Nationalism is probably the most successful of modern techniques of creating commitment and resolve. But we will see how it too depends on the old religious values of sacrifice and suffering. Indeed, nationalisms also posit a transcendent point of reference that exceeds locality, family and other particularisms for the sake of the ‘imagined communi

It was when a mode of community-formation that I have called confessional nationalism became suitable for the competitive pursuit of global resources that doctrinal differences became salient.

What then was required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning. As we shall see, few things were (are) better suited to this end than an idea of nation.