Between Islam and the nation; nation-building,the ulama and Alevi identity in Turkey

This article analyses the relationship between Islam and nationalism by considering the role of the ulama in Turkey, housed within the Presidency of Religious Affairs (PRA). The ulama – religious scholars and experts of Islamic law – in Muslim majority contexts are typically closely linked with the state and play a key role in shaping the boundaries of Islam and of what is Islamically acceptable. However, this is also of consequence for the boundaries of the nation, since in Turkey Islam and nationalism has been intertwined, with Islam playing a central role in nation-building, as a basis of ethnic identity formation and a source of symbols and myths. This articles shows, firstly, that the PRA has acted as a carrier and preserver of Sunni (Hanefi) Muslim identity in continuity with the Ottoman ulama and, secondly, that it has delimited nation-building, by considering its approach to and interventions against Alevi identity.     

Simultaneous identities: ethnicity and nationalism in mother tongue education in Nepal*

The scholarly works on ethnicity and nationalism have been highly dominated by binary frameworks. In addition, the normative preference for civic consciousness and the concerns of national disintegration often separate the notions of ethnicity and nationalism. This article suggests that the notions of ethnicity and nationalism cannot be understood exclusively as a choice between maintaining the integrity of the nation and completely rejecting it. Drawing on fieldwork in mother tongue schools in Nepal, the article draws attention to the ways in which school actors discursively positioned ethnic identity as imperative to national identity, the one that bolsters the notion of Nepali nationhood. By paying close attention to the everyday context within which discourses of nationalism are situated, this article argues for an analytical necessity to approach ethnicity and nationalism in relation to each other to appreciate the process of symbolic negotiations in public spaces.     

Citizenship policies in interwar Turkey*

Abstract. This article studies interwar Turkish nationalism from the perspective of Turkish citizenship policies. The interwar era witnessed the rise of a nationalist state in Turkey, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Ethnicist Turkish nationalism emerged as a political force in the 1930s. The study scrutinises the impact of this on Turkish nationalism. In doing this, it focuses on the practices of the Turkish state, especially the citizenship policies. Accordingly, the piece examines the role of ethnicity, religion and territory in Ankara's denaturalisation and naturalisation policies. It concludes that, despite the rise of ethnic nationalism, not ethnicity but the legacy of the millet system and ethno‐religious identities shaped Turkey's citizenship policies in the interwar period.     

Imperialism and nationalism: The Home Rule struggle and border creation in Ireland, 1885–1925

This article explores relationships between imperialism and nationalism, illustrated by their interactions in the struggle over devolved Irish ‘Home Rule’ and partition between 1885 and 1925. Ireland's partition border was primarily an imperial creation shaped by the prolonged, complex and unequal interactions between Irish nationalism and British imperialism. But partition was by no means an inevitable outcome of a mutually constitutive and ambiguous relationship where British imperialism had long characterised Ireland as a frontier zone but one within the core of empire. The Irish case serves as a reminder of the role of imperial arbitration in modern state and nation-building, and also in sowing the seeds of contemporary conflicts. This argument draws on the recent ‘re-discovery of imperialism’ and is advanced as a corrective to reading history backwards through the lenses of contemporary national states. It challenges the tendency to draw overly sharp temporal and spatial distinctions between imperialism and nationalism as rival ideologies and practices.     

Nationalism and Sexuality,What are the Issues?

Abstract. This article attempts to clarify in a systematic fashion the relationship between nationalism and sexuality. Whilst a relationship is now generally recognised between the two phenomena, it has been neglected relative to other issues. There are genuine reasons for this, the relationship being fraught with conceptual and empirical problems. Such problems are evident in the writings to date directly on nationalism and sexuality. This discussion attempts to initially disentangle racism and gender from nationalism and sexuality, respectively, before outlining what I consider to be the three major intersections: national sexual stereotypes, sexuality in national conflict and sexuality in nation-building. Each of the intersections are indicated by an assessment of their conceptual relationship, and illustrated by various historical instances.     

Ethnic boundaries and boundary-making in handicrafts: examples from northern Norway,Sweden and Finland

When ethnicity is said to be manifest and practised through handicrafts, these seemingly innocent objects become political. They raise questions concerning who can do what handicraft, who can use what symbols or what developments are “allowed”. They illustrate the continuous production of ethnic norms and boundaries, especially when global tourism enters into the equation. Taking a social constructivist perspective, our study addresses ethnic boundaries and boundary-making in handicrafts in northern Sweden, Norway and Finland. Our findings are based on fieldwork (35 interviewees) with people of diverse local backgrounds making and selling handicrafts. Methodologically, we avoid preselecting people based on ethnicity, but instead contribute to an understanding of the constitutive processes of ethnicity by looking at how ethnic talk comes into conversations about handicrafts. Our findings demonstrate that the interviewees draw an ethnic divide between “Sámi”/“non-Sámi”, while other ethnic-choices move to the background. This divide can be seen to be amplified by tourism. The boundary for who can make a Sámi handicraft or use Sámi symbols remains significant, yet also fluid. The article deepens the understanding of the Sámi/non-Sámi ethnic categorization, here in relation to handicrafts. It also helps unravel the complexities between tourism, ethnicities and handicrafts more broadly.     

Religion and nationalism: four approaches*

ABSTRACT. Building on recent literature, this article discusses four ways of studying the relationship between religion and nationalism. The first is to treat religion and nationalism, along with ethnicity and race, as analogous phenomena. The second is to specify ways in which religion helps explain things about nationalism – its origin, its power or its distinctive character in particular cases. The third is to treat religion as part of nationalism, and to specify modes of interpenetration and intertwining. The fourth is to posit a distinctively religious form of nationalism. The article concludes by reconsidering the much‐criticised understanding of nationalism as a distinctively secular phenomenon.     

Indigenous myths and nation building in Latin America

In Latin America, ethnicity is equated with indigenity. It is an objective of this article to review the legacy of Anthony Smith regarding the vitality of the ethnic past and the myth of origin, as the core of his theory of nationalism based on the weight of ethnocentrism. To this end, we address two routes, the use of the ethnic past and ethnicity by nationalists and founders of the state and, how indigenous intellectuals, on the other, have found a reinvention of their identities through various myths of Amerindian origin. Ethnic myths and the use of the ethnic past have been accepted, denied or rejected by nationalists, while indigenous peoples adhere to their own myths or seek to reinvent them. Mythical information is a component of identity but also requires institutions to disseminate such information among the group.     

A bargain between the secular state and Turkish Islam: politics of ethnicity in Central Asia

Abstract. This paper reveals and analyses the ethnic politics mobilised by a fast‐growing Islamic movement, the Gülen movement, which emerged in the 1980s in Turkey and expanded to Central Asia in the mid‐1990s. Following the micro‐sites, where nationness is reproduced as an everyday practice, my ethnographic research in Almaty‐Kazakhstan explored the emergent Islamic sensibilities for the nation and ethnic identity. Revivalist Islam has often been essentialised as incompatible with nationalism, since it has been widely associated with the Muslim community rather than nations and nation‐states. I argue that this bias is facilitated and maintained by the deep division in the literature. Scholarly work on both Islam and nationalism are split into two opposing approaches, state‐centered and culture‐centered. The findings of the present study challenge the binary thinking that juxtaposes politics against culture and dichotomises ethnic and state‐framed base of nationalism and nationhood. My major finding is that the Gülen movement has not only inherited the symbols and myths of descent from the founding fathers of the Turkish state, but it is also currently reproducing the related ethnic politics in cooperation with–not in opposition to–the secular states in the post‐Soviet Turkic world. The study reconciles ethno‐symbolic and state‐centered approaches in explaining the convergence between Islamic and secular nationalism in the formation of ethnic politics in Almaty‐Kazakhstan.     

Fichte and the German Idiom: the Metaphysics of the Addresses to the German Nation

This article argues against the dominant Anglophone and Francophone interpretation of Fichte, which reads him as advancing either a form of ethnic or cultural nationalism. It claims that what is missing from the current reception of Fichte is the essentially philosophical and cosmopolitan character of his nationalism – the fact that the Addresses to the German Nation uses non‐empirical and cosmopolitical concepts to develop and articulate its nationalistic viewpoint. It therefore claims that the notion of a national philosophical idiom that the Addresses present, far from being a screen for its nationalism, is its driving engine. It does this by considering the problems of translating the German locution ist unsers Geschlechts. Consequently, it is claimed that the cosmo‐nationalism of Fichte is not reducible to a set of claims regarding ethnicity or even the empirical world, even if a discourse on the organismic, on what counts as life, irreducibly haunts the Addresses.     

Playing for Ireland in foreign fields: the Gaelic Athletic Association and Irish nationalism in America

With a few exceptions, the existing scholarship on the relationship between the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and Irish nationalism has largely overlooked the experiences of the Irish diaspora. This article seeks to redress this neglect by exploring the ways in which Irish nationalism has historically been produced, reproduced and contested amongst members of the GAA in the USA. In light of their status as focal points of Irish immigration and as centres of Gaelic games activity in America, the article focuses on the cities of Boston, New York, Chicago and San Francisco. It draws on extensive archival and interview research conducted in each locale since 2000 and reveals that while intensely politicised and ethnic versions of Irish nationalism have historically weaved their way through US branches of the Association, since the mid-1990s there have been a number of socio-economic and political developments both in Ireland and in America that have seen the GAA begin to articulate a more civic, less ethnically bounded version of Irish nationalism.     

Enacting nationalism through youthful mobilities? Youth,mobile phones and digital capitalism in a Lao‐Vietnamese borderland

Mobile phone use has become a defining feature of what it means to be young, and the relatively remote Lao‐Vietnamese borderland area that is the focus of this study is no exception. Drawing on Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, this article investigates the interplay between the everyday styles of being young, the forces of digital capitalism and the enactment of nationalism. We do this with a focus on ethnic minority youth's appropriation of the mobile services offered by Viettel, the most popular mobile services provider in the study area and owned by the Vietnamese Ministry of Defence. We suggest that the everyday performances of being young, revolving around the mobile phone, are affected by the forces of digital capitalism. We further suggest that the cultural context of Viettel's digital capitalism is embedded in a fabric of Vietnamese nationalism, leading ethnic minority youth, consciously and unconsciously, to enact nationalism through their everyday styles of being young.     

Globalisation and the decline of national identity? An exploration across sixty‐three countries

The relationship between globalisation and national identity is puzzling. While some observers have found that globalisation reduces people's identification with their nation, others have reached the opposite conclusion. This article explores this conundrum by examining the relationship between globalisation and people's feelings towards national identity. Using data from the International Social Survey Program National Identity II ( 2003 ) and the World Values Survey ( 2005 ), it analyses these relations across sixty‐three countries. Employing a multilevel approach, it investigates how a country's level of globalisation is related to its public perceptions towards different dimensions of national identity. The results suggest that a country's level of globalisation is not related to national identification or nationalism but it is related negatively to patriotism, the willingness to fight for the country and ethnic conceptions of membership in the nation. An examination of alternative explanations indicates that globalisation has a distinct impact on national identity.     

Stateless Nation-Building: Quebec,Catalonia and Scotland in the Changing State System

Abstract. The reconfiguration of political space is bringing about new forms of territorial politics. The meanings of nationalism and the state are being transformed and new types of autonomist movement are emerging. These are often seen as a resurgence of ethnicity, or as attempts to recreate mini nation-states fragmented from the existing ones. Mainstream political science tends to regard them negatively. It is argued that the resurgence of minority nationalism is also a response to the needs for collective action in a world of weakened nation-states. New forms of collective identity and action are emerging which recognise the limitations of traditional sovereignty and the necessary interdependence of the contemporary world. There is much that is new here, but also much that has always been present but has been lost in the state-centred perspective of political science. The argument is illustrated by an examination of three of the most electorally successful nationalist movements in the Western world, in Quebec, Catalonia and Scotland. These are seen not as classic nationalist movements but as nation-building projects which recognise the limitations of the nation-state formula and are engaged in ‘stateless nation-building’. This project is difficult to translate into constitutional terms or to reconcile with the model of the state prevailing in the respective majority communities.     

Nation,Ethnicity, and Canada in Laura Goodman Salverson’s The Viking Heart

This article argues that expressions of national identity in twentieth-century Euro-Canadian literature often conceive of the nation as existing in both ethnic and ostensibly pluralist, immigration-based models, and that the former is frequently valorized over the latter, resulting in the implicit legitimation of settler colonialism. It does so by examining a few major theorizations of nationalism—constructivism, ethno-symbolism, and ethnonationalism—and suggesting that literary critics’ frequent adherence to the constructivism of Benedict Anderson can sometimes obscure the aforementioned dynamic. Finally, this article reads Laura Goodman Salverson’s The Viking Heart (1923) as a text that renders in all its contradiction the problem of ethnicity and nation in Canada, arguing that Salverson combines (but does not synthesize) the twin forces of ethnicity and liberal pluralism that make up the Euro-Canadian imagination’s split conception of the nation.     

Old wine in new bottles: civic nation‐building and ethnic nationalism in schooling in Piedmont,ca. 1700–1861

ABSTRACT. Gellner (1983 : 35) equates nationalism with ‘the organisation of human groups into large, centrally educated, culturally homogeneous units’. As the theorist of nationalism argues, and as recent and not so recent historical research shows, the modernisation of schooling is a defining moment in this process. The objective of this article is twofold: first, to show that during the Risorgimento schooling in Piedmont became nationalist; and second, to explain why that was the case. In doing so, it is argued that: (a) the modernisation of schooling reflected the rise of laissez faire liberalism, industrialisation and the enfranchisement of the middle class; and (b) the leadership of the Risorgimento revived pre‐modern ethnic symbols of patriotism to legitimate inequality and state formation under conditions of individualism.     

The fluidity of nationalistic and ethnic aspirations in Aceh

ABSTRACT. Peace negotiations between the Indonesian government and the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) have resulted in the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) ultimately ending a three‐decade‐long struggle for independence. Through a historical comparative analysis, this article explores the changing nature of Acehnese nationalism. It explores how Acehnese ethnicity and nationalism are constructed and how they have transformed over the decades in conflict with the Indonesian government. Acehnese ethnicity and nationalism, which are political in nature and ethnic in character, have ideologically shifted throughout time. Historical junctures and myths were utilised to legitimise these changing ideological goals. Despite the transformation of Acehnese nationalism and consequent changes in its ideological basis, a strong Acehnese identity still remains a constant.     

Religion,secularisation and nationalism in Quebec and the Basque Country: a comparative approach

This article analyses the relationship between religion, secularisation and nationalism in Quebec and the Basque Country using a comparative approach. I will first outline the ethnic‐religious origin of these nationalist movements. Second, I will examine the extent to which the ‘new’ secular and violent nationalism (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna and Front de Libération du Québec) that emerged in the 1960s was fuelled in its origin by a transfer of sacrality. Third, I will address an aspect that has led some theorists to view religion and nationalism as analogous phenomena, in which nationalism is construed as a religion of blood sacrifice. Fourth, I will examine another aspect that leads to this view of religion and nationalism as analogous phenomena, as the latter also provides a framework of transcendent meaning through an imaginary of continuity between the different generations. The article concludes with a series of general considerations on the relations between nationalism, secularisation and religion.     

Varieties of nationalism in the political discourses of Habsburg Austria

Nationalism in the Habsburg Empire is traditionally viewed through an ethnic lens. Despite a growing literature on ‘national indifference’ that studies nationalism in Habsburg central Europe from a constructivist perspective and advances our knowledge concerning variations in national identifications, the nationalism implied in these works remains largely limited to an exclusionary ethnic type. This reductionist view of central European nationalism mirrors the traditional dichotomy of ethnic ‘Eastern’ versus civic ‘Western’ nationalism. In order to avoid this reduction, this article approaches nationalism as a thin-centred ideology and explores varieties of nationalism in Habsburg Austria during the long 19th century. Although certain ideational paths made ethno-nationalism appear, retrospectively, as a quasi-natural feature of central Europe, the findings show that there developed rival discursive traditions of nationalism and competing representations of nation.     

East and West in Jewish nationalism: conflicting types in the Zionist vision?

ABSTRACT. This article analyses the ethnic and civic components of the early Zionist movement. The debate over whether Zionism was an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement or a Western‐civic movement began with the birth of Zionism. The article also investigates the conflict that broke out in 1902 surrounding the publication of Herzl's utopian vision, Altneuland. Ahad Ha'am, a leader of Hibbat Zion and ‘Eastern’ cultural Zionism, sharply attacked Herzl's ‘Western’ political Zionism, which he considered to be disconnected from the cultural foundations of historical Judaism. Instead, Ahad Ha'am supported the Eastern Zionist utopia of Elchanan Leib Lewinsky. Hans Kohn, a leading researcher of nationalism, distinguished between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ nationalist movements. He argued that Herzl's political heritage led the Zionist movement to become an Eastern‐ethnic nationalist movement. The debate over the character of Jewish nationalism – ethnic or civic – continues to engage researchers and remains a topic of public debate in Israel even today. As this article demonstrates, the debate between ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Zionism has its foundations in the origins of the Zionist movement. A close look at the vision held by both groups challenges Kohn's dichotomy as well as his understanding of the Zionist movement.