Review of 'Nationalism and Multiple Modernities' 2014

alter the arrangement.) (1) This Westphalian Peace, as is widely believed, heralded the system of nation-states in Europe. However, this peace should be understood in the sense of Orwellian doublespeak. The Westphalian system ushered in a new series of national wars for hegemony in Europe and in colonies -and through a number of local wars, Napoleonic campaign, Franco-Prussian war , this process went on upto the two world wars in the twentieth century, and even beyond that up to the present time.

European Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research, 2015

Different events which happened in Europe made not only Europeans but people all over the world think that the efforts for creating a unified Europe, and a global village is threatening national identities and livelihoods. Although globalization is considered as a buzzword of modern era, nationalism, too, is very much alive in its own way. Nationalism is not only expected to persist but also increase and intensify in response to and in opposition to forces of globalization. Thus according to Anthony Giddens, “the revival of local nationalisms, and an accentuating of local identities, is directly bound up with globalizing influences, to which they stand in opposition.”(Giddens, 1994:5).Therefore this paper will try to answer the question: Is there a link between nationalism and globalization? Can these two forces be complementary rather than contradictory? Is their existence a battle of winners and losers? The paper will shortly see the pros and cons and the implications of these for...

2017

1996

The reemergence of nationalism in Europe is characterized by its strong appeal to values outside modernist spheres of reference. Its success is a symptom of profound dissatisfaction with modernist ideals, resulting in, in the words of William McBride, a sort of global malaise. 1 Juergen Habermas' analysis of the changes in Europe is, as I shall show, inadequate, especially for Eastern Europe. The new nationalism defies an analysis like his that is too rationalistic and couched in Enlightenment ideals such as morality for morality's sake, a rather conceited conception of reason, and an abhorrence (or at least a commitment to uncompromising domination) of nature. I will try to explain how the history of nationhood in Europe is influencing the current resurgence of nationalism as the new direction of society. It will be interesting to note the difference between unified Germany and Eastern Europe. The Germany's tradition included a very strong appeal to mythology which did not translate well into the reasonableness of enlightenment but did translate well into postmodernism. The case study of Yugoslavia as a victim of nationalist forces, which gained the upper hand as a consequence of the lack of any other forces, will serve to demonstrate the "newness" of the nationalism there. Habermas 1 " Rethinking Democracy in Light of the East European Experience," in The Social Power of Ideas, pg. 125

This paper attempts to provide a typology of state-seeking nationalisms of the 21st century. We collected data using James Minahan's (2002) Encyclopedia of Stateless Nations and from the major newspaper sources with international coverage using Proquest newspaper database from 2000-2010. Based on these data we identified over 300 nations, which demand a state for their own, which have a well-defined territory, has a flag of their own and an organization which demand independence and/or autonomy. This paper examines 174 of these nations which have populations over 1 million. These nations are highly different from each other in terms of their level of mobilization level of militancy, organizational capacity, demands and grievances. Taking these differences into consideration, we established a typology of 21st century state-seeking nationalisms. Our typology, which is inspired by Miroslav Hroch's three phases, is not only descriptive in character but also suggests how nationalist movements evolve and transform in time.

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2000

There is a great failure and mental morass concerning theory and political practice of nation and nationalism, including not only traditional approaches but late nationalism studies as well. The reason is a long-standing and widely shared quest for adequate de nition of what does not exist, in reality, as a collective body. Nation is a powerful metaphor which two forms of social groupingspolity (state) and ethnic entity (the people)are ghting to have as their exclusive property. In its latest manifestation, it is an argument for geopolitical engineering and for questioning the legitimacy of weaker collective actors on the part of the winners. There is no sense in de ning states and ethnic groups by the category of a nation. The latter is a ghost word, escalated to a level of meta-category through historic accident and inertia of intellectual prescription. A suggested 'hard scenario' for breaking the methodological impasse is a 'zero option', when both major clients for being a nation will be deprived of a luxury called by that label. The process of dismantling the non-operational category should be started with the intellectual courage to forget the nation as an academic de nition and extend this logic into the domain of politics and everyday discourse.

Annual Review of Political Science, 2021

Amid the global resurgence of nationalist governments, what do we know about nationalism? This review takes stock of political science debates on nationalism to critically assess what we already know and what we still need to know. We begin by synthesizing classic debates and tracing the origins of the current consensus that nations are historically contingent and socially constructed. We then highlight three trends in contemporary nationalism scholarship: (a) comparative historical research that treats nationalism as a macropolitical force and excavates the relationships between nations, states, constitutive stories, and political conflict; (b) behavioral research that uses survey data and experiments to gauge the causes and effects of attachment to nations; and (c) ethnographic scholarship that illuminates the everyday processes and practices that perpetuate national belonging. The penultimate section briefly summarizes relevant insights from philosophy, history, and social psychology and identifies knowledge gaps that political scientists are well-positioned to address. A final section calls for more comparative, cross-disciplinary, cross-regional research on nationalism.

Modernism/modernity, 1995

Whatever nationalism is, whether ideology, civic religion, popular sentiment, or mass psychosis, its influence on modern society, politics, and art has been profound, perhaps more influential than the political movements of liberalism, fascism, and communism, all of which it underlay, interacted with, and powerfully defined. Whether analysts view nationalism as a beneficial or detrimental historical force, they tend to agree that this potent and multifarious phenomenon warrants sustained and rigorous analysis. The recent burst of academic studies is, in part, the product of that consensus. The current wave of nationalist movements around the globe not only provides powerful additional evidence for this assertion, but also presents interesting difficulties for those who study the topic. The three works under review here provide an opportunity to consider the challenges of analyzing nationalism in what is an increasingly nationalistic moment. In their respective strengths and weaknesses, these books confirm that our efforts to come to terms with nationalism as an historical artifact are always entangled to some extent with our sense of it as a contemporary political problem, and therefore, that we need to find ways of dealing with that entanglement in an honest and productive manner, so that we can elucidate nationalism without unwittingly perpetuating the errors that characterize its history.

This seminar provides an overview over various theories of nationalism and seeks to test their applicability through case studies since the early nineteenth century from Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Its aim is therefore to gauge the potential and the limits of what so far has been a distinctly Eurocentric brand of theorizing. A first part of the seminar familiarizes students with the most common theoretical approaches to the study of nationalism from an interdisciplinary perspective, framed around the well-known debate between modernists such as Ernest Gellner and primordialists such as Anthony Smith. A second part deals with a series of case studies, which aim at allowing for teasing out intercontinental comparisons as well as ideological transfers in the history of the spread of nationalism since 1800. The ultimate aim is to provide students with a firmer grasp of how manifold forms of nationalism have profoundly shaped our contemporary world.

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2002

Our current historical conjuncture is marked by a global proliferation of nationalisms that have fundamentally, and often violently, transformed the inherited geopolitical configuration of the postwar era. The apparent resurgence of nationalism has been matched by a growing convergence across disciplinary divides on the problematic of nationalism. A few salient prior works notwithstanding, it is mainly in the last two decades that nationalism has emerged as a central preoccupation of contemporary historical and social-scientific analyses. Remarkably, the stubborn persistence of nationalism in the current context of neo-liberal global restructuring and the dizzying expansion of nationalism research have not enhanced analytical consensus on core theoretical and methodological issues. Indeed, the rush for an analytical "fix" on nationalism has tended to fortify rather than resolve inherited methodological divides, especially that between objectivist and subjectivist approaches to nationalism. This essay critically reconstructs Benedict Anderson's concept of modular nationalism through the optic of recent calls to mediate the canonical opposition between objectivity and subjectivity. If this is a familiar call, it is also one usually more honored in the breach than in the observance. Recent works by social theorists have at once stressed the limits of this classical opposition and identified its socially generated character.' According to these works, an adequate account of such modern social forms as nationalism must capture the dynamic interplay between sociohistorical processes and the embodied, constituting character of everyday practices and cultural categories of understanding.