Ernest Gellner asserts that ‘nationalist sentiments are deeply offended by violations of the nationalist principle of congruence of state and nation’, for ‘nationalism is primarily a political principle, which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’ (2006 [1983]: 128, 1). This notion of congruency—a congruency of ‘people’ with space and authority, or, briefly, the discursive idea(l) by which nation and state ought to be aligned—has become a leitmotif in our contemporary modes of thought. According to Bartelson (2009) it is precisely the permeation of the idea of nationalism, or the notion of a homogeneous national community, that has made it impossible to think about world community. Modernism and the ideal of national congruency have become indivisible thus rendering alternative modes of political life nearly impossible (Conversi 2012; Mandelbaum 2016a). In the social sciences, this has been dubbed ‘methodological nationalism’, namely ‘… the all-pervasive assumption that the nation-state is the natural and necessary form of society in modernity; the nation-state is taken as the organizing principle of modernity’ (Chernilo 2006: 5–6).
In political and International Relations (IR) theory, more specifically, the congruent nation/state is both the final goal of political life and the precursor of, or at least concomitant to, liberal democracy , peace and modernisation (e.g., Cooper 2003: 14; Kymlicka 2001, 2004: 144–175; Linz and Stepan 1996: 16–37; Stepan 2008; Tamir 1993), whilst security in particular is discursively intertwined with nation/state congruency (e.g., Downes 2001; Kaufmann 1998; Mearsheimer and Pape 1993; Miller 2007, 2012; Van Evera 1994). The doxa of contemporary political and IR theory assumes, explicitly or tacitly, that only congruent societies are safe from internal upheaval and are able to modernise and develop economically. Congruent societies, however defined and practiced, are assumed to be the optimal units in the ‘modern international’ (see also the critique in Bartelson 2015).1 This ideal of nation/state congruency, which Gellner defines as the core principle of nationalism, is not to be conflated with state-centrism/statism , the indivisibility of sovereignty and/or territoriality, the subjects of important critical work in IR (e.g., Agnew 1994; Bartelson 1995, 2001; Booth 1991; Elden 2013; Walker 1993; Weber 1995). Rather, nation/state congruency refers to the discursively produced relationships between population, defined in terms in national peoplehood, authority and space and the various practices that allude to fix them, albeit always failing (Stavrakakis 2007: 189–210). As Doty (1996, 2003, 2007) has demonstrated in various studies of nationalism, the border and anti-immigration practices, the narratives of national identity and belonging are ambiguous and ambivalent at their core and require continuous maintenance. The distinctions between the inside and the outside, attempts to fix national borders, as well as to stabilise the meaning of the nation, sovereignty or the ‘will of the people’ (e.g., Canovan 2005; Conversi 1995; Doty 2007; Shapiro 1997, 2004; Walker 1993; Weber 1995) allude to the need to unpack the power of the nation/state and the ideal of unity it seeks to possess.
This book critically interrogates the ideal of nation/state congruency and asks: ‘how did we get here?’ By deploying a genealogical approach (Andersen 2003: 17–23; Bartelson 1995; Foucault 1991; Nietzsche 1998 [1887]; Shiner 1982: 382–398, especially 387) this book aims to analyse the conditions under which we have come to define our socio-political existence, problems and solutions in terms of national unity and congruency, indeed the conditions under which the ideal of nation/state congruency, however defined, came to be rendered intelligible and legitimate. In other words, this book aims to critically unpack the values and meanings that have come to be equated with, and attributed to, the ideal of national homogeneity and in doing so have made it natural and rational. This means deploying the discursive practices approach and analysing the discursive spaces (Bartelson 1995; Doty 1993) through which nation/state congruency came to be established.
Equally important, this book aims to understand better the power of/in nationalism, namely the affective hailing capacities that the ideal of nation/state congruency entails and how it came to be the doxa in modern political thought and practice. Put differently, this book engages with the discursive and affective apparatuses that have rendered the ideal of congruency a leitmotif in modern and contemporary political and IR theory.2 The book’s two main goals—to offer a genealogy of nation/state congruency and to understand better the ‘persistence of nationalism’ (Stephens 2013)—are intertwined since the power of nationalism, as I explain below, resides not only in the various discursive formations that animate it (e.g., achieving security, peace or modernity), but also in its structure, namely in nationalism’s fantasmatic ontology, its promise and failure and the temporal enjoyment it entails. Drawing on Kapoor’s (2008, 2014) psychoanalytical explanation of the endurance of development discourses, I argue that understanding nationalism requires both a discursive reading of its rationalisation and normalisation, but equally it requires a psychoanalytical explanation of its repetition, why and how nationalism discourses persist.
To do so, this book deploys a discourse analytical and a Lacanian psychoanalytical approach in arguing that this ideal of nation/state congruency can be read as a fantasy , or a fantasmatic project, an endless endeavour of overcoming the lack and contingency of social life by offering a ‘fullness-to-come’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 147; see also Arfi 2010; Eberle 2017; Kapoor 2014: 1133–1135; Mandelbaum 2014, 2016a; Žižek 1999, 2005, 2008). A psychoanalytical reading of nationalism and the nation/state further draws on the Lacanian theorisation of the ‘split subject’, of the Freudian Spaltung, and thus lack (Lacan 2006 [1966]: 530; see also Burgess 2017; Epstein 2011: 335–337; Fink 1997; Glynos and Stavrakakis 2008: 260; Kinnvall 2017; Solomon 2015; Zevnik 2016). The Lacanian ‘lack’ or ‘void’ is key to the psychoanalytical reading of the nation/state as fantasy since it entails that no fixed and stable identity is possible. The Lacanian subjectivity is in an ontological state of void, a barred subject in Lacanian terminology ($), which is why political life is a continuous attempt, albeit bound to fail, at filling this lack (Stavrakakis 1999; Verhaeghe 1999).
The ideal of nation/state congruency is thus a fantasy for it masks the disunity of, and the split in, society by offering an explanation for why ‘we’ (the ‘nation’, ‘people’, ‘society’ and other tropes referring to an imagined collectivity) are not yet congruent (Lacan 1998 [1972–1973]; Žižek 1992: 165, 2008: 1–54) and by promising resolution and thus unity ‘… once a named or implied obstacle is overcome’ (Glynos and Howarth 2007: 147; Stavrakakis and Chrysoloras 2006: 144–163). Since such a mode of wholeness, a fixed identity, i...