To be sure, modernization theory has clarified many aspects of nationalism. But in its effort to see the nation as a collective subject of modernity, it obscures the nature of national identity. I propose instead that we view national identity as founded upon fluid relationships; it thus both resembles and is interchangeable with other political identities. If the dynamics of national identity lie within the terrain of political identities rather than in a privileged and unique sphere, we will need to break with two assumptions of modernization theory. The first of these is that national identity is a radically novel form of consciousness. Below, we will develop a crucial distinction between the modern nation-state system and nationalism as a form of identification. Although the ideology of the former seeks to isolate and fix the latter, national identification is never fully subsumed by it and is best considered in its complex relationships to other historical identities. The second assumption is the privileging of the grand narrative of the nation as a collective historical subject. Nationalism is rarely the nationalism of the nation, but rather represents the site where very different views of the nation contest and negotiate with each other. Through these two positions, we will seek to generate a historical understanding of the nation that is neither historicist nor essentialist, and through which we might try to recover history itself from the ideology of the nation-state.

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