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ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 141

The cultural politics of difference

obviously communitarian and solidaristic aspects of such
nationalism sit fairly comfortably with equivalently commun-
itarian and solidaristic elements in culturalist theory. Whatever
its emancipatory intent, however, radical nationalism seems open
to two fundamental objections: first, that in a world becoming
increasingly internationalised and culturally cosmopolitan it
articulates a by now demonstrably ‘retrospective’, rather than
‘prospective’, structure of feeling; and second, that it threatens
to repress cultural identities other than its own. There might
thus be a necessary and unavoidable conflict of interest between
a nationalist imagination centred on the category of nation and
a feminist imagination centred on gender; between nationalism
and the kinds of socialist imagination centred on class; between
nationalism and the ‘multicultural’ imaginings of non-national
or sub-national ethnic groups. Though the Welsh or the Quebe-
cois, for example, might well still choose between nationalism and
multiculturalism, only the latter remains available to the Afro-
Caribbean and Bengali communities in Britain or to the Greek and
Italian communities in Canada or Australia. For these last, multi-
culturalism seems likely to remain structurally incompatible with
any but the most tentative of cultural nationalisms.
Solidarity, community and culture are, of course, vital and
important: they render social life meaningful, creative and some-
times even genuinely co-operative. But the imagined community
of the nation-state remains a very special case, as it seems
unimaginable except as superordinate to and sovereign over all
other imaginable communities: the nation-state is not simply a
community, but also a state, and states are by definition
sovereign. How, then, to square this circle? Arguing in defence
of Irish nationalism, Eagleton borrowed from Williams an
analogy between class and nation (Williams, 1964, p. 322), which
pointed to the need to go, not so much around nationality, as
‘all the way through it and out the other side’. ‘To wish class or
nation away, to seek to live sheer irreducible difference now’,
Eagleton continued, ‘is to play straight into the hands of the
oppressor’ (Eagleton, 1990, p. 23). In Ireland, the whole process
of nation-state building is so obviously already under way, and
yet so obviously stalled, that nationality is perhaps an almost

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