The question of why state and nation seem to be developing different relationships to territory is critical to the main argument of this essay and requires some elaboration, especially because not all nation-states are equally wealthy, ethnically coherent, internally contested, or globally recognized. Given that all state apparatuses are faced, in one or other way, with the reality of moving populations, legal and illegal commodity flows, and massive movements of arms across state borders, there is very little that they can realistically monopolize except the idea of territory as the crucial diacritic of sovereignty. Yet what Monroe Price has called the global “market for loyalties” is not one in which states are set up to compete very well the global competition for allegiances now involves all sorts of nonstate actors and organization and various forms of diasporic or multilocal allegiance. The result is a historically peculiar development. Where states could once be seen as legitimate guarantors of the territorial organization of markets, livelihoods, identities and histories, they are now to a very large extent arbiters (among other arbiters) of various forms of global flow. So territorial integrity becomes crucial to state-sponsored ideas of sovereignty, which, on close inspection, may be in the interest of no other organization than the state apparatus itself. In short, states are the only major players in the global scene that really need the idea of territorially based sovereignty. All sorts of other global competitors for popular allegiance (artists and writers, refugees and guest workers, scientists and scholars, health workers and development specialists, feminists and fundamentalist, transnational corporations and United Nations bureaucracies) are already evolving nonstate forms of macro-political organization: interest groups, social movements, and actually existing transnaional loyalties. Transnational religious formations (often associated with Islam but equally salient with respect to Christianity, Hinduism, and Judaism) are the richest examples of such loyalties.