The Impossible Nation State

ABSTRACT Every strand of contemporary politics, from the populist right to the anti‐capitalist left, from separatists to cosmopolitans, is trapped in the same bad history: the belief that national sovereignty was once whole and is now being stolen. In fact the nation state is not an ancient inheritance but a postwar improvisation, which has held together because it has little positive content: it does not insist on a shared culture, single economic creed, just a people governing a territory. Tracing our present discontents to a 50‐year long 'revolt of particularities' (including Manchester) this essay argues that reconstruction now means a flexible form of nation‐building which abandons homogeneity and learning to govern on multiple scales at once, national, regional and local.