The only exception to the rule of identity politics is nationalism, whose success, far from dissolving it, has made it the foundation of practical politics and common sense that no one can escape, since citizenship, for multitudes of middling sorts, determines life chances far more profoundly than class. And yet nationalism has its discontents, especially among intellectuals, most of whom are of middling sorts.
Some oppositions to nationalism are merely the complaints of the privileged who lack self awareness, those who live in powerful nations, benefit from their citizenship, and object most vociferously to the nationalism of the oppressed, thinking that they are free from nationalism themselves, when if fact they are not.
But others speak to the essential paradox of modernity: the quintessential experience of capitalist modernity, born of primitive accumulation, is not to be at home, freed from feudal ties to land and community, and yet the quintessential means of modern politics, nationalism, compels one to identify with a nation, a homeland. In other words, the modern predicament, from which there is no escape under capitalism, is to be and not to be at home at the same time.
Here's an essay by Bertell Ollman that, while much of it is devoted to criticism of Zionism in particular, also addresses the question of modernity and nationalism.
<http://www.nyu.edu/projects/ollman/docs/resignation.php> Letter of Resignation from the Jewish People By Bertell Ollman
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>From what I've said so far, it would be easy for some to dismiss me as
a self-hating Jew, but that would be a mistake. If anything, I am a
self-loving Jew, but the Jew I love in me is the Diaspora Jew, the Jew
that was blessed for 2,000 years by having no country to call his/her
own. That this was accompanied by many cruel disadvantages is well
known, but it had one crowning advantage that towered over all the
rest. By being an outsider in every country and belonging to the
family of outsiders throughout the world, Jews on the whole suffered
less from the small-minded prejudices that disfigure all forms of
nationalism. If you couldn't be a full and equal citizen of the
country in which you lived, you could be a citizen of the world, or at
least begin to think of yourself as such even before the concepts
existed that would help to clarify what this meant. I'm not saying
that this is how most Diaspora Jews actually thought, but some
did—Spinoza, Marx, Freud, and Einstein being among the best known—and
the opportunity as well as the inclination for others to do so came
from the very rejection they all experienced in the countries in which
they lived. Even the widespread treatment of Jews as somehow less than
human provoked a universalist response. As children of the same God,
Jews argued, when this was permitted or just quietly reflected when it
wasn't, that they shared a common humanity with their oppressors and
that this should take precedence over everything else. The
anti-Semitic charge, then, that Jews have always and everywhere been
cosmopolitan and insufficiently patriotic had at least this much truth
to it.
Not many Jews today, of course, take this position. In a 1990 interview, Britain's most famous intellectual and Zionist, Isaiah Berlin, recounted a conversation he had with the French philosopher, Alexander Kojeve, who is reported as saying, "You're a Jew. The Jewish people probably have the most interesting history of any people that ever lived. And now you want to be Albania?" Berlin's reply was, "Yes, we do. For our purposes, for Jews, Albania is a step forward."1 This was a surprising answer from a culturally sophisticated liberal, an atheist, someone who claimed never to have experienced any anti-Semitism in England, and who wrote extensively about nationalism and its perils. What overrode all such considerations for Berlin was the human need to belong, which he understood as belonging not just to a group but to a particular place. Without their own country, Jews had suffered all manner of oppression as well as the pervasive longing that accompanies any extended exile. Berlin was fond of repeating that all he wanted for Jews is that they be allowed to be a "normal people"—with a homeland—just like the others. Yes, just like the Albanians.
-- Yoshie