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The idea of a post-1990s re-formed India is shaped by an imaginary of a fractured body of the nation—a ‘new’ nation in tune with the neoliberal desires of a structurally adjusted world and the ‘old’ nation constitutive of superfluous matter in excess of that seductive world. This imaginary is not only etched in popular discourses but also in the policy-making apparatus engaged in the task of creating a global identity for India. Taking the Brand India initiative—promoted by the Indian state to produce positive images of the nation for global publicity—as a case study, this article argues that in this shift from nation building to nation branding, the very idea of prosperity and equity has now become first and foremost a matter of image. In this world of images, one can also witness how a competitive strategy to seek more corporate investments through concerted brand campaigns has redefined the relationship between the nation and corporations. While earlier it was the corporations which sought the...

The recent hosting of the World Cup by South Africa invoked what Michael Billig has termed ‘banal nationalism’, manifesting itself through blowing of ‘Vuvuzelas’, waving and displaying of the national flag on vehicles, as well as the wearing of sports regalia (Football Friday) by the people across racial, ethnic and class divisions. The support for the national team—‘Bafana Bafana’ occupied the national centre stage and became the main symbol around which national pride and unity crystallised. How long will this national unity survive the event? Is South Africa experiencing one month of fake nationhood? Is this national unity a sign of triumphalism over divisive nationalisms of the past? This article deploys a combination of Billig's concept of banal nationalism, Foucaldian discourse analysis and a historical approach to examine how South African nationalists used the World Cup to enhance the project of nation building. The article analyses the various debates about the nation provoked by the hos...

This article is an effort to advance the political and intellectual debate on the theory and practice of nation building in an era of collapsing states. I assume at the outset that we are in the midst of a crisis of the nation-state system as a whole and, thus of the vast majority of its constituent polities. This is not a problem that can be addressed by technocratic prescriptions for the creation or stabilisation of particular collapsing or failing nation-states or the rehabilitation of the nation-state system as a whole. In this context the debate about nation building needs to be carried well beyond its current terms of reference. Only by dramatically deepening and broadening the current level of both commitment and understanding of what is at stake can we begin to come to grips with the fate of nations, the collapse of states and the future of the world.

Even as the literature on US imperialism proliferates, US military and political failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have become apparent, and the hollowness of the economic and financial foundations of the US imperial enterprise has been revealed. This article attempts a new interpretation of the more important dynamics of US imperialism from the birth of the republic to its present quagmire in the oil-lands of the East, focusing on its weaknesses. It argues that, while the US state has been expansionist and imperial from its earliest days the reality of its imperial achievement has been shallower than that of any previous empire, prompting the need for qualifiers like ‘empire like no other’, ‘soft power’, etc. The article concludes tentatively by pointing to the chief elements in the contemporary conjuncture which lead us to expect the end of empires altogether.

This paper investigates the public role of mainline churches in post-apartheid South Africa and their interaction with the political discourse. The action of churches in the public sphere in the 1990s has been commonly defined as ‘critical solidarity’ and their voice was of support and alignment with the African National Congress ( anc ) position in the process of nation building. Through an analysis of political and religious discourse this paper aims to demonstrate that it is possible to identify a shift in the churches' action in the past five years, passing from a position of alignment and non-confrontation with the government to a situation of disengagement and critical opposition. This reshaped relationship highlights the internal and external difficulties of the anc in shifting from liberation to democracy. This is underscored by the generation of rhetoric and myth that preclude critical spaces, asserting the inalienable right of the anc to produce all political discourses.

This article examines the politics of African states in which insurgencies or liberation movements have taken control of the government. It analyses the impact on governance of reforms introduced by these post-liberation regimes, their relations with traditional authorities and civil society and relationships within and between competing guerrilla movements. It interrogates the nature of the state that emerges from this process. The ‘post-liberation’ state label is argued to be both meaningful and useful, as part of a larger project of exploring and explaining the post-colonial African state, highlighting debates about representation, citizenship and nation building. While post-liberation regimes have advantages in implementing state building projects, they are also subject to contestation when the new state institutions and regime incumbents become too exclusivist or predatory.

Nation-building projects involve a wider array of social processes than is often emphasised in the mainstream literature. To perpetuate the nation-state requires a firm material basis and is therefore predicated on the relationships and institutions through which goods are produced, distributed and consumed. This article analyses the material underpinnings of nation-building during three periods of Chilean history. First, it examines the ‘national-developmentalist’ period between 1950 and 1973, the contradictions of which culminated in the bloody demise of Salvador Allende's ‘democratic road to socialism’. Second, the article analyses the period of neoliberal restructuring under the Pinochet dictatorship. It is argued that neoliberalism shares many of the characteristics of earlier nation-building strategies, although the means and ends differ greatly. Attention is placed on neoliberalism as a form of ‘creative destruction’ in which established institutions are destroyed through a state-led progr...

This article will examine the ideology and practice of the USA's nation-building campaign in South Vietnam in the 1960s. Specifically, it will analyse the way in which US officials and social scientists conceived of development and promoted it as a weapon for anti-communist counter-insurgency. Convinced that they could modernise South Vietnam in ways that would undercut the sources of the revolution and create a liberal, capitalist state, they embarked on a comprehensive programme of social engineering with disastrous results. The article will also reflect on the reasons why, despite growing evidence of policy failure, US officials continued to promote a strategy that ignored Vietnamese history. In closing, it will reflect on the degree to which US assumptions about the basic malleability of the Vietnamese and their institutions have found echoes in the recent US attempts to reconstruct Afghanistan and Iraq.

This article argues that the most important failure of US nation-building efforts in the Philippines was the failure to address the social question in the colonial and postcolonial era. While it focuses on the decades following World War II, it explains that the roots of contemporary problems lie in the colonial years. Colonial and postcolonial administrations were interested above all in establishing and maintaining social order and, from the Cold War onwards, in protecting US military bases. Incorporating indigenous elites into an expanded, but decentralised, political system was always more important than addressing the political and economic demands of other Filipinos; and opportunities to introduce real land reform, to reform the economy, and to broaden the political system to include voices ‘from below’ were always eschewed in favour of keeping elites happy. As a result, although a formal nation-state was built, the majority of Filipino citizens feel no connection to the state that in theor...

In September 2005 Papua New Guinea (PNG) celebrated 30 years of independence from Australia. Despite greater Australian control over foreign aid spending in its former colony since the late 1980s, the Australian government still fears ‘state collapse’ in PNG. Framing its concerns in such a fashion assumes that there was a time when the state in PNG ‘worked’ in the same way as developed states. Australia practised paternalistic colonial policies before 1975, and independence was thrust upon PNG rather than achieved as the result of the efforts of an organised nationalist movement. Nation-building in PNG has been problematic from the outset, with a linguistically diverse population and no significant nationalist sentiment or structures on which to build. In the past decade neoliberal economic policies promoted by Australian policy makers and international lending agencies have tried to force the government and economy to be more efficient. Slowing growth, increased unemployment, rising crime rates ...

This introductory article emphasises the need to put the contemporary nation-building (state-building) effort in post-Saddam Iraq and elsewhere in historical perspective. With the resurgence of a powerful international discourse on nation-building that draws very selectively on the ostensible lessons of earlier nation-building successes and failures since 1945 (in fact the term nation-building is increasingly being substituted for the less problematic concept of state-building), it is more important than ever to set the idea and practice of nation-building in the context of decolonisation, the universalisation of the nation-state system, the geopolitics of the rise and fall of the Cold War and the transformation of the global political economy between the 1950s and the 1990s. In contrast to a growing number of quantitative and technocratic studies of nation-building and political instability, the article emphasises the profound need for broad qualitative analysis that historicises and de-routinis...

This article will examine the consequences of US-sponsored development assistance programmes in Guatemala during the 1960s, the so-called Alliance for Progress decade. Recently declassified and unclassified State Department records reveal that the US Agency for International Development (usaid) mission in Guatemala helped organise numerous co-operatives, community leadership programmes and modernisation projects that empowered disenfranchised Mayan Indians and poor Ladinos (mestizos or persons of mixed European and indigenous ancestry). At the same time, the John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson administrations assisted the Guatemalan government in creating a repressive counter-insurgency programme whose victims included not just communist guerrillas but also members of popular movements who had been mobilised by usaid. Washington resolved the contradiction by abandoning ‘soft development’ programmes in favour of a military build-up that eventually resulted in the deaths of more than 200 000 Guatem...