Description
Nationalism, the modern state, and sovereignty are not only foundational to modern world politics but also hegemonic conceptualizations through which it is understood. Yet can these intellectually, historically, and politically European constructs genuinely serve anticolonial projects? In other words, can the master’s tools dismantle the master’s house? This article argues they cannot. Through a critical reading of the legitimation and normalization of nationalism and the nation-state in postcolonial “cultural authenticity,” decolonial “plurinational state,” and the reification of state borders in internal colonialism debates and strands of Marxist historical sociology, I show how nationalism and the nation-state are presented as remedies to colonial domination. Against this, I conceptualize colonial nationalism as a structuring ideology of colonial modernity. I suggest four mechanisms to understand the entanglement of colonialism with nationalism and nation-state in perpetuating coloniality of power. (M1) Prefiguration: nationalism and the nation-state as ontologically Eurocentric conceptualizations operates as the standardized norms of building political community and organizing political power. (M2) Centralization/Homogenization: the modern nation-state as a colonial conquest, of both territories and imaginations, beginning its outward colonial expansion by first conquering and homogenizing within Europe. (M3) Sovereign Masking: Assumed sovereign equality of states obscures the hierarchies embedded in the coloniality of modern world politics. (M4) Elite Translation: postcolonial elites reproduce colonial domination techniques within “independent states” through internal sovereignty. The article advances decolonizing IR debate by moving beyond generic invocations of coloniality and unsettling residual state-centrism, showing how coloniality is reproduced across scales through the coupling and spatiotemporally specific replications of nationalism and the nation-state.
