Witness the fragmentation of the former Yugoslavia. The forced disaggregation of a people once united by a civic identity into tiny, ethnically homogeneous states, each in conflict with the others, is perhaps the clearest example of what happens when transnational identities—in this case ethnicity—clash with national loyalties. Similar tensions led to the partitioning of Urdu-speaking West Pakistan and Bengali-speaking East Pakistan into the homogenized states of Pakistan and Bangladesh. But when it comes to the power of transnational identities to challenge nationalist ones, no force exerts a
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