Nationalism Reconsidered: The Local/Trans-local Nexus of Globalisation

The emergence and generalisation of the nation-state model was a product of an earlier phase of capitalist globalisation and the resulting dualistic process of expansion that, throughout the world, worked to increase the cultural distance between cities and their surrounding hinterlands. This dualism had a simultaneous globalising and localising dynamic: it linked together the upper strata of communities around the world in a trans-local system of trade and inter-cultural exchange; but, by restricting access to the material and cultural products generated by this system, it simultaneously reinforced a separate set of conditions of life for the wider local population. It was in the context of both the mobilisation of labour forces and the increasingly different systems for trans-local and local interests and actors that dominant groups began to assert the national idea as a means of providing a new basis and cultural framework for social cohesion and order.