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The article explores the concept of empire, or rige, in the context of a small nation-state with no immediate claim to imperial greatness and with a rooted self-understanding as anything but an empire. It does this by exploring the concept of empire in the far right movement Young Denmark on the basis of a close reading of their imperialist program in the pamphlet Danmark udslettes! from 1918. Rige had been a vague term for the larger Danish polity that originated in a pre-national conceptualization of the polity as a realm. The article suggests that rige-as-realm was translated by the radical right into a concept of empire. In the process it dramatically changed its emphasis, reorienting itself toward a "horizon of expectation". It became a politically loaded battle concept that then entailed a critique against the dominant liberal conceptualization of the polity and nation. Rige came to signify the ambition of being a great power, the spiritual elevation of the nation through the transcendence of the decaying liberal modernity. The program addressed the tension between a conservative political attitude and modernity and thus signified a kind of reactionary modernism that rejected liberal values while at the same time celebrating technology, industrialization, and the process of modernization.

Written as a contribution to the Harvard Symposium on Changing Images of the State, this article explores the realm of Pornotopia, a republic of images, the state that liberal America aspires to be. Imagine a nation in which there is little or no discord about pornography because there is little or no meaningful discourse about it. Imagine a nation in which people gladly trade the reality of human beings for images of that reality, a "virtual reality." Imagine a nation in which there is erotic self­expression but little or no communal expression. Imagine a nation in which sexual war and sexual pleasure are synonymous and unending. Imagine, again, a nation in which rubber speaks and people know it. Imagine a nation in which deliberative democracy is a deliberate lie and sexual harm is a necessary lie. Imagine, if you can, the death of discourse. As you will see, you have just imagined the pornographic state.

AbstractPublic management scholars argue that collective action problems (e.g., incentives to free‐ride on the efforts of others or shirk agreements) threaten the feasibility of intergovernmental cooperation. Drawing on collective action theory, this article examines factors associated with overcoming free‐riding incentives and provides evidence challenging the idea that governments are prone to such strategic behavior. The empirical analysis of a national Danish purchasing group demonstrates how coercion is not necessary to induce subnational governments to incur private costs to join the group and, despite opportunity and incentive to free‐ride, contribute to its production of joint purchasing agreements—collective goods whose quality depends on the staff resources and expertise the participating governments contribute to their production. Further, multivariate analyses find that governments are more likely to help produce these collective goods when they receive more of their benefits, face lower contribution costs, and receive stronger social norm pressures from peers.