Habermas, Jürgen. “The European Nation-State – Its Achievements and Its Limits: on the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship.” In Mapping the nation, ed. Balakrishnan, Gopal. 281-94. New York: Verso, 1996. (p. 287)

Habermas believes that it is possible to replace the nationalism of a “cultural community” with an allegiance to a historical community united by its constitutional traditions. Completely idiotic of course, but the process by which he gets to this argument is interesting nonetheless.

Also worth reading:

Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: a Derivative Discourse? Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Not to mention my forthcoming dissertation chapter on the subject…

I enjoyed Chatterjee even if I didn’t always agree with his approach. I posted an entry on him here:

http://www.muninn.net/blog/archives/000019.html

I have uploaded some notes from the book you mentioned, just quotes and passages I found interesting with page numbers, don’t know if it will be of use to anyone…

http://www.muninn.net/notes/chatterjee.html

Last night I dreamt you were crawling around above a fireplace in an old style pub on a Portuguese island just off the Bering straits. The drinkers in the pub looked like they were waxworks but were actually alive. Strange. You also had a very high forehead and curly ginger hair.

He was probably trying to find an opening to get away from the smoke! :-) (Climbing the walls, so to speak). The drinkers looking like waxworks? Hmm, our hero being a T-totaller, perhaps that signifies the fact that he’s slightly different from them, while their actually being alive, signifies his total acceptance of them and never failing friendship. But why Bering straits? Must have to do with his non-stop travelling tendencies. Old style pub, waxworks, foreign location etc., and his crawling around above it all, could also signify his constant digging into the distant past?

The high forehead and curly hair does fit perfectly, by the way.

Siri