The Dictionary of Human Geography

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concerns with theimaginative geographiesof

orientalism; one connection being the ways in

which the cultures ofimperialism worked

contrapuntallyto construct the modernity

of Euro-American nationalism by constantly

contrasting the supposedly pre-modern

human geographies of their colonies with the

ordered and enframedlandscapesof metro-

politan museums, exhibitions and textbook

cartographies (Said, 1993, 2003 [1978]; cf.

Mitchell, 1988; Gregory, 1994). Other post-

colonial studies of nationalism have advanced

these ideas by problematizing the diverse

geographical arguments and assumptions that

continue to create hierarchies of national

belonging, national achievement and national

blame in the course of imagining community.

Whether it is concerned with the fate of women

on the margins of the post-colonial nation

(Spivak, 1992), or interest in the necessarily

extra-territorial affiliations of anti-racist and

anti-colonial activists (Gilroy, 1993; Singh,

2004), or reflection on the historical tragedies

that have led to geographies of blame for the

so-called failure of post-colonial nationalism in

countries such as Haiti (Scott, 2004; see also

Farmer, 1992), scholarship addressing the

imagined communities of nationalism has inc-

reasingly also complicated pre-emptiveepi-

stemologicalassumptions that limit national

history to national geography. At the same

time, work on the ways in which national geog-

raphy is taught and learned in nationalist teach-

ings themselves has also increasingly sought to

unpack how theperformanceof nationalism

can both close down and open up opportunities

for imagining territory anew (compare

Bhabha, 1994 with Bru ̈ckner, 1999; Schulten,

2001; Sparke, 2005). All these post-colonial

questions indicate how nationalism can be

implicated in racialized imaginings ofspace

andplacein both dominative and resistant

ways, an ambivalence that has historically

been one of the reasons why defining national-

ism has been so vexing for critical theorists. As

Etienne Balibar puts it, with both a question

and an answer of his own:

Why does it prove to be so difficult to define

nationalism? First, because the concept never

functions alone, but is always part of a chain

in which it is both a central and weak link.

Thischainisconstantlybeingenriched...

with new intermediate or extreme terms:

civic spirit, patriotism, populism, ethnicism,

ethnocentrism, xenophobia, chauvinism,

imperialism, jingoism... (1991, p. 46)

ms

nation-state The combination of national

governanceand nationalgovernmentality

that emerged as the norm of European state-

making in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-

turies, and that spread across the world in the

twentieth century as a basis for post-colonial

state-making in the former colonies of the

globalsouth. In all these contexts, the hyphen

in nation-state has traditionally symbolized

the articulation of nationalism with the

development of the modernstate, its sover-

eignty overterritory, and its capacity to

police and administer the spaces contained

by nationalborders(Giddens, 1985; Sparke,

2005). None of these articulations have ever

been comprehensive and complete, and while

most nation-states presume to govern all

inhabitants as if they were a singlenation,

in practice they often also dominate and

marginalize populations who speak minority

languages, identify with minority ethnic com-

munities and/or who live in borderlands

(Flint and Taylor, 2007 [1985]). Thus while

the hyphen in nation-state is considered a con-

ventional and quite unremarkable linguistic

convention, it points to social and political

practices that often put an oppressive line

through the possibility of statehood for ‘sub-

national’ nations.

The volatile and often violent two-way geo-

graphical dynamic between state-making and

nationhood only really became stabilized in

the mid-twentieth century, at the same time

as it was extended through anti-imperial

independence movements across much of the

world (Blaut, 1987). At this point, Fordist

regimes of accumulationin core countries

of the world economy tended to systematize

‘official nationalism’ as a basis for managing

classdivisions through redistributive taxation,

state education and welfare administration

(see fordism). And in the global south,

nationalism meanwhile served to rally popular

support for new post-colonialdevelopment

initiatives based onimport substitution–

albeit ironically also sometimes being twisted

into neo-imperial projects of quelling the

resistanceof unofficial nationalism (Trouil-

lot, 1990). But even at this high point of

the nation-state as a container of politics,

the hyphenated hybrid was wracked by the

geopolitical tensions of thecold war and

globaluneven development(Taylor, 1994a).

Even the institutions of international

relations where nation-states were sup-

posedly represented in their full normative

and sovereign roles simultaneously revealed

their precariousness: the United Nations was

Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_N Final Proof page 489 31.3.2009 3:13pm Compositor Name: ARaju

NATION-STATE