Nationalisms

Abstract

‘Who are we as a people now?’ (Cairns 1992: 35). The poser of this question is a Canadian, and bookstores in his country are replete with titles on national belonging, dissolving and reimagining. The complexities of Canadian national edentity give the ‘who are we’ question particular piquance, but it has much wider comparative appeal, although whether ‘appeal’ is quite the right word is debatable, given the angst often evoked by the query. Americans might approach the topic in terms of racialised, multicultural machinations, the permeability of their state borders and some loss of post-Cold War imperial imperious reign, and reflect on its recurrent consequences for domestic ‘race’ relations. But now there is more conjecture about persistent and resurgent national autonomies within British boundaries, and, once inconceivable, European imaginings beyond them.