Multicultural iteration: Swedish National Day as multiculturalism‐in‐practice

This paper examines the creation of ‘national day’ in Sweden in order to understand how such a holiday works to shape the Swedish nation's relationship with diversity. Analyzing parliamentary debates and press coverage, the author finds that official national day coverage tends to invest the nation with progressive and multicultural meanings, foregrounding immigrant voices. However, this multiculturalism is polysemic, vague and subject to contestation, both from far right ‘traditionalists’ seeking to ‘protect’ Swedishness from outside influences and cosmopolitans who see the nation as outdated and dangerous. The creation of a new national holiday can be seen as a ‘democratic iteration’ wherein democracy is restated and reinvested with meanings, and new lines of cleavage are drawn, and also as a ‘multicultural iteration’ where multiculturalism is invested with new meaning. Finally, the author argues that multiculturalism benefits from polysemy in that the concept can then adapt to changing circumstances, and, thus, survive.     

高技术条件下的人类、战争与环境--以1991年海湾战争为例

科技进步和军事变革互为条件、共同发展。战争作为“流血的政治”,其根本属性并没有随着科技进步而改变。它不仅是人类社会内部的严重冲突,更是特定生态系统中人与环境的对立。与以往的战争模式相比,高技术战争看似“人道”,却凸显出人与环境之关系更趋紧张的态势。以1991年海湾战争为例,战争双方滥用科技带来的破坏,几乎超出了自然环境的自我恢复能力和人类重建家园能力。无论联军还是伊军,都是环境的破坏者,他们连同平民一起又是环境破坏后果的最终承担者。从人与环境的关系入手审视高技术战争,使我们看到了现有的战争伦理的局限性。     

Female Patriots: Women,War and the Nation in the Period of the Prussian‐German Anti‐Napoleonic Wars

The period of the wars against Napoleon between 1806 and 1815 represents a central phase in German history for the formation of a national political culture organised along gender lines. Acting as a sort of catalyst, these wars accelerated and intensified the nationalisation of the gender order and the ‘gendering’ of the nation, and also permanently influenced the fundamental structures of the relationship between women, the state and the nation. The article analyses the contents and forms of patriotic national women's activities during this period, as well as the ways in which they were perceived and judged in public discourse. In so doing, it explores the relationship between women, war and the nation.     

Using an awakening narrative to leave behind a former national‐identity: an investigation of the conversion of national‐identity in Taiwan

National‐identity has become a civil religion and a major source of how people define themselves. Changing one's nationality thus is a salient event/social process in today's society; therefore, people's nationality conversion deserves more academic attention. Treating the convert as a social type and regarding people's self‐reports (or converts' accounts) as topics for analysis, this article examines the Taiwan case to illuminate how people tell their stories of converting nationality. ‘Converts’ usually employed an awakening narrative to leave their former national‐identity behind: For example, the ‘awakening’ plot is readily apparent, a huge contrast between a previous ‘wrong’ self and a current ‘correct’ self is mentioned, and the ‘awakening’ is delineated as an achievement. The symbolic awakening is harnessed as a strategic tool to create discontinuity autobiographically, to justify one's major change, to ensure that one's cognitive security remains intact, and to call for more awakenings. This article further notes that, since narrative itself is a practice, people always have ‘a self in the making’ which determines (and is determined by) how people (re)tell their life stories. Moreover, in Taiwan's case, we see that ‘awakeners’ usually admired early awakeners but blamed late awakeners (which constitutes an interesting triadic group relationship); people may also describe their experience of having multiple awakenings before the ‘grand’ awakening (‘Awakening’). © The author(s) 2015. Nations and Nationalism © ASEN/John Wiley & Sons Ltd 2015