdieu (1990:12). 68 Mann (1993:505). 69 Maier (2000:815). Also see Agnew (1994) and Taylor (1996). 70 Lefebvre

(1991:279).

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a territorial between political, economic, military,and cultural correspondence states in Euro-Americaand resourcesand relations.Modem imperial-national East Asia (Japan) increasingly sought to inscribe their institutionalpresence and authorityin a second-order (that is, a produced rather than pre-given) political-economic space. In the specific case of British and French colonial states in SouthAsia (colonial India)andNorthAfrica (Algeria,Egypt), the centralizationand territorialization colonial state power unwittinglymade posof sible and directed the dynamics and characterof emergent anti-colonial nationalist movements. A rangeof regulatorypracticesand institutions--which emergedin the late nineteenthcenturyand congealed in the mid-twentiethcentury-helped forge nationalterritoriality the privileged scale for social relations,economic deas velopment, political governance, and affective allegiance. These included the boundaries;the exdemarcation,mapping,and policing of national-territorial of pansion and interpenetration society by state institutionssuch as the army, the schools, public bureaucracies; formationof a vast, territoriallyintegrated networksof communicationand infrastructural complexes such as roads, railand ways, bridges, canals, and post-offices; the appropriation designation of naturalresources(forests, lands, oil, mines) as sovereign state space; practices of spatial and economic planning that took a demarcatednationalterritoryas theirexplicit targetand unit of development;andthe creationof a nationalized, built environmentin the form of capitalcities, monuments,official cemeteries, collective memmuseums, and parks,that worked as places of state-mediated ory and which made visible the affective liaisons betweenterritory, history,and collective identity.7" These practices helped forge the political, institutional, and spatio-temporal matricesof the modularnationform.They expressed,and congealed, a specifically modernistand nationalistpre-occupationwith societal homogenization.The paradigmatically nationalistpreoccupationwith homogenization, its articulationwith direct reference to an imagined national space, culture,and economy, and the demandfor exclusive and exhaustiveloymodularnation alty from its citizens, all set apartthe post-nineteenth-century form from other territorialstates and imagined communities,such as empires and city-states. The progressive deployment of the above-mentionedpractices throughout the inter-state century,fasystem, especially duringthe earlyandmid-twentieth cilitated the reproductionof the conditions that engenderedthem in the first place. Consider,for instance,the practiceof delimitingandregulatinga stable, territorial to This form of enclosure,which fixes territory sovereignboundary. The conty, is the differentiaspecifica of the modernworld system of states.72 solidationof the inter-statesystem into a global mosaic composed of mutually
71 HobsbawmandRanger(1983); Scott (1999), Poulantzas(1978); Weber(1976). For an analysis of this process in colonial India see Goswami (1998a). 72 Arrighi(1994); Wallerstein(1983); Taylor(1994).

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exclusive, contiguous state territoriesoccurredin tandem with the consolidation of practicesof internalterritorial-economic sociopoliticalclosure.The and intensification of practices of "self-reflexive monitoring"within and among nation-statesfortified the principle of mutuallyreciprocatedterritorialsovereignty constitutive of the inter-statesystem.73It also entailed the formal institutionalization,however violated in colonial practice, of the principle of territorialnationality,and accentuatedattemptsto sustain a territorialcorreand spondencebetween a nationalstate, people, territory, economy. The formalinstitutionalization the principleof territorial of sovereigntywas rooted within a relationaland dynamic "field"in both spatio-temporal orand ganizational senses.74 As used here, "field" refers to the multiform, differentiated,and uneven global space-timeengenderedby the dynamics of the inter-state system and the deepening and widening of colonial territorialand capitalistexpansion.This field was at once an arenaof materialand symbolic struggles and an objective configurationof forces. Within this field, nationstates were formally similar;that is, they occupied structurally equivalentpositions despite vast substantivedifferencesin economic and political resources andpower.Furthermore, nation-states were shapednotjust throughrelationsof of interconnections of interdependence but insofaras the reproduction particular states came to dependupon the dynamicsof the field as a whole. The practices of individualstates were thus both enabled and constrainedby the workings of a dynamic field that systematized certain patternof interactionsand socio-political forms on an increasinglyglobal scale. Modularitythus exists as a systemic featureof a specific global field througha dynamicprocessof "structuration."75 The discursive co-constitutionand intertextualityof nationalist discourse. The emergenceof a dynamic and interdependent field was coeval with the reconfigurationof the discursiveterrainof nationalimaginings.The development of a high degree of reflexive monitoringbetween nation-statesparalleledthe or growing "intertextuality" discursive overlap between various nationalist movements.The decadesbetweenthe late 1870s and 1914 marked,for instance, the unprecedenteddisseminationof nationalistmovements in both colonized and imperial-national contexts in Europe,SouthAsia, andEast Asia. These naand tionalistmovementswere distinguishedby widely sharedparticularistic organic conceptions of nationhood,evinced in the novel emphasis placed on a common territory, language,ethnicity,and race as the essential markersof nationhood. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centurynationalisms discursively converged aroundan invocation of an already existent, internallyhomogenous, and externallydistinctive nation; widely sharedhistoricist claims that sovereign statehoodwas the culminationof an inner dialectic; and a pro73 Giddens (1987:256). 74 Bourdieuand Wacquant(1992:101). 75 Giddens (1990a); Sewell (1992).

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of foundly statist orientationthat reflected the progressiveinstitutionalization the link between nationhoodand statehood.76 These discursive elements fueled a transnationalpolitics of closure that helped secure the nation form as a bounded "spatialframeworkof power."77 The politics of closure foundconcreteexpressionin a rangeof practices.These included the stress placed on culturaland linguistic purity;the emergence of protectionisteconomic policies in Europe,America, and East Asia; the rise of anti-colonialmass mobilizationcampaignsexemplified in the early twentiethcentury swadeshi movement in colonial India, and the boycott movement in China that sought to regulatepracticesof consumptionand productionas part of a largereffort to producean autonomousnationalspace; the establishment of immigrationcontrols;andthe popularization attempted and naturalization of imperialideologies in Europe,NorthAmerica,and Japan. of Duringthe earlytwentiethcentury,the intertextuality nationalistdiscourse in sharpenedwith the generalizationof the doctrineof self-determination both its Wilsonian and Leninist articulations.The principle of self-determination fostered a multiplicityof territorially delimited, formally similarnation-states based on the principleof territorial nationalityand popularsovereignty.It also privileged subjectivist understandingsof nationhoodinsofar as any body of people thatconsideredthemselves a nationclaimedthe rightfor a separate,sovereign and independentnation-state.The demandfor an autonomoushistory, culture, language and the like could no longer be thought,much less realized, outside of the demand for national self-determination. Nicos Poulantzas As observes, a self-identified nationalcommunitywithout a state of its own was confrontedwith the dangerof "losing its traditionand history."78 Nationalist movementshad to eitherconfrontexisting state structures seek theirtransand formation,or, in the case of anti-colonialnationalisms,aspireto theirown sovereign, properlynationalstates. In either instance,the discursive and structural dimensionsof the modularnationformrepresented institutionalized the ideal and normativehorizon for legitimatecollective struggle. Two methodologicalimplications of this theorizationof modularityas entrenchedwithin a relational,interactive,and dynamicglobal field meritparticular emphasis. First, the origins, character, trajectoryof particular and nationalist movementscannotbe understoodapartfrom a simultaneousfocus on their articulation with a historicallyspecific relationalanddynamicglobal field. Second, the notionof a dynamicandrelationalfield implies both objectiveand suband jective relationsof interdependence formalequivalence.The emergenceof a transposable, not dynamic,and durablenationform entaileda transformation merely in objective conditionsbut in the formationof novel categoricalidentities and conceptionsof territory, economy, culture,and history.The formation
76 Anderson (1983);Hobsbawm (1990). 77 Lefebvre (1991:279). 78 Poulantzas (1978:113).

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of of a modularnationform in conjunctionwith the transnationalization social relations transformedthe terrain of subjectivity because it offered new resources, practices, and disciplines for the creationof novel political identities and ideationalframeworks.In particular, made possible the coeval nationalit ization and naturalizationof sociocultural categories of understandingand nationalistmovementsmust therepractice.An adequateaccount of particular fore considerthe historicallyspecific dialogic links forged between nationalist movements within a common historical conjunctureand transnationalfield conditionsof intertextuality). (i.e., the intercontextual The naturalizationand nationalizationof social categories of practice and of analysis. Centralto the projectof nationalismis the naturalization the nation form. This project entails the translationof local, regional, and transnational of identities on a national-territorial scale, and the transformation the abstract frameof reference categoricalconceptionof the nationinto a taken-for-granted in everyday life. It involves the institutionof a lived equivalence between the individualand the nation, and the forging of an interiorizedrelationbetween a of nationalpeople, space, economy,and state.The very durability the particular nation form stems from the historically configuredlink between processes of or nationalizationand naturalization, the productionof an implicit and norma79 tively presumptivenational"habitus." The persistentand troublingoverlap between nationalistdiscourses, scholemerged arly analyses, and everyday categories of practiceand understanding duringthe periodof high nationalismin the late nineteenthand earlytwentieth centuries.It was duringthis period that such categories as territory, economy, history,andcultureacquireda specifically nationalmeaning.Scholarshave detailed the philological and geographical expansion of the meaning of such words as "pays, paese, pueblo, patrie"in a numberof mid-to-latenineteenthcenturyEuropeancontexts.80Recent works have analyzedas well the transnational provenanceand circulationof the normativeand analyticalcategory of "nationaleconomy"-initially formulatedby such theorists as FriedrichList, Henry Carey, and John Rae-during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuryin a numberof colonial and formallynationalcontexts includingIndia, In Korea,Turkey,Japan,Germany, America,and Poland.81 addition,they have drawnattentionto the geopolitical conditions of possibility for the emergence of nation-centeredconceptions of history, the nationalization of scholarly More fields, and the historically specific "epistemology of state-centrism."82 generally,the modernvision of the world as made up of ontologically distinct underwenta novel process of territorializaspheres (culture/economy/politics)
79 Bourdieu(1977). 8o Deutsch (1953); Hobsbawm(1990). 81 Goswami (1998b); Henderson(1983); and Sporzluk(1988). 82 See Poulantzas(1978) for a brillianttheorizationof the role of the nation-statein establishmatricesof everydaylife. Also see Brenner's(1999) rigoring and regulatingthe spatio-temporal ous critiqueof the "epistemologyof state-centrism."

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tion. This specifically modern imaginationof social and political life was at and once naturalized nationalized.The idea thatsociety was spatiallybounded within particularstate structuresassumed a self-evident status in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sociological and philosophicalparadigms, as well as in emergentnationalistdiscourse.83 of to It is important stresshere thatthe interpenetration nationalistcategories both historically and at present, is of thought and social-scientific analyses, not just an intellectualmistake. The reificationof the nation-stateas the selfand of evidentcontainer political,cultural, economicrelationsis a social process. It is rootedin andreinforcedby the practicesand institutionsof the modernnation-state,the organizationof the inter-statesystem as a series of mutuallyexclusive, spatially bounded nation-states,and the pervasively institutionalized tie between nationhoodand statehood.In a powerful analysis of the epistemoraisedby nationalism,Rogers Brubaker warnsagainstthe logical conundrums of practice"as "categories persistenttendency to treat nationalist"categories of analysis."84The effort to excise nationalistassumptionsfrom analyses of nationalismrequiresan account of the historicalproductionof such apparentas ly naturalcategories of understanding a nationaleconomy, nationalterritostatus ry, and nationalculture.That these categories have a taken-for-granted of the modular in both scholarly and populardiscourse attests to the "depth" In nation form as at once a subjective and objective structure. orderto underin world politics for over two stand the vast role that nationalismhas played hundredyears, we need to be attentiveto the categories,institutions,and practices of the modularnation form. However,ratherthanpresupposingsuch naand culture, tionalist "categoriesof practice"as a nationaleconomy, territory, A we need to provide a sociohistoricalaccount of their co-constitution.85 sonot only the intertextuality ciohistoricalconception of modularityilluminates between nationalistdiscourse and scholarly analyses, but also embeds this infield and conjuncture. terface within a historicallyspecific transnational
CONCLUSION: MODULARITY AND ITS FUTURES

I want to conclude here by sketchingsome implicationsof this analysis for ongoing debates about the future of nationalismand the nation-statein light of Recent scholarshiphas drawn contemporaryneo-liberal global restructuring. attentionto the ways in which the acceleratedintegrationof financial, labor, of and capitalmarketson multiple spatialscales, the reorganization the spatial mass migration, and inter-scalarinternationaldivision of labor, processes of the acceleratedcirculationof aesthetics, images, and culturalflows, and the regulatoryinstitutions,have apparently emergence of a host of supranational the attenuated institutionalcapacitiesof nation-statesto regulatetheirnational
83 Agnew(1994);Brenner (1999);Giddens (1990b); Wallerstein (1991). 84 Brubaker(1996:15). 85 Ibid.

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economies, accomplishprojectsof social citizenship, and deliver on promises of collective development.86The apparenterosion of the territorialcorrespondence between culture, territory,people, and economy has imposed, acsovereigntyand the inhercording to this view, novel constraintson territorial ited nation-stateproject of homogenization.How to think throughthe spread of nationalism,in tandem with global capitalism, remains both conceptually difficulty and politically urgent. the Many scholarshave interpreted intensificationof these emergenttrends as posing a fatal challenge to nationalismand the nation-state.87 Othershave emphasized not only the continued political force of nationalismbut also its Both sides in this debateassume,to varyubiquityacrosspoliticallandscapes.88 ing degrees, the radicalnovelty of the presentconjunctionbetween processes of nationalizationand the proliferationof profoundlyuneven yet densely intertwinedsupra-national, regional, and local processes of capitalistrestructuring and intra-and inter-statedynamics. In an anxious attemptto fix the future of nationalism,contemporarydebates have pushed aside the longue dure'eof the intimatelinks between the nationform, the reworkingof global capitalism, and the relationalcharacterof intra-and inter-statefields. of A sociohistoricalunderstanding modularityembeds the post-nineteenthand multi-scalar, unevenprocesses of centurynationwithinthe multi-temporal, (qualitativeshifts in capitalismalong with the shifting dyglobal restructuring namics of the inter-statefield), therebyprovidinganalyticalleverage and comparativeperspectiveon the present.In this view, while neo-liberalglobal trends appearto have heightened the tenuousness of the coincidence of nation and state, they have also spurrednational, supranational,and sub-nationalstate restructuring, strategies(fromheritageindustries,to economic andinstitutional to repressiveimmigrationmeasures)that seek to refortifythis inheritedframework. Furthermore,contemporarynationalist movements contest, without and overcoming,the institutional,spatio-temporal, discursivelineamentsof the modularnation form, especially the principleof terripost-nineteenth-century between territory, torialnationalityand the discursivearticulation history,peonationalistmovementshave challengedexand state.Many contemporary ple, isting state structures,and dominant articulationsof nationhood, and have scales. Howevmobilized simultaneouslyon local, regional, and transnational er, they representthe rearticulationof discourses of nationhoodand the relativization of the nationalscale (as the object of economic governanceand the scales andorlocus of collective allegiance)in relationto otherspatio-temporal ganizationalforms, ratherthana challenge to, much less an overcomingof, the modularnationform as such.
86 Harvey (1990); Hirsch (1995); Jessop (1999); Sassen (1998). 87 Appadurai (1996, 1996); Breuilly (1985); Hardtand Negri (2000); Held (1990, 1995); Hobsbawm (1990). 88 Mann (1993); Tilly (1994, 1996).

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Despite requiemsof its imminentdemise, the futureof the nationform seems uncomfortablysecure. The elements of a substantivealternativeto the nation form have yet to emerge.A reworkednotion of modularitysuggests the limits of perspectivesthat view the futureof the nation-stateand nationalismas one of eitherimminentdissolutionor mechanicalreproduction. Fromthis perspective, the challenges that neo-liberal forms of global restructuring pose to nationalismandthe nation-state demandthatwe pay attentionto the on-going, dynamic reconstitutionof the nation form. A reworked notion of modularity representsan initial but crucial step towardengaging this largertask.
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