nation-state. National education systems, mass media, and consumer markets are still subverting localism and homogenizing social and cultural life into units which are, at their smallest extent, national. When watching the Olympic Games or other events transformed into displays of emotional nationalist pageantry, it is difficult to believe that the nation-state is finished.
The nation-state is thus not in any general decline, anywhere. In some ways, it is still maturing. However, even if it were declining in the face of the supranational forces, it is still gaining at the expense of the local, the regional, and especially the private forces. The modern nation-state remains a uniquely intense conception of sovereignty. Militarism, communications infrastructures, economic, social, and familial regulation, and intense feelings of national community attachment have been fused into a single caging institution.
But our society has never been merely national. It has also been transnational--involving relations that freely cross national boundaries. A
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