Modern nation-states fuse civic and ethnic forms of allegiance into a single imagined community.

Evidence

All so-called modern, liberal nation-states thus combine the so-called rational, reflective, civic form of allegiance to the state with a so-called intuitive, instinctual, ethnic allegiance to the nation. That heterogeneous formation, “Britishness,” grounds the United Kingdom, the political entity, as an “imagined community.” As that great patriot, Enoch Powell, observed: “The life of nations, no less than of men [sic], is lived largely in the mind.” Britain’s rational and constitutional foundations are given lived meaning and texture through a system of cultural representation. They are grounded in the customs, habits, and rituals of everyday life, the social codes and conventions, the dominant versions of masculinity and femininity, the socially constructed memory of national triumphs and disasters, the imagery, imagined landscapes and distinctive national characteristics which produce the idea of “Britain.” These aspects are no less important because many of them are “invented” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1993). — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 360

Categorization

• XREF: Directly names the imagined community concept Anderson’s framework supplies — connects to the reader’s toolkit goal of imagined community of the nation. — connects to: The nation’s sacred aura lets patriotism capture and tame universalist religions.
• DEFINE: Defines the dual civic/ethnic allegiance structure as the core mechanism by which nation-states produce belonging.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that the rational civic state is grounded in invented cultural particularities, yet cannot be reduced to that, is a genuinely dense formulation worth sitting with.