ANDERSON, Benedict 1991: Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Revised Edition. London and New York: Verso

In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose the following definition of the 
nation: it is an imagined community – and imagined as both inherently 
limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the 
smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, 
or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their 
communion. (...) The nation is imagined as limited because even the 
largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has 
finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. No nation 
imagines itself coterminous with mankind. (...) It is imagined as sovereign 
because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and 
Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, 
hierarchical dynastic realm. Coming to maturity at a stage of human history 
when even the most devout adherents of any universal religion were 
inescapably confronted with the living pluralism of such religions, (...) 
nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and 
emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state. /

Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and 
exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal 
comradeship. (p. 5-7

Giorgio Agamben - We Refugees

Giorgio Agamben. "We Refugees." Symposium. 1995, No. 49(2), Summer, Pages: 114-119, English, Translation by Michael Rocke.

7. Before the extermination camps are reopened in Europe (which is already starting to happen), nation-states must find the courage to call into question the very principle of the inscription of nativity and the trinity of state/nation/territory which is based on it. It is sufficient here to suggest one possible direction. As is well known, one of the options considered for the problem of Jerusalem is that it become the capital, contemporaneously and without territorial divisions, of two different states. The paradoxical condition of reciprocal extraterritoriality (or, better, aterritoriality) that this would imply could be generalized as a model of new international relations. Instead of two national states separated by uncertain and threatening boundaries, one could imagine two political communities dwelling in the same region and in exodus one into the other, divided from each other by a series of reciprocal extraterritorialities, in which the guiding concept would no longer be the ius of the citizen, but rather the refugium of the individual. In a similar sense, we could look to Europe not as an impossible "Europe of nations," whose catastrophic results can already be perceived in the short term, but as an aterritorial or extraterritorial space in which all the residents of the European states (citizens and noncitizens) would be in a position of exodus or refuge, and the status of European would mean the citizen's being-in-exodus (obviously also immobile). The European space would thus represent an unbridgeable gap between birth and nation, in which the old concept of people (which, as is well known, is always a minority) could again find a political sense by decisively opposing the concept of nation (which until now has unduly usurped it).
This space would not coincide with any homogeneous national territory, nor with their topographical sum, but would act on these territories, making holes in them and dividing them topologically like in a Leiden jar or in a Moebius strip, where exterior and interior are indeterminate. In this new space, the European cities, entering into a relationship of reciprocal extraterritoriality, would rediscover their ancient vocation as cities of the world