Melani McAlister

Can This Nation Be Saved

The problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of the borderline. As globalization becomes the primary paradigm for analyzing current political and cultural trends, concepts like hybridity and border crossing have become far more than postmodern enthusiasms. They are a fundamental structure of contemporary experience, not just for Internet users and cosmopolitan travelers but for (im)migrating workers, cultural consumers, and global terrorists. In this context, older models of nationally based scholarship are being challenged since, as George Lipsitz has argued, the new realities have disrupted the “isomorphism of place, culture, nation, and state” (15). This is not to say that the nation no longer matters. Just the opposite. With global transformation as the unavoidable context, an examination of the status of the nation—its moral and social groundings and its political efficacy— has become more rather than less urgent. In the early 1990s two political events suggested the evolving role of the nation in the global order: the US-led war against Iraq in 1990–91 and the breakup of Yugoslavia in 1991–95. For many observers the Gulf War highlighted the continuing significance of nationalist ideology as the cultural cement of the warfare state, supporting a potentially aggressive force that can wield an army to invade a neighbor (as Iraq did) or to organize a massive response and retaliation (as the US did). In addition, the Gulf War pointed to the changed global political landscape in the post– Them and Us: Questions of Citizenship in a Globalizing World By Rob Kroes University of Illinois Press, 2000