I have three points that I will make in this paper. The first is that Taylor is right in viewing dignity as an essential feature of nationalism, but he is wrong in thinking that it can help us very much in understanding contemporary nationalist movements. Dignity functions at a very deep level within the nationalism issue and not at the level of explanation that Taylor addresses. The kind of social imagination that Taylor attaches to dignity involves the constitutive conceptual features of nationalism but it will not get us very far when we seek to understand particular nationalisms. In other words the idea that dignity is tied to national identity tells us about the meaning of nationalism. It does not tell us a great deal about the cause of this or that nationalist movement.

Second, the concept of dignity as Taylor develops it provides a psychological spin to the explanation of nationalism and this spin is incomplete. It places too much emphasis on the individual psychology of elites and it neglects others equally important considerations. Moreover, neglecting these other considerations may well add to the misunderstandings and conflicts which often accompany nationalist movements.

Third, there are different forms of nationalism that likely require different explanations. Here I show how the idea of dignity relates to these different forms in different ways.

The rise of nationalism involves the development of a specific form of collective identity, one that is seen to originate in a shared language, culture, and historical experience. People who express particular nationalist sentiments usually hold that 1. that they are obliged to favor co nationals¹ and 2. that their nation has a right to recognition by others. This recognition entails, among other things, acceptance by outsiders of the special moral obligation that people within the nation have to one another. Although recent events in the former Soviet Union and especially in Bosnia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia have displayed many of the negative aspects of nationalism, they do not serve to define it. Nationalism, as Taylor indicates, can be liberal as well as conservative and it can be democratic as well as authoritarian. While there are differences about whether nationalism is a relatively new phenomena, as Anderson suggests,² or a more ancient one, as Scruton proposes,³ it is not simply to be understood and dismissed as an anachronistic remnant of a tribal morality superimposed on modern needs, practices and institutions.

The conditions which give rise to nationalism today are essentially modern and include the pressure towards economic and political homogeneity and a felt need for differentiation and recognition. Thus, as Taylor correctly notes, whatever its origins, nationalism today arises from the demand that the modern state makes on its population and it develops in response to economic, cultural and social conditions that are unique to modern life.

The most important of these conditions include: 1. the rapidly expanding global economy which places a strain on local labor, and leads some to seek state protection from global economic forces on the grounds that co nationals have a special responsibility to one another; 2. the spread of popular global culture, a spread which threatens to marginalize local forms of cultural expression, and which leads to demands to set up special cultural boundaries such as official languages, restricted immigration based on national preferences or nationalistic educational programs; and, a unique combination of cultural and racial integration at the higher ends and class stratification and immobility at the lower end. This means that for a large number of people the modern multinational, cosmopolitan state is unable to deliver on promises for upward mobility and a better life--promises which have served as legitimizing principles for more universalistic, cosmopolitan societies, and which have served to justify compulsory schooling and the development of a cosmopolitan identity. The effect is a challenge to the legitimacy of schooling as an instrument of fairness and mobility and a reassertion of more culturally specific, nationalistic educational goals.

These conditions are acknowledged by Taylor in a general way when he sees nationalism as "a call to difference in face of the waves of 'modernization', lived in the register of threatened dignity, and constructing a new, categorical identity as the bearer of that dignity." However, in Taylor's explanation of nationalism he puts these conditions to the side in order to highlight the conceptual framework and imaginative innovations that he sees them giving rise to.

Taylor explains modern nationalism as a reformulation of collective imagination that enables people to conceive of themselves as equal members of one and the same national unit, as opposed, say as unequal participants in a cosmic plan interpreted by church authority and enacted by princely powers. Given this long range perspective, the reformulation of collective imagination is certainly an important consideration in explaining nationalism as such.

However, an explanation of the rise of contemporary nationalism in say, Bosnia or the former Soviet Union, or in Quebec, must also provide an account of why this way of imagining collective identity has, in these instances, come to take priority over other imaginative possibilities. After all, it would be quite conceivable to have all of the imaginative apparatus of nationalism in place, but still see one's primary affiliation connected to race, religion, gender, humankind or any other possible forms of organization. Imagination sets a range of possibilities for us, it does not determine which of the possibilities we will choose to act on or to organize our lives and commitments around. Certainly nationhood requires the kind of imaginative frames described by Taylor, but nationalism requires more. It requires a commitment to bring this imagined world into being for oneself and for others "like oneself". Hence, an explanation of nationalism in the modern age requires a comparative framework. The question is not simply why nationalism. It is why nationalism rather than something else such as, say transnational racism or classism, or religious fundamentalism.

The need for the comparative perspective also suggests one of the reasons why Taylor's concern for dignity is not sufficient to provide an account of nationalism. Dignity may be slighted for many different reasons--because one is a woman, or a Jew, a working person or an older citizen. To see a slight to dignity as the fuel for nationalism does not tell us how it is that the appeal to nationhood comes to have priority over other appeals when dignity is at stake.

It is true, as Taylor's criticism of Gellner's emphasizes, the homogenizing effect of modern state bureaucracies and educational systems is not a sufficient explanation for the rise of modern nationalist movements. Even if the push towards homogenization is as strong as Gellner suggests, this does not tell us why some people and groups work hard to accommodate themselves to the standard model while others strive to resist it. An account of nationalism requires that we understand why some groups resist official definitions and reconceptualize the boundaries of the state in ways that are consistent with modern nationalism while others are more content to accept official standards and definitions and to strive to overcome their own "deficits" in an attempt to assimilate into the larger multi ethnic, cosmopolitan state. Yet if Gellner fails to answer this issue, so too does Taylor. Why, we may ask, in the tone of the bewildered white, Anglo Christian male, are some groups so willing to accept our standards while others feel them as an imposition and a slight to their dignity?

The explanatory shortcomings of the concept of dignity should lead to some concern regarding Taylor's view that elites form the spark for nationalist movements. In the first place if the concept of dignity is not fine enough to distinguish between national resistance and, say gender or class resistance, it does not help to say that it is the slighting of the elite that starts the process. The question we want answered is which process does it start. Is it the affirmation of gender, class, race or nation? However, there are other, more fundamental problems that the focus on elites raises.

Taylor's account serves to highlight conceptual and psychological questions while neglecting economic ones. In raising this criticism I am not suggesting that economic causes are real and psychological ones artificial. Nor am I arguing that elites always are a secondary element in nationalistic movements. I am saying that sometimes economic causes are significant and that when they are, we need explanatory schemes that can capture this. I am also saying that sometimes elites are responding not to slights to themselves, but to the deteriorating conditions, under modernization, of the masses, and that when this happens we also need explanatory schemes that can capture this dynamic. In order to address this issue I return to the question of the character of nationalism and the forms that it takes in the modern world.

There are at least two different forms that nationalism take which it is helpful to distinguish. There is the nationalism of exclusion where a dominant group within an established state seeks to maintain its own identity. It may do this either by enforcing uniformity on different groups within its boundaries or by excluding those outside of its boundaries from entering and becoming fully participating citizens. The attempts by the right to establish an official national language and to provide a common and dominantly coded curriculum in the schools is an expression of the first. The exclusionary policies of the Japanese towards their long standing Korean residents is an example of the second.

There is also a nationalism of resistance. Here a dominated group within a local area may seek to forge an identity that separates it from a more cosmopolitan unit. This reflects the situation in Quebec. Or, a nationalism of resistance may take the form of the opposition of one subordinated group against other, equally subordinated groups in a struggle for dominance and power as is the situation in Bosnia. Dignity is not unimportant as an element in the explanatory process, but it needs to be unpacked in each instance in order to understand the factors involved in its loss.

Each form of nationalism has its own explanations, but to suggest that they all pivot in the same way on a deprivation of dignity on the part of elites overstates the importance of elites and short-circuits other important explanatory elements. Dignity works differently in the nationalism of resistance than it does in the nationalism of exclusion. In the nationalism of resistance some elites are educated to identify with norms of modernization. They are schooled in the curriculum or even on the soil of the cosmopolitan sector. A rebellion against these norms emerges, according to Taylor, when the dominant forms threaten to overwhelm local culture and hence to defile that which is different.

Yet even when restricted to resistance movements, Taylor's focus on elites only takes us part of the way towards an explanation of any particular expression of nationalism. What Taylor does not tell us is why elites should experience a loss of dignity, especially when they have been singled out as special and often treated to the best education that the cosmopolitan sector can provide. Why should they not be satisfied to serve to model or enforce the standards of the dominant culture on their "own" people?

There is a considerable body of literature that suggests that when elites begin to resist they do so not in terms of their own individual dignity--although this is a factor--but to give voice to the situation of "their" people where political influence or economic well being or both are eroding. Consider the case of Fanon, French educated, and trained as a psychiatrist. When he was appointed to minister to government officials in Algeria where he was born he questioned whether he should be using his skills to comfort the torturers of his people who were suffering from bad dreams and lack of sleep. If these nationalistic sentiments were accompanied by a felt loss of dignity it was not because of any assault on his status as a professional. It resulted from the fact that he was placed in a position where his professional know-how was used to mend the pain of colonialists who were harming the Algerian people.

To fail to see this connection between the elite and the people is to provide an explanation which focuses too heavily on individuals and could wrongly imply that national movements of resistance could be stemmed by simply providing elites with a bit more dignity--perhaps a clinical promotion for Fanon or a college professorship for Castro.⁴

This way of looking at national movements of resistance is likely to intensify the misunderstandings. Whereas one group seeks recognition as a collective unit, the other seeks to explain the movement as a problem with individual leaders. The critical question then is how this identification with "their" people develops, given that so much educational energy has been spent creating an elite that is loyal to the principles and institutions of the modern, cosmopolitan sector.

There are a number of different answers to this question. One approach involves distinguishing between different kinds of elites and how they have obtained their legitimacy. For example Given my earlier remarks regarding integration and mobility at the upper end of national life and stagnation and immobility at the lower ends, then elites themselves will have different sources of legitimation, and those who are accepted by the cosmopolitan culture may be different than those accepted by indigenous groups.

In addition to the possibility of a dual elite, there is the likelihood that local elite, even those educated and legitimized through the educational avenues of the cosmopolitan center, have a dual perspective. On the one hand their education informs them of the refined explanations and justifications for the existing distribution of power, wealth and status and on the other hand they have access to the "folk" explanations that are transmitted through informal local educators such as grandmothers, priests and barroom gossipers. In either of these two cases, the assault is experienced not just to one's self, or one's private position, but to the self as a member of a national group whose lower standing, and limited opportunities have become the focus of a collective grievance. Through both personal history, and day to day contact the chosen, locally originated elite comes to reidentify with this national grouping and takes its identity on again. The process is often intensified by markers such as skin color, accent, "body language" or take-for-granted elements of day-to-day conversation, that serve to distinguish locally grown elites from cosmopolitan grown ones, thus limiting the extent to which identity can be shaped by professional or cultural status.

Similarly, the nationalism of exclusion may also be understood by exploring conditions that connect dignity to the lives of people as they are lived in our rapidly changing world. Consider the vast change that has occurred in the last decade and a half in the relations of power between capital and labor due in large part to the globalization and mobility of capital and the national boundaries of organized labor. Organized labor is still nationally based while capital has the capacity to move with great swiftness to different parts of the globe, enabling it to rent a labor force, first in this country and then in that one, as the need and the climate for capital accumulation allows.

This imbalance has placed nationally based labor unions in a very vulnerable position as industry after industry can make good on promises to move operations abroad should labor become too aggressive. One response to this vulnerability is to seek to protect the economic situation by emphasizing membership in the "national family" and by insinuating that such membership entails certain economic rights which those outside the family should not be entitled to. True, dignity, as Taylor conceives it, is involved in these developments, but it is situated in some very important structural changes taking place world wide. To view the nationalism of exclusion in terms of a response to global forces and to the immobility of organized labor is to begin to approach a comparative explanation where we can see some of the factors that are lending themselves to the nation rather than, say, the class as the organizing principle in this instance.

It may also be useful to recall that different modes of organization--class, religion, nation, gender--are not necessarily exclusive of one another, and that different combinations are possible. It is important to build an explanatory scheme which can capture some of these combinations. For example, many patriots see their nation's mission as wider than just establishing an organization and giving voice to a unique people. The national voice is important not just because it expresses the desires of a people, but because the message itself is believed by them to have global implications. Israel stands to exemplify the laws of Moses; the former Soviet Union to advance the cause of the working class world wide; Iran to fulfill the prophesies of Mohammed and the like. We would best understand these possibilities by developing fluid explanatory schemes which can capture both the horizontal and the hierarchical, the deontological and the teleological aspects of the modern drive for nationalism.

What Taylor's account tells us is that nationalism is not always traced back to simple economic causes, and that it is not reducible to tribal impulses that just need more modernization to overcome. He is quite right in seeking to understand expressions of nationalism in the first instance by what nationalists tell us about themselves--that they seek a voice for their collective uniqueness. However, if our understanding of nationalism is to be as comprehensive as Taylor wishes, it will be important to allow that sometimes there are larger forces which spark the spirit of nationalism and that these will be different in different cases. Dignity can serve as a reminded that nationalism is about identity and recognition as long as it does not mask cases in which it is also about a reduction in economic well being and political or cultural influence. In other words, explanations of nationalism must be explanations of nationalisms and these will take different forms in different situations.