Justifying Multiculturalism: Social Justice,Diversity and National Identity in Australia and New Zealand

Multiculturalism has been criticised for emphasising cultural recognition over resource redistribution for minority cultural and ethnic groups. Moreover, critics argue that cultural diversity fails to provide enough common ground upon which to sustain civic nationalism. This paper examines the development of multiculturalist and biculturalist policies in Australia and New Zealand, and argues that these have in fact been justified in terms of a negotiated balance between two civic values: the value of diverse cultural expression, and social justice understood in egalitarian terms. The tension between these values has shaped the debate around multiculturalism in both cases. Both the social justice and value of cultural diversity arguments are deployed to reinforce conceptions of national identity in Australia and New Zealand.     

The Treaty of Waitangi in Contemporary New Zealand Politics

This paper identifies three discourses that are prominent in contemporary Treaty of Waitangi policy debate, each with significantly different implications for Maori political status within the modern nation-state. At one extreme the Treaty's significance is exaggerated by overemphasis on partnership as an implicit Treaty principle. At another extreme the Treaty's significance is understated by an assimilationist position that denies the Treaty's relevance to Indigenous rights which, in turn, imposes serious constraint on the extent to which partnership can actually develop into comprehensive policy practice. An alternative position is one that sees the Treaty, which is supported in international law, as affirming a twofold conception of citizenship as the basis of both individual and collective Maori rights.     

华夏民族与国家认同意识的演变

华夏民族与国家的演进和互动走着一条与西方不同的发展道路,由此形成古代中国民族认同与国家认同的同一性传统及民族意识中的民族与国家认同相一致的深层价值结构,同时也导致古代中国独特的政治地缘与民族地缘的特征。它使中国在国家与民族认同上呈现重要特点:即族别上的兼容性、民族统一与国家安全的一致性、文化的开放性。近代以降,传统家天下的国家与民族意识受到严峻挑战,其认同观念面临断裂和重新阐释、再塑的问题。以孙中山为代表的近代仁人志士积极探索民族国家的重建途径,创造性地提出政治革命与民族革命相统一的思想,并以此为核心构建近代中华民族国家中民族认同与国家认同新的一致性。     

Political science and the study of politics in New Zealand

Stephen Levine (Ed.), Politics in New Zealand: A Reader, Allen and Unwin, 1978.

Alan McRobie and Nigel S. Roberts, Election ‘78. The 1977 Electoral Redistribution and the 1978 General Election in New Zealand, John McIndoe, 1978.     

实处与窄处:民族复兴运动时论中的新生活运动

国民政府初期的民族复兴运动本起于民间,是"思潮"的一种强化说法,但这种社会意识氛围,正好为取得执政地位不久的国民党当局所运用。蒋介石亲自发起新生活运动,使时人发生民族复兴运动可落到实处的想象,但其提倡的礼义廉耻、服从命令、国民生活军事化所包含的特定政治意图,暴露出严重排他性和狭隘性,"实处"沦为"窄处",效果难彰,变成"纸上的运动"。这可能是常态建设"运动"化、社会运动"政治化"很难避免的结局。     

The Soviet Union and the Construction of Azerbaijani National Identity in the 1930s

Although the titular nation of the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic was Turkic speaking and had strong cultural and historical ties with Iran, the Soviet regime constructed a national identity that was divorced from its Turkic and Iranian past. The current literature cannot provide the exact period when this construction was put forward and generally argues that the Azerbaijani identity was artificially created as part of a broader “divide-and-rule” policy that was applied to all the Turkic nations in the Soviet Union. However, this thesis by itself does not explain why this change from a Turkic identity to an Azerbaijani one happened seventeen years after the Bolsheviks assumed power in Baku, and its simple causation makes it sound more like a conspiracy theory, which had a certain popularity in the Cold War era, than a scholarly argument. By presenting a broader view, the paper explains why and when the national identity in Soviet Azerbaijan was altered from Turkic to Azerbaijani. It argues that there were many factors that induced the Bolsheviks to take this extraordinary step in 1937. In fact, the change in defining national identity in Azerbaijan was a result of a combination of developments in the 1930s in Turkey, Iran, Germany, and the Soviet Union. The article concludes that these developments left Soviet rulers no choice but to construct an independent Azerbaijani identity.     

Status Rivalry and the Politics of Biculturalism in Contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand

Could it be that despite a huge literature spanning decades from many disciplines, a corpus of writing that examines seemingly every twist and turn of a complex situation, we still are missing something basic and fundamental to a proper understanding of contemporary cultural politics in Aotearoa New Zealand? A thing so obvious and omnipresent, that it was characterized long ago in the anthropological literature as the fundamental dynamic of Polynesian culture, and acknowledged even further back by Maori in their ancestral sayings? He tauranga uta, he toka tu moana (a resting place ashore, a firm rock at sea). ‘This metaphor describes the chief whose influence is unchallenged in his territory which extends from the land to the sea’ (Mead and Grove 2003:125). But surely real chiefs, those solid anchoring points, no longer exist as they did before the coming of the Pakeha. Be that as it may, the elements of social organization and associated cultural values of chiefly status continue to resonate in contemporary society. This paper argues that Goldman's concept of status rivalry is that crucial overlooked aspect of cultural politics necessary to a full understanding of what is happening today in the Waitangi Tribunal, Parliament, and so many other places where biculturalism and multiculturalism are debated and discussed, and that it is an aspect of Polynesian culture that has been part of the interrelationship between the Crown and te tangata whenua (the indigenous people) since their first encounters.     

清代满人的“中国认同”

美国的部分新清史学者总爱笼统强调中国与大清始终为两回事,不能混为一谈,这就必然涉及到清代满人的中国认同问题。本文对这一认同形成发展的过程与特点,进行了较为专门系统的考察和分析,认定它与满人自身的族群认同并不矛盾且处于不同层次;以满洲帝国称大清,严格说来并不符合入关后特别是康熙中叶以后满人正式的国家认同之实际。从某种意义上说,将更为广阔地区的非汉人族群彻底有效地陶铸成中国人,使他们以主人翁的姿态公开认同并满足于中国的身份,且在清末实现一定程度的现代性转换,不仅是清朝超越以往中国各王朝主导族群的满人特性独特作用的结晶,也恰恰正是体现其统治时期最为鲜明的中国特性所在,不能把两者简单对立起来。     

Shaping Women: National Identity Through the Use of Language in Franco'S Spain

In my article I show how a very particular identity was created for women during the period of Franco's Spain. I will draw upon a varied range of materials from official discourses, particularly the Sección Femenina (the women's branch of Falange); the Álvarez Enciclopedia and other texts such as songs, poems and the popular press. Following Foucault (1980: 30) I analyse an identity based on oppressive discourses whose power ‘reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning process and everyday life’. The nationalistic stress of this discourse is one that encourages women to create a new image of Spanish femininity that should be ‘different’ from the liberated portrayal of women coming from Europe, mainly through the path of growing tourism. The language of these discourses is somehow baroque, elaborated, energetic and highly dramatic. It tries to seek attention through an unnecessary and badly misorientated dramatism. It is cryptic and manipulative and claims to be poetical, but its main intention is to confine women indoors and to make them look at the world through the curtains or from a closed window. On the other hand it made women feel they were the representation of a unique matriarchal nationalism making them appear as the heroines of an essentialist national metaphor: women mothers of the nation. Inherent in Franco's equation of women = femininity = nation is a contradiction that defines women as ‘indoor heroines’ and bases nationalism in a naturalised representation of gender where women are a gendered representation of this nationalism.