Enduring Crises of the Nation‐State: How Spatial Imaginations Reshape Identity and Dis/Unity

ABSTRACT This article reframes the contemporary “crisis” of the nation‐state not as a simple erosion of sovereignty but as a problem of spatial misalignment: adaptive states remain strategically embedded in dense transnational regimes, yet domestic legitimacy falters when unitary national imaginaries confront heterogeneous, multi‐sited social realities. Synthesizing globalization studies, identity transformation literature, and spatial theory, we conceptualize layered citizenship as a regime of constitutional equality coupled with differentiated access to political voice, cultural expression, and mobility, sustained by hierarchies of cultural legibility and securitized forms of visibility. We develop this argument through Türkiye's trajectory from late Ottoman plural imaginaries and Republican homogenization to contemporary geopolitical upscaling, showing how shifting spatial projects have configured unity and disunity across time. While external organizations recalibrate state functions without abolishing capacity, internal cohesion increasingly depends on integrating plural identities into the language and infrastructures of public space. As a constructive response, we reconstruct Blue Anatolianism not as historical romanticism but as a methodology of spatial commoning that relocates identity from blood to place and from essence to shared use. Through route pedagogy, in situ learning, multilingual signage, and conservation–use balances, we outline scalable commons‐oriented policies that render difference co‐present and publicly legible without undermining territorial integrity. The framework explains why conventional appeals to unity reproduce fragmentation and offers an implementable program to reconcile adaptive statehood with plural belongings. Though grounded in Türkiye, the argument travels to post‐imperial and metropolitan contexts, where spatial commons can realign sovereignty, territory, and identity by thickening shared infrastructures of narrative, route, use, and care.