Before Postnationalism: Supernationalism, Modernisme , and Catalonia

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Before Postnationalism: Supernationalism, Modernisme, and Catalonia Brad Epps is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He has published over fifty articles on modern literature, film, art, and architecture from Spain, Latin America, Catalonia , and France and is the author of Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo (Oxford UP). He is currently preparing two books: Daring to Write, on gay and lesbian issues in Latin America, Spain, and Latino cultures in the United States, and Barcelona and Beyond, on modern Catalan culture. He is also co-editing two volumes, one with Luis Fernández Cifuentes, Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity, and another with Keja Valens, Passing Lines: Immigration and (Homo)sexuality. To wish class or nation away, to seek to live sheer irreducible difference now in the manner of some contemporary poststrucuralist theory, is to play straight into the hands of the oppressor. —Terry Eagleton Introduction: An Alluring Proposition Postnationalism may well be a lure, and a late capitalist one at that. It serves, within an increasingly anxious intellectual market, as a sign that sells. And what it sells, ever so symbolically, is nothing less than the promise of a new world, free from the narcissism of small differences and the fanaticism of big identities, beyond the pettiness of borders and the grandeur of patriotic projects. Postnationalism shimmers seductively as a way out of so many nagging problems, so much sacrifice and violence, so much divisive love and ironclad hatred. Ample as its bounds may be, it is arguably related less to internationalism, in the Marxian sense, than to multinationalism, where globalization is of capital importance indeed. Even if the concept is taken less dramatically as indicating a crisis in strong understandings of national identity, even if it is taken as more descriptive than prescriptive, it nonetheless suggests a world order in which nationalism is out of sync with new material technologies, modes of information, and markets. However superannuated it may seem to some, nationalism, in all its contenArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 7, 2003 134 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies tious guises, remains rigorously current for many more. As Immanuel Wallerstein asserts, "[tjhere is no question that, at the present time, nationalism in general [...] is a remarkably strong world cultural force," stronger now, he continues, "than any other mode of social expression or collective mentality," with the possible exception of religion, to which it is so often bound (314). Even Eric Hobsbawm, who writes of the decline of nationalism as an historical force, notes that "there is no foreseeable limit to the further advance of national separatism" (163). There is also, of course, no foreseeable limit to national consolidation and expansion, most spectacularly that of the United States of America in its various wars against terrorism . And yet, obviously, there is some question as to the strength, sweep, and future of nationalism, a question posed by the very existence of something called "postnationalism." As term and concept, "postinternationalism" also exists, as well as "postcapitalism," and perhaps, though I have yet to see it, "postmultinationalism ." Whatever the case, the proliferation of the "post" is as dizzying as it is undeniable . Postinternationalism, as formulated by James Rosenau and his followers, takes as its motivating force the insufficiency of the sovereign state of Westphalian Europe to account for the dynamics of contemporary global politics. Postnationalism appears to be similarly motivated, though the accent tends to fall on the dangers of nationalism (its violence, racism, sexism, and so on) rather than on the limitations of the established analytical protocols of international relations theorists. The ethicopolitical , even moral, tenor of postnationalism is such that the contrast with nationalism is not only charged but also overstated. Far from being mutually exclusive , nationalism and postnationalism are in many respects complementary—one highly successful Western construction entailing another, so far less successful and more anxiously Western construction. The repercussions of such constructions for what is not the West, or not quite the West, are serious, but so too are the repercussions for the West itself—its frayed yet persistent European core. For nationalism is by no means inoperative in contemporary Europe; nor, despite...