期刊名称：Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences
印刷版ISSN：1944-1088
电子版ISSN：1944-1096
出版年度：2009
卷号：1
期号：2
页码：498-522
出版社：Guild of Independent Scholars
摘要：The glue of imagination is one of the basic ingredients which is required for the setting up of a nation. It goes without saying that the imagination too has a certain limitation as the nation so formed has its own restricted boundary. But to imagine a nation without any history cannot be dreamed of. Evidently we see that both imagination and history play a vital role to churn out a nation. It may not be out of place to have a look at a nation's definition before moving ahead. The definition of nation continues to proliferate day-in and day-out, thereby perplexing the concerned critics. The fact can be further substantiated by Hugh Seton- Watson's statement in which he utters: "Thus I am driven to the conclusion that no "scientific definition" of the nation can be devised, yet the phenomenon has existed and exists."2The phenomenon has been further magnified by postcolonial critics, ever since its rise in the nineteenth century in Europe. Since then nation has been the cause of many untold conflicts leading to two disastrous World Wars. Today the number of these nations has increased to 196, which again reflects that each nation is imagined in its own ways since they all have a different history. My statement finds legitimation in the following words of Wang Gungwar, an Ausatralian who served as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hong Kong:What may emerge as the basis of Australian national identity is a consensus that Australia is not part of Asia, nor Europe, nor America, but a country with some of the best modern features of these three countries
