If nationalism is over, we shall miss it. Revolution may be the project of a vanguard party acting on behalf of its masses. Resistance to capitalist globalization may be pursued by a multifarious and inchoate multitude. But imagining democracy requires thinking of "the people" as active and coherent and oneself as both a member and an agent. Liberalism informs the notion of individual agency but provides weak purchase at best on membership and on the collective cohesion and capacity of the demos. In the modern era, the discursive formation that has most influentially underwritten these dimensions of democracy is nationalism.¹

Nationalists have exaggerated and naturalized the historical and never-more-than- partial unity of the nation. The hyphen in nation-state tied the modern polity—with enormously more intense and effective internal administration than any large-scale precursors—to the notion of a historically or naturally unified people who intrinsically belong together. The idea that nations give states clearly identifiable and meaningfully integrated populations, which in turn are the bases of their legitimacy, is as problematic as it is influential.² It is of course an empirically tendentious claim. But it is part of a discursive formation that structures the world, not simply an external description of it.

To be sure, nationalism has also been mobilized in sharply antidemocratic projects; it has often organized disturbingly intolerant attitudes and it has led to distorted views of the world and excesses of both pride and imagined insults. It has also been a recipe for conflicts both internal and external. Populations straddle borders or move long distances to new states while retaining allegiances to old nations. Dominant groups demand that governments enforce cultural conformity, challenging both the individual freedom and the vitality that comes from cultural creativity. These faults have made it easier for liberals to dismiss nationalism from their theories of democracy. But this has not made it less important in the real world.

There are of course also many problems that affect everyone on earth—environmental degradation, for example, or small-arms trade. Nationalist rhetoric is commonly employed in excuses for governmental failures to address these problems. Transnational movements press for action. But for the most part the action comes, if it does, from national states.

Likewise, there is no nonnational and cosmopolitan solution available to complex humanitarian emergencies like that in Darfur. International humanitarian action is vitally important, but more as compensation for state failures and evils than as a substitute for better states. More generally, lacking a capable state may be as much a source of disaster as state violence. National integration and identity are also basic to many efforts at economic development and to contesting the imposition of a neoliberal model of global economic growth that ignores or undermines local quality of life and inhibits projects of self-government. Nations also remain basic units of international cooperation.

In fact, nationalism and nation-states retain considerable power. Rather than their general decline, what we see today is loss of faith in progress through secular and civic nationalism and state-building projects. This makes it harder to appreciate the positive work that nationalism has done and still does (alongside its evil uses). Nations provide for structures of belonging that build bridges between local communities and mediate between these and globalization. Nations organize the primary arenas for democratic political participation. Nationalism helps mobilize collective commitment to public institutions, projects, and debates. Nationalism encourages mutual responsibility across divisions of class and region. We may doubt both the capacities of nation-states and the morality of many versions of nationalism, but we lack realistic alternatives. Regional integration and other transnational projects are important, but so far they have been either complements to nation-states or efforts at state building with a more or less similar model but on a larger scale.