I was tremendously pleased when I read Steve Smith's thoughtful and erudite comments. Smith's piece is a work of substantial scholarship in its own right, and it nicely complements the discussion articles. I am quite in agreement with most of what Smith has to say, but I do want to respond briefly to the two significant criticisms that Smith makes. The first is that the articles do not sufficiently “attend to the issue of continuity between national identity and earlier forms of politicized ethnicity,” since Seregny and I “implicitly subscribe to the modernist paradigm of nation building.” The second is that the “interplay between nation and empire” and the “relationship between national and class identities” were more conflictual than we allowed.