Seeking to discredit universalizing narrative, much cultural criticism in recent years has exchanged cosmopolitanism and the abstract question of 'nationalism' for an emphasis on the contextual construction of national movements or identities. That these imperatives emanate quite blatantly from Wall Street in no way seriously troubles the effectiveness of modernity as a narrative paradigm. Indeed, both in the corporate media and in mainstream Western political discourse generally, nations and nationalisms are commonly treated as atavistic or progressive depending on the degree to which their behavior harmonizes with globalizing imperatives. In consequence, the modernist paradigm continues to rule many skeptical or hostile accounts of nationalism, for so long as the nation-state is taken to supersede other political or social formations, the cosmopolitan critique fails to challenge 'the fundamental philosophy of universal history that underwrites nationalism's inscription in modernity'. Lloyd goes on to note that the nation's intermediate status in this narrative-halfway between primitive tribalism and modernity's ever-deferred perpetual peace-accounts for nationalism's irreducibly double association with modernization and atavism. As the proper subject of history, the nation-state can prefigure history's end because, as David Lloyd writes, 'the particularism of contents, potentially in contradiction with the universalism of modernity, is subsumed in the formal congruence between its own narratives of identity, directed at one people, and the narrative of identity that universal history represents for humanity in general'. 1 That the nation-state should remain the premier vehicle of political and economic legitimation in an era dominated by American imperialism and international capital-forces that, of course, regularly and flagrantly violate the sovereignty of disadvantaged nations-is unsurprising if one accepts the continuing pertinency and power of a Western master-narrative of modernity, according to which the nation represents the emergence of a people into history and prefigures the global achievement of universal human concord. Two decades ago Benedict Anderson commented that ''the end of the era of nationalism,' so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight', and the intervening years have made it increasingly clear that the developments and processes we summarize as 'globalization' operate in mingled synchrony and tension with the political form of the nation-state. Of the many relics of the Romantic era that continue to shape our (post)modernity, the nation-state surely ranks among the most significant. Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The imagined community