Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

It is not the postmodern formulations of Bhabha that are imperialist
and eurocentric, but modern assertions of a homogenous national
identity upon which imperialism first depended.
In his essay ëThe European Nation-State ñ Its Achievements and
Its Limits. On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenshipí
(1996), Habermas attacks the politics of the European nation-state. He
notices how in German, the concept ënationí ambiguously refers to a
ëVolksnationí or a nation of collective citizens and a ëStaatsnationí or
a nation of individuals which is a prepolitical nation of legally
empowered citizens. Habermas argues:

In view of both the growing pluralism inside national societies and the global

problems national governments face from the outside, the nation-state can no

longer provide an appropriate frame for the maintenance of democratic

citizenship within the foreseeable future. What generally seems to be necessary

is the development of capacities for political action on a level above and

between nation-states.^21

Habermas draws our attention to the tension between ëmulticultural
differentiationí and ëtrends towards globalizationí. He argues in the
vein of Bhabha that

today, all of us live in pluralist societies that move further away from the format

of a nation-state based on a culturally more or less homogenous population. The

diversity in cultural forms of life, ethnic groups, world-views and religions is

either huge already, or at least growing.^22

The theorist of international relations, Michael Shapiro, also
notices how notions of order and identity, based on the state and
nation are in huge flux, especially in the post-Cold War period.
Nationalism and post-nationalism appear to be reactions to these
changing notions caused by cross cutting cleavages such as Euro-
peanization (Brusselization), globalization (capitalism) and regional-
ism, as well as more complex forms of social dislocation. These
indications could lead us along the path provided by Habermas to

(Berkeley: California, 1988); Manthia Diawara, ëThe Nature of Mother in
Dreaming Riversí, Third Text, 13, Winter 1990ñ1.
21 Habermas, ëThe European Nation-Stateí, Mapping the Nation, p.289.
22 Ibid., p.293