Nations imagine themselves eternal and immutable just as fervently as they must reinvent themselves continuously. If they are, as Tom Nairn puts it, “a modern form of community,” they embody the contradiction between the noun and the adjective. They can be, at best, precarious balancing acts between modernity’s capitalism and commodification, which corrode community, and the compulsion to create minimal meanings and solidarities. As modern capitalist societies, nations are not serial sums of their members. National communities are hierarchically structured by the inequalities that capitalism creates among the groups that constitute them, and national cultures and ideologies of nationalism must somehow manage to articulate community out of, and despite, the inequalities. Changes in the orders of inequality which nations really are must be articulated in the national discourse by changes in its characteristic themes, idioms, and figures, by new inclusions, exclusions, and reorderings. This paper is about an instance of such changes.
