Worlds of Reform

modern states were refined and their powers to conscript, tax, regulate, and coerce were elaborated. The new states forged new popular nationalisms, planted new identities in their citizens' consciousness, and absorbed political ambitions. They developed policy regimes said to be rooted in deep, distinctive structures of national character and values. But for all their power to absorb and focus politics, the nation states were never as politically self-contained as their leaders represented them to be. The point is not only that the construction of the nation was itself a transnational project, made as much in processes of adaptive borrowing as by invention. Parliaments, constitutions, systems of representation, and the symbolic repertoire of nationalism itself (flags, anthems, oaths, pageantry, and the rest) were passed across the new nations. But also and just as importantly, the projects to modernize the existing regimes of policies and politics and to make them more just? the agendas of "reform," as historians know them?were transnational in their