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This chapter reviews the definitions or types of nationalism, including the distinction between ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ nationalism, and the less common and apparently self-contradictory concept of ‘multicultural nationalism’. It argues that identities are not only chosen, multiple, and fluid, but also used for purposes, for integration, as well as for differentiation. This chapter also describes two key Scottish minorities: ethnic Pakistani Muslims and English immigrants, reviews the historical and political setting, and describes the plan of the book.

‘Multicultural nationalism’ comes very close to being an oxymoron: devolution increased national self-consciousness and 9/11 added to the problems of multiculturalism everywhere, including Scotland. But in practice, potential problems proved to be solutions. Since England has a key role in defining Scottish identity, Scottish nationalism stimulates Anglophobia but not Islamophobia, and Muslims can use Scottish nationalism as a tool of integration. 9/11 made life worse for Muslims in Scotland, but not as much as elsewhere. Thus, 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’ bound Muslims more closely to Scotland. Although both minorities criticized the governing performance of the new Scottish Parliament, both felt that its street-level impact has been more positive than negative. English immigrants feel that devolution has defused tensions, and Muslims self-consciously distinguish between the positive impact of devolution and the concurrent, negative impact of 9/11. Against the odds, multiculturalism and sub-state nationalism have not merely coexisted, but actually interacted positively within post-devolution Scotland.

Chapter 3 analyzes the dominant public discourses of American liberal multicultural nationalism as they were re-articulated in the post 9-11 era—discourses that link America and Americans to a set of liberal values for which the nation stands. This dominant discourse of liberal multicultural nationalism implicitly and explicitly co-constructs self and “Other”, belonging and not belonging, civilization and barbarism. This dominant national imaginary is deeply interwoven with the United States’s imperial ambitions, mitigating its economic, political, and military interests in the Middle East and South Asia. At this historic moment, the normative articulations of what it means to be American—and the values and beliefs that this nation is imagined to embody—have been drawn in relation to a particular discursive construction of Islam and the “Muslim world.” Drawing on a decade of scholarship on the cultural politics of the “war on terror” this chapter illustrates the connection between these broad political discourses of nationalism, and the everyday nationalism that, as the following two chapters show, Palestinian American youth encountered in their schools and communities. It illustrates how these nationalist discourses unfold in curriculum, and a student newspaper.

This concluding chapter suggests that the value of studying these century-old stories of shadowing the white man's burden, as explored throughout the text, is both to appreciate their role in bringing about in this current era of multicultural nationalism, with all its limitations, and to identify their unfinished business. What remains new in these stories of national inclusion are their surprisingly destabilizing narrative effects. Some critics currently seek to uncover a cultural history of transnational identities and coalitions as models of resistance, reasoning that transnational forms of domination call for transnational resistance movements and that global histories of slave rebellion, labor radicalism, feminism, and anti-imperialism can provide valuable models for such movements. But of course the scale of international relations and the frame of national belonging have been and remain important grounds for imagining domination and resistance, and for this reason alone, narratives that adopt this scale should still command part of our attention.