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In this controversial look at nationalism, Gregory Jusdanis offers a sweeping defense of the nation as a protector of cultural difference and a catalyst for modernization. Since the end of the Cold War, the nation-state has undergone intense scrutiny among critics in the media and the academy. Many believe that civic nationalism may be fruitful but that cultural nationalism fosters xenophobia and backward thinking. Jusdanis, however, emphasizes the positive collaboration between nation-building and culture. Through a series of critical readings of multicultural, postcolonial, and globalization

Taking as its starting point the indifference, if not hostility, of postcolonial criticism to examples of modernization and belatedness outside of the western Europe/colony dichotomy, this article considers alternative projects of modernization. To this effect, it proposes the concept of incongruous comparison, defined as an attempt to juxtapose ideas, authors, institutions, texts that do not share a common history or geography. Incongruous comparison highlights both the logic and agreement that traditional conceptions of comparison presume and necessitate and the discordant note that this practice actually strikes. In seeking to reveal as many differences as points of commonality, incongruous comparison is patterned on social communication that requires both symmetry (shared interests, ability to translate into one's own language) and asymmetry (gaps, disjunctions, misunderstandings, lack of full translation). In order to illustrate this concept, the article brings together two unrelated authors, Adamantios Korais, an influential scholar of the Greek Enlightenment, and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, one of the most important intellectuals in Latin America of the nineteenth century and president of Argentina. Specifically, it examines how each author used the philosophical conflict between barbarism and civilization in their conception of modernization. It concludes by looking at the work of Lucio V. Mansilla, who, by travelling to the territory of the Ranquel people of the pampas, ended up undoing the barbarian/civilization dichotomy.

Greece as a nation-state is to a large extent a creation of the Hellenic diaspora. Though internal problems within the Ottoman Empire and external intervention by the great powers, particularly Russia, made the situation ripe for rebellion between the 1770s and 1820s, the intellectuals and merchants of the diaspora actually translated the dissatisfaction among peasants into a nationalist project. Members of the Greek intellectual and mercantile elite, scattered throughout many European cities, launched one of the first projects of modernization outside western Europe (see Jusdanis). Having understood from their experience in the West, first, that the nation-state, and not the empire, was becoming the dominant mode of social and political organization and, second, that their interests lay in neither the Ottoman nor the Russian Empire but in the capitalist states of western Europe, many intellectuals and merchants sought to free the Greek territories from Ottoman control and to create a new administrative unit, independent yet attached to the West. Their chief aim was the invention of a national culture, an imaginary field of shared sentiments, beliefs, and symbols, to replace the ethno-religious identities of the Ottoman Empire. With this collective national consciousness the Greek-speaking Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire came gradually to regard themselves primarily as fellow citizens of a nation-state rather than as coreligionists of the Orthodox millet. Though they remained Orthodox Christians, their religious belief constituted not their entire identity but one dimension of their national consciousness. In the differentiated order of modernity, religion simply served one function—meeting the spiritual needs of the citizens.