The nationalist myth is that, what we buy when we consume those pictures with either sympathy or apathy, granting them some kind of objective reality. This reality, that we buy, is socially constructed and are, what Noam Chomsky called, “Necessary Illusions”.
But the people who doing imaginings are usually nationalists, people with political agendas. People working in the media do not necessarily have any political agendas but are not less unaware about the things that totally surrounds them. Thats why we see all Newscasters engaged in showing pictures of the celebrations and protests about the birth of this imagined community while nobody asked what it actually is that make a nation with its state?
Nationalists often argue that it is history that makes a nation a nation. But if the battle of Collagen in the 18th century went somewhat differently, we would have a state of Scotland instead of just a region. An earlier victory might have given us a state of Wales. And what if Germany had one WWII. Would there still be a French nation and state?
After 1991 when nations like ukraine which at least for the last 1000 years had never have a state, began popping up over night, claiming statehood while other states like Tchekosovakia or Yugoslavia, that Americans have taken for granted, suddenly disappeared, even political scientist began to recognize how profoundly unnatural, that is how very political, the nation and identifying it with a state really is.
But even if we wanna to conceive that there is something objective and natural about nations, we still have to ask, what is it?
Somebody who is less impressed with the forces of history in determine a nation and its state could come to language as the factor that makes them seem like a natural phenomenon.
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