Book Review: Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream

“Nations Matter” is a passionate defense of nationalism in the age of cosmopolitanism. Craig Calhoun sees cosmopolitanism as a raw fantasy and nationalism as a realistic view. He called the formation of a world-democratic city-state a charming but unattainable ideal and claimed that now, in the first decade of the twenty-first century; the discourse of globalization is foggy more than it was in the 1990s. In this short article, fifteen critiques are presented to the author’s claim. The most important criticism is that the growth of extremist nationalism in the United States and Europe cannot be considered a defeat for the world because social change will generally take place in a sinusoidal, mixed-resistance path, and in the process of ups and downs. The rise of Trump, Brexit, and the like is part of a global resistance movement that is quite natural. The resistance will continue and may intensify, but on a larger scale, the general trend is still in favor of globalization, and nationalism is nothing but a decline.