title: Border State (Writings From An Unbound Europe)
author: Tnu nnepalu
description: <DIV>"This short novel. . .speaks suggestively about the agony of 'hoping against hope,' the intensity of expecting the 'great indescribable' to happen, as in Ibsen's tragedies and Beckett's Waiting for Godot." --<I>World Literature Today</I><br></DIV><br /><br /><DIV>"Offers a rare, brilliantly realized account of a lost man in the grip of Western excess, emotionally crippled by a world that is subsuming his own." --<I>Translation Review</I><br></DIV>
zlib_text: 3
  * This is the text of the Tseo-nam lecture delivered at Seoul National University, May 1996.
  1 H. Lübbe, Abschied vom Superstaat, Berlin 1994, pp. 33f.
  Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, new states have been emerging in 
  fast-moving sequence—whether through the secession of formerly ‘autonom-
  ous’ territories, or through the reunification of national states that had fallen
  into dependence and partition.* These would appear to be only the clearest
  symptoms that a phenomenon more or less forgotten, or anyway neglected, 
  in postwar Europe has plenty of life left in it. A colleague of mine describes 
  the situation as follows: ‘With the break-up of the imperial realms, the world 
  of states is re-forming at borders marked by the origins of those states, whose 
  contours are to be explained in national-historical terms.’1 Today, the political
  future again seems to belong to the ‘ancestral powers’—primarily, religion 
  and the nation. In the social sciences, the talk is of ‘ethno-nationa