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[I]n the modern world everyone can, should and will “have” a nationality, as he or she “has” a gender.
Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.
In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson (1991) explains his proposition that a community depends for its coherence on repeated and renewed acts of imagining. The community to which we belong is not just a group of individuals proximate and known to us, but, perhaps more vitally, the conjuring up of those far-flung others that we imagine to be like us, our founding fantasy about what constitutes the community to which we believe ourselves to belong. All communities are imagined, Anderson tells us, “because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image