Despite differing conceptions on what this might actually mean, we are living in a global world. The system of nation states remains intact - and with it, nationalist sentiment from Argentina to Yemen, and everywhere in between - but it is in transition. While in 1991, Benedict Anderson proclaimed, “nation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time” (3), increasingly today, the focus of public discourse is on the ineluctable forces of ‘globalization’. This is not to say that the nation has been rendered obsolete - far from it, in fact. But we live in a world where the national currency of Ecuador is the U.S. dollar, where gross fixed foreign investment in countries like China and Senegal make up nearly half of the total national GDP,¹ and where increasingly stringent ‘trade’ pacts such as MERCOSUR, NAFTA, and the EU demand that nations relinquish sovereignty to supranational bodies that dictate cultural and political policy as well as economic. In short, we are witnessing a complication of the nation. The socio-economic mode of regulation that has transformed our political culture, our social norms, and our production processes is also transforming our dominant notion of territorial organization, and most importantly, the symbolic politics of collective identity formation that accompany it. Two cases in Latin America present extremely interesting examples of these changes: the Bolivarian Revolution, and the Zapatista movement.

Anderson’s text works within both geographic and historical fields in that he seeks to provide a genealogy of nationalism and explain this historical trajectory with reference to the imposition of national territorialities onto the geographical imagination of citizens (171). Yet, while his genealogy extends right up to the moment in which he wrote the second edition, Anderson fails to take into account the highly relevant developments in political geography from which he might have drawn and instead assumes the dominance of the national scale.² These developments have anticipated the widely varying ways in which Latin Americans have sought to identify themselves in the last twenty years - ranging from local, to intra-national regional, to supranational regional.

Perhaps the most visible transition from the traditional imagined nation to the complicated imagination in recent years is the rise of Chavez seeking to advance the ‘Bolivarian revolution’. To say that the Chavez movement is national is entirely correct, but to say that it is only national obscures its highly complicated multi-scalar nature. Chavez seeks to do much more than simply project Venezuelan national identity onto the world stage in order to advance national interests. Rather, he seeks to link multiple interests and identities that cut across national territorial boundaries, ultimately aimed at creating something newer, and greater, than the Venezuelan nation. The creation of Telesur, a multi-state television station endorsed by Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba and Uruguay is a case in point. Just as print-capitalism played such a pivotal role in the transformation of thought that made the nation conceivable, new forms of communications technology (transnational television networks, internet communications, satellites, etc.) are enabling the practice of new collective and unifying rituals (Anderson 35-6). This contemporary transformation has its own shifting notion of temporality, one that links the world together instantaneously, allowing broad dialogues to occur, with much less concern for language than with print technology.³ As Telesur indicates by launching its first broadcast on the 222^nd birthday of Simon Bolívar, as well as in the general language used by proponents of the Bolivarian Revolution, there are increasingly links to timeless - if not divine, in the traditional sense - symbols of shifting statehood.⁴ The point here is not to say that the nation is irrelevant, but that we are in the midst of a political and cultural dialectic that is changing our understandings of collective identities, and the forms of political and social organization used to reflect these identities.

Similarly, the Zapatistas provide an interesting example of emerging social movements and the challenges they present for fixed national identities. Utilizing state of the art telecommunications technologies, the Zapatistas effectively linked their struggle within the broader Mexican imagined community, but also to macro-regional and global struggles worldwide, garnering considerable support from Europeans and Americans who shared, at least rhetorically, their sense of social justice. The EZLN represents this dialectic quite well, for they operate within the confines of traditional forms of political organization (i.e.: Mexican territorial boundaries), in many ways reinforcing national collective identities. However, they also are forging international solidarities of shared consciousness - forging new imagined communities - united around the struggle for certain collective values and beliefs.⁵ Just as the birth of Latin American nations nearly two hundred years ago depended on unifying myths, political and social values, and the technology to express them, resulting in the nations that exist today,⁶ new media technologies are enabling the reconstruction of collective identities that have begun to challenge the traditional power of national territorial boundaries.

We are witnessing a new era in the organization and construction of statehood, and while the era of the nation-state remains strong, it is changing. The narrative that Benedict Anderson provided in Imagined Communities posited that the universalisms of religious dynasties were slowly eroded through the convergence of capitalism and print technology onto the diversity of local vernaculars, creating new space for specific national identities (18, 46). Today a similar process is occurring: regional, if not global, discourses are forming with the convergence of shifting economic relations and new developments in telecommunications. However, just as Anderson claims that the “cultural artifacts [of nation-ness were] the spontaneous distillation of a complex ‘crossing’ of discrete historical forces”, the current transition is not inevitable or predetermined. Indeed, this shift is highly contested, and in an era of supposed cosmopolitanism, there has been a marked resurgence in nationalist sentiment throughout the world. Yet, the nation in Latin America is changing, and the struggles over what form this change should take in many ways reflects the same struggles during the Spanish-American fight for independence, with change coming from both elites and the agency of citizens dissatisfied with their specific ‘national compromise’. However, while Latin America provides excellent examples of this transition, it does not monopolize them. Worldwide, we are witnessing the complication of the nation.

Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York, NY: Verso. 1991.

1. To say nothing of currency flows, which often eclipse entire national economies in size, topping 1 trillion USD per day. [↩]
2. To his credit, in the second edition he notes that to incorporate “these vast changes in the world and in the text is a task beyond my present means” (xii). Still, for a matter of such importance, this seems somewhat disingenuous, since he could easily have added another chapter at the end of the text revisiting the central issues, as in Joan W. Scott’s Gender and the Politics of History. Regardless, Anderson makes no serious reference to the EU in the original text, which by 1983, had already risen as an emblem of changing state spatial territoriality. [↩]
3. For more on this, see David Harvey’s concept of the space-time compression in The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 1990. The globalization of English, a project begun during the colonial era has continued unabated, with the vast majority of internet communication occurring in the language, and television, through visual representation and body language partly work to break down language barriers by portraying ‘shared humanity’. [↩]
4. Florencia Copley “Telsur is Constructing another View” Nuestra America Dec. 14^th 2005. www.venezuelanalysis… [↩]
5. Maxwell Cameron. “Uprising Costs” The Guardian Unlimited. Feb. 26^th 2007 commentisfree.guardi… [↩]
6. And not, for example, Gran Colombia or the United Provinces of Central America. [↩]

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Matthew Lymburner is an MA student at the Institute of Political Economy, Carleton University. He is interested in Brazilian history and political economy, and progressive politics worldwide.
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