Religious Nationalism in an Age of Globalization

The Case of Paraguay's "Mennonite State"

Resumo

This article uses the example of Mennonite nation-building in Paraguay during
the 1920s and 1930s to argue that state formation is not inherently modernist. Tracing
nineteenth and early twentieth-century discourses of Mennonite colonies in Imperial Russia, Canada and elsewhere as a state "within a state", the essay advocates a
reevaluation of theories of modern statehood advanced by thinkers like James C. Scott and
Ernest Gellner. As conservative, pacifist Mennonites traveled from North America to the
Paraguayan Chaco to escape the pressures of assimilation in democratic society, their
migration paved the way for coreligionists fleeing persecution in the Soviet Union to join in a formation of a rural, autonomus "Mennonite state" that was organized internationally, characterized by deep religious observance, and conceived in opposition to
high modernist projects.