Rethinking the Nationalist Conflicts in Taiwan and Japan's Role

unpublished discussion paper .Yale University, 2010

You can think about nationalism in its bearing on politics in several different ways, which may well prove not to be simultaneously compatible with one another. You can view it as a political phenomenon predicated on attitudes, cognitive orientations, and interpretations and assignments of values, within a given population. You can also view it (and with equal appropriateness) as a political strategy for different types of agents across a wide range of settings. You can view it as a normative and practical conception of how it is appropriate to interpret and assign value within political life. All of these ways implicate political judgment from the outset (11a), but they do so with varying explicitness. Strategy can at least be assessed hypothetically and instrumentally independently of any disposition to espouse or shun it. But it comes under scrutiny, characteristically, when and because different sorts of political actors do find themselves drawn to it or repelled by it. Normative and practical conceptions of how to interpret and assign value within political life constitute political judgments in themselves. Even as a political phenomenon nationalism's presence must be established either by direct quotation (the salience of the terminology and conceptualisation of nationhood within the ways in which a particular population speaks), or by the evidently political judgment that the category of nation is constraining or driving the political responses of some elements of the population in question in clear and forcible ways. How should we see the aetiology of that presence ? How should we select intellectual strategies for identifying it more clearly and reliably than the social sciences have yet proved able to ? The grounds for bothering to try to do so issue from two further

Antonsich, M., Nations and nationalism, in J. Agnew, V. Mamadouh, A. Secor and J. Sharp (eds.) Companion to Political Geography, Oxford: The Wiley-Blackwell (2015).

Nation and nationalism are two referents which continue to play a major role in how politics and social life are organized. The present article discusses their relevance from two distinct perspectives. Traditional accounts of nation and nationalism have largely focused on the questions of ‘when’ and ‘what’ is a nation, i.e. on the historical origins and substance of the nation, including its civic/ethnic character. Starting from the early 1990s, new approaches have instead privileged the ‘how’ and ‘where’ of a nation, i.e. the ways and the sites in which the nation is reproduced and becomes a relevant resource in people’s lives. The article then focuses on one of the most pressing challenges the nation is facing today, namely the increasing ethno-cultural diversity of its population. Final remarks point to the directions where further research is needed and where political geography can offer an important contribution.

European & Balkan Perspectives (2545-4854), 2019

Interpretations of nations, their identities and nationalism can be carried out from several different perspectives. The basic theories of nations that have been studied from the 19th century to the present day are primordialism, perennialism, ethno-symbolism and modernism. This article will present contemporary theories in interpreting and defining of nations and nationalism. In this article, only one hypothesis will be elaborated: "The different theoretical interpretation of the nation contributes to the development of nationalism in some nations." This hypothesis is operationalized as follows: The descriptive method will explain the essence of the basic theories that define the nation as human, natural, or divine creation. Then, through a comparative analysis of those same theories, I will try to prove that certain theoretical views of nations lead to the creation of a phenomenon called "nationalism".

Citizenship and Rights in Multicultural Societies, 1995

The traditional nation-state is based on an authoritarian ideology in terms of the ethnic, religious and regional status of the individual (the citizen). This ideology corresponds to a centralist power structure and to the regrettable fact that population groups which differ from majority populations (in terms of their ethnic, religious, cultural orientation and so forth) do not enjoy equal rights. (Examples of this denial of basic rights are numerous even in the member states of the European Union.) The often un-reflected equation of nationality and citizenship fails to provide proper legal (constitutional) safeguards for human rights in the sense of peoples' (ethnic) rights. 1 The inhuman result of such an 'ideology of equation' can best be studied by analyzing the present ethnic strife in the territory of former Yugoslavia, where regrettably-with the help and tacit approval of European and United Nations diplomats-nationalist and chauvinist policies are being re-introduced as major factors shaping international relations.

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.

Journal of Human Sciences

Following dissolution of empires, nation-states appeared on the stage of history in the 19th century when they were established as a result of nationalism that came into prominence based on unity of common language and history. it would not be wrong to say that the nationalist movements that started in the 19th century and the transition period to the nation-state structure took place simultaneously. Nationalism has an important role in the process of losing the legitimacy of traditional structures and the emergence of modern states. The nationalist movement and its studies, which gained momentum especially after the world wars, were gen-erally evaluated together with modernism. Even if nationalism is not an ideology, it is undeniable that the na-tion form has existed in social life since ancient times. In addition to the economic, social and cultural reasons and changes that helped the emergence of the nation-state, there is also the concept of "nationalism", which was of...

China Perspectives