week 4 - ethnicity, nationalism and identity

Question 1

Ethnicity

Answer 1

• Group sharing common attributes - historical, cultural, institutional

Question 2

Nation

Answer 2

• politicized ethnicity: A specific community claiming territorial sovereignty in the name of its distinctive features or identity

Question 3

Nationalism

Answer 3

• pursuit of sovereignty or autonomy on behalf of the national community

Question 4

National identity

Answer 4

• collective feeling of belonging to a nation and sharing it’s distinctive attributes

Question 5

Defining the nation - primordial

Answer 5

• the nation as an empirical fact with emotional resonance
• points back to primordial ties that bind - language, race, religion, customs which form the content of ethnic and national identity

Question 6

The primordial nation

- tudjman: nations are naturally occurring

Answer 6

Tudjman - nations grew up in a natural manner, in the objective and complex historical call process on the basis of blood, linguistic and cultural kinship and the common vital links of the between the ethnic community and the common Homeland and the common historical traditions and aims, nations are irreplaceable cells of the human community (this statement violates the idea of voluntary choice, nations are not built by people, they are natural)
Pearse - National freedom is not affected by the accidents of time and circumstance it does not vary with centuries or with the comings and goings of men or of empires

Question 7

Defining the nation - perennial

Answer 7

Nations not as objective, essentialist and timeless but as deeply historical:

• framed around crucial events
• supported by symbolism
• cultivated by elites
• pointing to substantial continuity between pre-modern and modern nations - “ethnie” as necessary foundation for the nation-to-be

Question 8

Anthony Smith

Answer 8

• for ethno-symbolists, what gives nationalism its power are the myths, memories, traditions, and symbols of ethnic heritages and the ways in which a popular living past has been and can be rediscovered and reinterpreted by modern nationalist intelligentsias
• imagined community does not mean false or fake community (Benedict)

Question 9

Susan Reynolds

Answer 9

• in 900 the idea of people at the community of custom, law and descent was already well entrenched in western society

Question 10

Defining the nation - subjective

Answer 10

Renan - the nation is a daily plebiscite

• builds on past and present
• memory but also forgetting

Question 11

Defining the nation - modernist

Answer 11

Benedict - an imagined community
- imagined as limited and sovereign
- national relations are mediated by signs and symbols
Historical product of:
- capitalism
-print and communications revolution
- “the fatality of human linguistic diversity”
- not flash, potentially powerful
- Modular: capable of being transplanted elsewhere

Question 12

The nation and economic modernity

Answer 12

• nationalism as an expression of modern social forces (Hobsbawm)
• nationalism as a new integrating force, better suited to modernizing societies (Gellner - community amidst industrialization and communication amidst industrialization)
• Gellner: nationalism is not the awakening Nations to self-consciousness it invents nations were they do not exist

Question 13

The nation and political modernity

Answer 13

• war drove the need for contribution , sacrifice
• state formation: enhanced contact, standardized language culture, and religion and promoted national identity
• nation-creation served the state: cultivating uniformity, aligning state and popular aims, easing implementation of laws

Question 14

The French case: old regime

Answer 14

Historically
- territorial community
- monarchical regime
- recognition of difference
- varied dialects, customs
French Revolution
- overthrow the society of privilege first
- revolutionary principles - liberty, fraternity, equality - seen as general, universal
- replaced these were national sovereignty
Declaration of the rights of man and and the citizen (article 3 - sovereignty resides in the nation)

Question 15

Citizenship (French case)

Answer 15

• The relationship to the state, involving allegiance and exchange for rights and duties
• Brubaker: belonging to a nation state
• Tilly: The ability to effectively claim rights with respect to a particular state
• Anderson: citizenship speaks to how the nation is imagined

Question 16

Brubaker: France vs Germany

Answer 16

Germany
- outcome: ethnocultural approach
- jus saguinis: key terms: particularistic, organic, differentialist, volk-centered
France
- outcome: political approach (jus soli)
- universalist, rationalist, assimilationist, state-centred

Question 17

Brubaker - why is the French case different

Answer 17

Sequencing

• nation proceeds a state = ethnocultural nationalism
• state proceeds a nation = political nationalism