Inhalt: | Consciousness of national belonging is one of the most striking and least understood of modern phenomena. The modern nation asserts its legitimacy in many ways, but most strikingly in the willingness of its members to believe in it, to identify with it, and even to die for it. Our continuing fascination with national character our own and that of others further attests not so much to the reality of the nation as to our seemingly unbreakable attachment to the national category. Yet a disjunction persists between national claims and national realities, between the enormity of the influence of the national idea in the world today and the arbitrariness of national identities themselves. |
