Contemporary nation states have to reproduce collective identities in societies with increasing ethnic differences. This is the situation where the political order is decoupled from the community of people. The following questions arise in such a situation: What happens to the sentiments of national belonging? How do collective identities decoupled from the nation-state look like? Do they still refer to a community below or above the nation-state or does emerge a more abstract or a more instrumental kind of togetherness? What happens to political mobilization in such culturally diversified societies? The final question: Do we still need the nation-state for taming collective sentiments or do we have to imagine different forms which require new theoretical tools to describe and design institutions for taming collective sentiments?
State; Nation; Identity; People; Globalization