Nationalism

This article offers an account of the responsibility that individuals bear by virtue of their national belonging alone. Via their national pride, the living connect themselves actively with select actions performed by others who might long be dead. They imagine themselves as having won past wars, built ancient empires and the like. This same feat of their imagination imposes on them a responsibility for the bad outcomes that were brought about through their imagined exploits. Their national responsibility for the "sins (...) of the fathers" however lends itself only to the kinds of responses that these living agents can demand of themselves. While their national responsibility can be captured by either the vocabulary of guilt or that of shame, the latter turns out to be more promising as it better accounts for the strong hold that the national idea has on contemporary political thinking. (shrink)

Cultural-nationalist and democratic theory both seek to legitimize political power via collective self-rule: their principle of legitimacy refers right back to the very persons over whom political power is exercised. But such self-referential theories are incapable of jointly solving the distinct problems of legitimacy and boundaries, which they necessarily combine, once it is assumed that the self-ruling collectivity must be a pre-political, in-principle bounded, ground of legitimacy. Cultural nationalism claims that political power is legitimate insofar as it expresses the nation’s (...) pre-political culture, but it cannot fix cultural-national boundaries pre-politically. Hence the collapse into ethnic nationalism. Traditional democratic theory claims that political power is legitimized pre-politically, but cannot itself legitimize the boundaries of the people. Hence the collapse into cultural nationalism. Only once we recognize that the demos is in principle unbounded, and abandon the quest for a pre-political ground of legitimacy, can democratic theory fully avoid this collapse of demos into nation into ethnos. But such a theory departs radically from traditional theory. (shrink)

The claim that liberal democratic normative commitments are compatible with nationalism is challenged by the widely acknowledged fact that national identities invariably depend on historical myths: the nationalist defence of such publicly shared myths is in tension with liberal democratic theory’s commitment to norms of publicity, public justification, and freedom of expression. Recent liberal nationalist efforts to meet this challenge by justifying national myths on liberal democratic grounds fail to distinguish adequately between different senses of myth. Once this is done (...) (drawing on Arthur Danto’s analytical philosophy of history), it becomes apparent that historical narratives cannot be justifiably shielded from criteria of truth and significance, and that genuinely historical myths are incompatible with liberal democratic political philosophy. (shrink)

Liberal nationalists advance two claims: (1) an empirical claim that nationalism is functionally indispensable to the viability of liberal democracy (because it is necessary to social integration) and (2) a normative claim that some forms of nationalism are compatible with liberal democratic norms. The empirical claim is often supported, against postnationalists’ view that social integration can bypass ethnicity and nationality, by pointing to the inevitable ethnic and cultural particularities of all political institutions. I argue that (1) the argument that ethno-cultural (...) particularity demonstrates the need for nationalist integration depends on an implausible reification of national identity at the level of social theory, and that (2) this reification ironically serves to undermine liberal nationalists’ normative claim. (shrink)

This paper subjects to critical analysis four common arguments in the sociopolitical theory literature supporting the cultural nationalist thesis that liberal democracy is viable only against the background of a single national public culture: the arguments that (1) social integration in a liberal democracy requires shared norms and beliefs (Schnapper); (2) the levels of trust that democratic politics requires can be attained only among conationals (Miller); (3) democratic deliberation requires communicational transparency, possible in turn only within a shared national public (...) culture (Miller, Barry); and (4) the economic viability of specifically industrialized liberal democracies requires a single national culture (Gellner). I argue that all four arguments fail: At best, a shared cultural nation may reduce some of the costs liberal democratic societies must incur; at worst, cultural nationalist policies ironically undermine social integration. The failure of these cultural nationalist arguments clears the way for a normative theory of liberal democracy in multinational and postnational contexts. (shrink)

Standing at the edge of life's abyss, we seek meaningful order. We commonly find this 'symbolic immortality' in religion, civilization, state and nation. What happens, however, when the nation itself appears mortal? The Mortality and Morality of Nations seeks to answer this question, theoretically and empirically. It argues that mortality makes morality, and right makes might; the nation's sense of a looming abyss informs its quest for a higher moral ground, which, if reached, can bolster its vitality. The book investigates (...) nationalism's promise of moral immortality and its limitations via three case studies: French Canadians, Israeli Jews, and Afrikaners. All three have been insecure about the validity of their identity or the viability of their polity, or both. They have sought partial redress in existential self-legitimation: by the nation, of the nation and for the nation's very existence. (shrink)

I argue that representations of the Muslim woman in the Western imaginary function as counter-images to the patriarchal ideal of Western woman. Drawing upon the work of Frantz Fanon (and supplementing it with a consideration of the role of gender), I show how the image of the veiled, Muslim woman is both othered and racialized. This “double othering,” I argue, serves: (i) To normalize Western norms of femininity. The social control of women and their bodies by liberal society is hidden. (...) Gender oppression is rather projected onto Muslim women, and identified with their societies, while remaining invisible within Western society. Western womanhood is taken to be “free” of such oppression. (ii) To deflect attention away from Western patriarchy, and promote complicity on the part of Western women with this society rather than other women. (iii) To represent Western femininity as an ideal that solicits women’s complicity universally. The attempt is to establish the superiority of Western society and its gender norms and morally justify the domination of other societies (in the name of civilization and the liberation of women). (shrink)

Colonial encounters in the 1850s: the European impact on India, Indonesia, and China -- Russia and Poland: the relationship of national emancipation to revolution -- Race, class, and slavery: the Civil War as a second American revolution -- Ireland: nationalism, class, and the labor movement -- From the Grundrisse to Capital: multilinear themes -- Late writings on non-western and precapitalist societies -- Conclusion -- Appendix: the vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe from the 1920s to today.

In _Marx at the Margins_, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the _New York Tribune_, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with our conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a (...) portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. _Marx at the Margins _ultimately argues that alongside his overarching critique of capital, Marx created a theory of history that was multi-layered and not easily reduced to a single model of development or revolution. Through highly-informed readings on work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond. (shrink)

Edit András Masculine nation, masculine war, masculine art Nationalism and masculinity (Little Warsaw: The Battle of Inner Truth) The rhetoric of nationalism is regarded to be heavily gendered, still for quite a long time the various nationalism theories have been in agreement only in their gender blindness. The gendered notion of nation has been naturalized to the degree that even feminist scholars have failed to examine the constructed nature of this connection. When they finally targeted nationalism, they focused on women (...) as victims of patriarchy or explored women’s contribution to the process of nation building. The focus on gender and sexuality in the making of nations appeared in parallel with the rise of nationalisms globally. This essay travels around the connection between nationhood and manhood through a close reading of the installation entitled The Battle of Inner Truth by a Hungarian artist duo, named Little Warsaw, examining how this symbiosis has been manifested in visual and cultural representation through the construction of the image of a glorified, virulent male warrior and heroic male struggle as opposed to the passive and weak, or its idealized and static counterpart, symbolizing the feminized nation to be defended. The artists transformed the floor of the Trafo Gallery, Budapest into a plotting board on which 73 statuettes and figurines borrowed from Hunga- rian public art collections serve as regiments in an imagined battlefield (these included small scale models for public monuments, autonomous and propaganda works, as well as commercialized knick-knacks, some of which are still visible in public spaces, others have been removed or never realized). They selected works made in the 20th century but relying on19th century visual clichés of public monuments, which represent mili- tary acts, patterns of aggression, heroism and are strongly connected to nation building and later to the construction of Socialist identity. The essay offers a feminist analysis (relying also on Nationalism Studies and Masculinity Studies) of nationalism and masculinity, to demonstrate the interplay between masculine culture and nationalist ideology as they designate gendered places for men and women in national politics. While the ready-made statues justly put into effect the nation as a masculine enterprise, the various artistic strategies – such as artistic research, re-enactment and popular history – applied to the very idea of setting up a game and the rearrangement of the figurines, in difference to the national and (art) historical canon, actually subvert the authority of post-socialist nationalism. However, its highly gendered construction is left intact. Keywords: masculinity, Men’s Studies, femininity, Women’s Studies, feminism, Gender Studies, game theory, war games, public monuments, public space, artistic research, re-enactment, nation building, nationalism, post-socialism. (shrink)

This article attempts to bring into discussion concepts from contemporary theories of republicanism from the vantage point of the particular theory of republican citizenship advocated by David Miller, and based on national identity. It emerges from the discussion of his notions of national identity and republican citizenship that he works with two parallel notions of political obligation: one that can be intimated from Miller’s Rousseauian vision of a political community as a community of common will, and another that can be (...) derived from his discussion of republican citizenship as a practice of deliberation. After identifying these two notions of political obligation as ancestral obligation and political obligation as public practice I proceed to show that they work independently of one another, and that the latter is to be preferred to the former. I conclude by suggesting that these findings entitle us to think that national identity is neither a necessary nor a desirable foundation for republican citizenship. (shrink)

Even though Fichte's Reden an die deutsche Nation arguably constitutes one of the founding texts of nationalist political thought, it has received little scholarly attention from English-speaking political theorists. The French, by contrast, have a long tradition of treating Fichte as a central figure in the history of political thought, and have given considerable attention to the Reden in particular. While the dominant French interpretation, which construes the Reden as a non-ethnic cultural nationalist text, provides a welcome corrective to those (...) who impute unmediated ethnic nationalism to Fichte, it is ultimately flawed for missing the text's crypto-ethnic character. While Fichte officially defines nationality in terms of language and culture, his linguistic-cultural nationalism ultimately collapses into ethnic nationalism. This collapse, signalled by his appeals to Abstammung and Abkunft, is propelled by the fact that, ultimately, the appeal to language and culture is incapable of securing immortality, which is the supposed source of its motivational power for Fichte. (shrink)

The domain of broadcast policies and television programs provide a useful point of entry for exploring the epistemological underpinnings of national culture in postcolonial India. The construction of national culture during 1982--98, revealed a series of contradictory articulations of power and representation through state ideologies of territoriality, sovereignty and citizenship. As an index of the hegemonic movement of the postcolonial Indian state, these ideologies constitute part of a larger problematic: the crisis of the nation-state. ;The dissertation explores representations of nation (...) in television documentary and entertainment programming on Kashmir and Punjab and in state policies regarding television. Discourse and narrative analysis was used to explore the relationships among textual, policy and larger sociopolitical contexts. One of the tasks of the discourse and narrative analysis was to identify main themes and patterns that shaped representations of nation. Five main themes--- myth of origins, geography & region, us & them, remaking postcolonial citizen-subjects, and secularism---were identified in the policies and programs that convey attempts to articulate the discourse of national culture. ;The analysis revealed particular ideological elaborations of the themes in the social construction of national culture. Though the policies and programs worked within the dominant field of representations, they exhibited marked internal contradictions. For instance, both policies and programs brought the inherent shortcomings of secularism to the surface. The broadcast policies promoted the state-based account of secularism by interpreting religion in rational terms. In arguing for the primacy of the universal over the particular , it effectively glossed over the specificities of religious identities. ;Theoretically, the dissertation outlined several arguments. First, it situated the particularities and shifts in the discourse of national culture on state-run television vis-a-vis state and politics. Second, it offered a critique of the existing theories of nation in cultural and literary studies that take as their point of departure novels and literature without paying attention either to the specificities of audio-visual forms of communication or the communicative dimensions of nation and national culture. Third, it presented a theoretical perspective sensitive to the postcolonial contexts, particularly a multi-religious and multi-ethnic society like India. (shrink)

A major issue in political philosophy is the extent to which one or another version of nationalism or, by contrast, cosmopolitanism, is morally justified. Nationalism, like cosmopolitanism, may be understood as a position on the status and responsibilities of nation states, but the terms may also be used to designate attitudes appropriate to those positions. One problem in political philosophy is to distinguish and appraise various forms of nationalism and cosmopolitanism ; a related problem is how to understand the relation (...) of patriotism to each. Nationalists may tend to be patriots, but need not be; patriots may tend to be nationalists, but need not be. Like nationalism, patriotism may also be considered in propositional forms or in related attitudinal forms; but unlike nationalism and cosmopolitanism, patriotism can exist in the form of an emotion: roughly, love of one’s country. This paper characterizes nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and patriotism in both forms and argues for a conception of patriotism on which it is both distinct from nationalism and compatible with certain kinds of cosmopolitanism. It also suggests that, in qualified forms, nationalism and cosmopolitanism may overlap in what they require of their proponents. (shrink)

Distinguishing between reasonable partiality and reasonable impartiality makes a difference in resolving the serious clashes between 'priority for compatriots' versus cosmopolitan global duties. Defenders of a priority for compatriots have to acknowledge two strong moral constraints: states have to fulfil all their special, domestic and trans-domestic duties, and associative duties are limited by distributive constraints resulting from the moral duty to fight poverty and gross global inequalities. In the recent global context, I see four main problems for liberal-nationalist defenders of (...) priority for compatriots: Reasonable particularists often forget that associative duties for compatriots compete with many sub-national and trans-domestic associative duties. They tend to forget that associative national duties compete with other, strong special obligations regarding not only citizens and residents inside nation-states but also trans-domestic obligations across state borders. They do not properly discuss the problem of unallocated duties in addressing global poverty and insecurity. The design of supra-national and global 'mediating' institutions, and the crafting of policies to remedy the misallocation of duties and to coordinate the required state activities is an urgent task neglected by liberal nationalists. In the recent context, reasonable partiality's bias towards partiality is most unwelcome and morally dubious. Reasonable impartiality's bias towards cosmopolitanism helps to stimulate a drastic shift in obligations and stimulates productive trans-national institutional design. (shrink)