The monograph examines the development of interwar Hungarian cultural diplomacy in three areas: academia, the tourist industry, and motion picture and radio production. It is a story of how Hungarian ...elites perceived—and misperceived—themselves, their surroundings, and their own ability to affect the country’s fate amid high hopes and deepseated anxieties about the country’s place in a Europe newly reconstructed after World War I. Though the study is rooted in Hungary, it explores the dynamic and contingent relationship between identity construction and transnational cultural and political currents in small EastCentral European nations in the interwar period.
The concept of the Rus’ Land (russkaia zemlia) became and remained an historical myth of modern Russian nationalism as the equivalent of “Russia,” but it was actually a political myth, manipulated to ...provide legitimacy. Its meaning was dynastic—territories ruled by a member of the Riurikid/Volodimerovich princely clan. This book traces the history of its use from the tenth to the seventeenth century, outlining its changing religious (pagan to Christian) and geographic elements (from the Dnieper River valley in Ukraine in Kievan Rus’ to Muscovy in Russia) and considers alternative “land” concepts which failed to rise to the ideological heights of the Rus’ Land. Although the Rus’ Land was never an ethnic or national concept, and never expanded its appeal beyond an elite lay and clerical audience, understanding its evolution sheds light upon the cultural and intellectual history of the medieval and early modern East Slavs.
The proclamation of Belarusian independence on March 25, 1918, and the rival establishment of the Soviet Belarusian state on January 1, 1919, created two distinct and mutually exclusive national ...myths, which continue to define contemporary Belarusian society. This book examines the processes that resulted in this dual resolution in the context of World War I and the subsequent Russian Revolutions. Based on original archival material, Lizaveta Kasmach scrutinizes the development of competing concepts of Belarusian nationhood in the context of rivaling national aspirations and imperial policies. The analysis convincingly demonstrates the divisions within the nationalist movement, both politically between the moderates and socialists, and geographically between German-occupied territory with Vilna as a center versus Russian-controlled territory around Minsk. Besides the case study of Belarusian nation-building efforts, the book is a contribution to the study of the First World War in East Central Europe, approaching the war and its aftermath as a mobilizational moment in the region.
In many parts of the world, nationalism has gone underground. It's there, just beneath the surface, underpinning the social order without requiring, or even permitting, much tinkering. This is the ...realm of the unselfconscious: nationhood not as an object of purposeful manipulation, but as an unspoken set of assumptions about the national order of things. But if the nation is unseen, unheard, unnoticed, how do we know this? Indeed, how can we know this? In this paper, I elaborate a breaching approach for uncovering the ways the nation is taken for granted. I look to the edges of the nation: the places, times and situations where the nation is on the periphery – the edges – of consciousness, lurking just beneath the surface where it might be teased out with a carefully concocted breach. My aim is to explore and exploit these edges to turn unselfconscious suppositions about the nation into explicit articulations of the nation.
Radicalization is a major challenge of contemporary global security. It conjures up images of violent ideologies, “homegrown” terrorists and jihad in both the academic sphere and among security and ...defense experts. While the first instances of religious radicalization were initially limited to second-generation Muslim immigrants, significant changes are currently impacting this phenomenon. Technology is said to amplify the dissemination of radicalism, though there remains uncertainty as to the exact weight of technology on radical behaviors. Moreover, far from being restricted to young men of Muslim heritage suffering from a feeling of social relegation, radicalism concerns a significant number of converted Muslims, women and more heterogeneous profiles (social, academic and geographic), as well as individuals that give the appearance of being fully integrated in the host society. These new and striking dynamics require innovative conceptual lenses. Radicalization in Theory and Practice identifies the mechanisms that explicitly link radical religious beliefs and radical actions. It describes its nature, singles out the mechanisms that enable radicalism to produce its effects, and develops a conceptual architecture to help scholars and policy-makers to address and evaluate radicalism—or what often passes as such. A variety of empirical chapters fed by first-hand data probe the relevance of theoretical perspectives that shape radicalization studies. By giving a prominent role to first-hand empirical investigations, the authors create a new framework of analysis from the ground up. This book enhances the quality of theorizing in this area, consolidates the quality of methodological enquiries, and articulates security studies insights with broader theoretical debates in different fields including sociology, social psychology, economics, and religious studies.
This article explores the nature of the process of nationalisation and the construction of nationality in Franco's Spain. Despite that nationalism constituted the principle axis of the narratives and ...the policies of the Francoist State, there has been scant research into the reach, the channels, and the role of Spaniards in the process of nationalisation. From a starting point of a complex conception of the Francoist national project, this essay seeks to reframe its analysis in light of the theoretical contributions of ‘banal nationalism’ and ‘everyday nationalism’. As such, on the one hand, I intend to make clear the heterogeneity and the dynamism of Francoist nationalism and, on the other, to include individuals within the scene and further, and in particular, to take into account the role of daily experiences and the capacity for agency on the part of Spaniards on the ground, as participants and constructors of the national community.
This study explores a group of social studies teachers' conceptions of citizenship by taking into consideration the country's increasingly authoritarian political culture. It offers an analysis of ...semi-structured interviews carried out with 20 teachers working at state middle schools in a relatively secular city. The study found that the majority of the teachers are subscribed to a non-democratic conception of citizenship that prioritizes an uncritical loyalty to the nation, inculcates passive compliance, relies on a pro-Muslim notion of human rights, and makes little room for political issues discussion. Despite that, some teachers seem to develop oppositional discourses and seek ways to claim their agencies. The study concludes that the authoritarian Islamic nationalism in power has intensified the ethno-religiously nationalist, statist, and duty-centric aspects of citizenship education (CE). Some teachers' explicit emphasis on pro-Islamic and anti-western discourses and almost all teachers' explicit concern to stay away from politics emerge as novel characteristics that are consistent with the dictates of Turkey's authoritarian regime. It seems authoritarian populist nationalism redresses citizenship as an exclusionary notion grounded in race, ethnicity, religion, and civilizational claims. Insights from this research may help the advocates keep CE supportive of democratic values under authoritarian conditions.
Why are states increasingly developing policies aimed at embracing their populations abroad? This interest in diaspora policies has become relevant beyond the academic context, reflecting a growing ...practice of states and international organizations. To address this, the article first provides a description of the growing number of state practices aimed at their population abroad. Based on an original dataset of thirty-five states, it then uses multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to establish an inductive typology of sending states policies: expatriate, closed, indifferent, global-nation and managed labor. Finally, it assesses three explanatory frameworks of diaspora policies, finding that, while explanations based on material factors and ethnic conceptions of citizenship provide insights into the determinants of diaspora policies, analyses in terms of governmentality provide a more fruitful framework for research.
•35 Diaspora policies are compared through multiple correspondence analysis.•Wealth and percentage of population abroad partly explain the type of diaspora policies.•These two factors fail to explain why states develop them.•Levels of remittances do not hold any explanatory power.•Governmentality best explains governments' transnational practices of power.
Why would love for their language lead several men in southern
India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the
Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that
transformed ...Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment,
producing in the process one of modern India's most intense
movements for linguistic revival and separatism. Sumathi Ramaswamy
suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a
singular metanarrative of linguistic nationalism and instead
proposes a new analytic, "language devotion." She uses this concept
to track the many ways in which Tamil was imagined by its speakers
and connects these multiple imaginings to their experience of
colonial and post-colonial modernity. Focusing in particular on the
transformation of the language into a goddess, mother, and maiden,
Ramaswamy explores the pious, filial, and erotic aspects of Tamil
devotion. She considers why, as its speakers sought political and
social empowerment, metaphors of motherhood eventually came to
dominate representations of the language.
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