Abstract
When, in 1882, Ernest Renan suggested that national identity is constituted by a daily plebiscite, he was invoking the idea in a largely metaphorical way. In the twenty-first century, the gap between metaphor and reality has narrowed dramatically across much of the world. To be sure, ever since the American and French revolutions, global history has been shaped in part by the tension between the uneven distribution (both within and across societies) of economic, military, and political power, on the one hand, and the formally egalitarian concepts of democracy, popular sovereignty, and self-determination, on the other. Yet, events of the last few years suggest that this systemic crisis is taking on new, reiteratively plebiscitary, forms in the age of instant communication and of popular backlashes against globalization.
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