When Nations Are Ready for Their Own Architecture: Introduction to a Journal Bloc on National Styles

Abstract

The positive, almost poetic metaphor of “nation-building” has held among the stiff, rational keywords of nationalism studies since the 1950s. This concept was introduced into the field’s discourse by the social scientists who first argued that nations were not created by God but by people themselves. These scholars named the process “nation-building.” According to them, nations had to be built through language standardisation, social mobility, mass education, and mass media. Thus, the concept was initially used in the sense of a general, socio-cultural, top-down process led by the elite, with the aim of unifying states.