New and old in the southern question

The southern question has been posed at the key moments in the history of the Italian state. Today we face a moment of comparable importance which urges that the southern question be re‐thought. It is not an unchanging question, yet it concerns issues fundamental to the state and has been treated by the country's greatest intellectuals as a national issue. The meridionalisti have been Italy's critical conscience yet, at the same time, stereotypes of a uniformly backward South have taken hold. The post‐war intervention in the Mezzogiorno should not be seen through such stereotypes as a wholly negative experience. Its successes and failures fit into an Italian pattern of state‐led modernization and it cannot be understood in isolation from the Italian state's weaknesses. Today, a new pact between the weakest and strongest sectors is essential. The South's economic and political leadership will be a central object of study if intellectuals are to help inform new policy.     

A transnational millet in the Jewish state: A Judeo-Spanish diaspora between Israel and Turkey, 1948–1958

Between 1948 and 1956, 36,302 Jews migrated from Turkey to Israel, forming the largest Turkish diaspora hub at that time. Drawing on the nine newspapers published by Turkish Jews in Israel in their vernacular, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), this article sheds light on the complex nature of the migrants' transnational affinity to the Turkish Republic and on how it coexisted with their Jewish nationalism. In addition to situating this development within the broader context of post-WWII Turkish transnationalism, we also delineate their unique historic status as ethnic Jewish communities or millet. Examining the post-Ottoman era, we show how they leveraged their political, commercial and leisure-related ties with Turkey—deemed more developed in those terms than Israel—to empower themselves as an ethnic community and to facilitate their integration into the Jewish state. In so doing, this study bridges some of the gaps in the analyses of Muslim and non-Muslim migrations, and it suggests that we rethink the languages used to explore Turkish transnationalism as well as its geographical borders and underlying characteristics.     

Language as an instrument of nationalism in Central Europe

This article presents a brief survey and analysis of the most intimate coupling of culture and national projects that occurred in Central Europe following the success of the Italian and German nation‐states established in this manner during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Language is the very ‘stuff’ of culture as well as the instrument of communicating and reaffirming cultural difference vis‐à‐vis other cultures. As such, language became central to the processes of nation‐ and nation‐state‐building in Central Europe, leading to politicisation of language and also of linguistics and philology, which were expected to fortify the nations and their nation‐states than rather to lend themselves to objective research. It is proposed that this specific Central European interweaving of language and national projects may be better comprehended through the application of Einar Haugen's model of language standardisation and Miroslav Hroch's model of nation‐building. These two models in the Central European case seem to be closely corresponding to each other. The short catalogue of language elements used to produce national differentiation closes this contribution.     

Les Fausses Confidences et “L'intendant de Qualité”

In Pierre Bourdieu's Les règles de l'art, Gustave Flaubert and Frédéric Moreau emerge as the ancestors of twentieth-century intellectuals, whose relative autonomy rests on a complex interplay of economic and political factors. What happens if one uses Bourdieu's discussion of L'éducation sentimentale as a model for analyzing an earlier pair of novels that also map out Parisian culture and society from the point of view of a young man who fails? Balzac's Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes offer a panorama of Parisian culture that, at least at first glance, bears a striking resemblance to the world of L'éducation sentimentale as seen through Bourdieu's lens.     

The Political Art of Patience: Adivasi Resistance in India

Abstract: This article documents the emergence of the Denotified Rights Action Group (DNG‐RAG), a national social movement orchestrated to assert the citizenship rights of adivasi (indigenous) populations in India. It assesses the movement's efforts to engage the central Indian government in meaningful dialogue to accommodate the inclusion of marginalized adivasis in the democratic politics of the nation. In doing so, the DNT‐RAG reasserts the primacy of the Indian state as the principal engine driving the project of nation building, and as such, the site that activists target to further an agenda of equitable development and democratic rights for those known as India's Denotified Tribes.     

Touching Like a State

This paper offers a theorization of how the state touches. Through an analysis of the extensive 2011 protests over Wisconsin Senate Bill 11, we interrogate the relatively non‐violent interactions between police and protesters during the 17‐day occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol building. On display there were diverse police deployments of “soft” force and haptic touching, technologies that enabled officers to subtly affect the movements and relations of protester crowds without resorting to familiar coercion‐ and consent‐based politics. We offer a pair of concepts, cathexis and l'esprit de l'escalier, to diagram how statist touches were mobilized to catch individuals unawares and momentarily co‐opt their bodily affects. These modes of control suggest much greater savvy regarding touch, force, and affect than is often granted in representations of the state apparatus. In light of this, we close with a reflection on the changing tactical grounds for struggle.     

Two bullocks,a ladder and a lamp: electoral symbols in Nehruvian India

There is a substantial body of literature on nation‐building that, from a variety of theoretical approaches, examines the role of symbolic constructs in the process of construction and consolidation of new nation‐states. Among these works, the dramatic and symbolic aspects of election and their function in the nation‐building project have been investigated by political scientists and anthropologists alike. However, analysis of electoral emblems as constitutive elements in the nation‐building process has been largely missing from most studies of nation‐building and official nationalism. A case study of postindependence India suggests how national belonging was also made to hinge upon on competent democratic participation of the masses in the political life of the country. Central to this process of identity work was the establishment of an independent Election Commission and of strict rules for the design, selection and allotment of election emblems. Conventional accounts have argued that these procedures were introduced primarily for the benefit of the uneducated masses who were suddenly invited to participate in India's democratic process. I argue against this simplistic interpretation. Far from being only tools for the simplification of electoral processes, India's election symbols were one of India's institutional mechanisms designed to nurture the development of a correct democratic conduct and therefore ultimately contributing to the Nehruvian national project.     

Negotiating hydro-scales,forging states: Comparison of the upper Tigris/Euphrates and Jordan River basins

In this comparative study of two water basins in the Middle East, we examine the hydro-political construction of scale as central to state and nation building, and their territorial consolidation. We argue that scalar negotiations and constructions of freshwater became central to the very consolidation of both Turkey and Israel. The examples we offer also illustrate the usefulness of a performative approach to scale, benefiting from but moving beyond a politics of scale approach. The comparative focus on hydro-scalar politics and performativities in relation to state and nation building offered a) lends to an enriched understanding of water politics in these two contested river basins, b) enables fuller understanding of how water becomes central to the processes by which nations, states, and territories are consolidated in this region, and c) contributes to recent debates in political geography by demonstrating the value of scalar and performative approaches. Underscoring these linkages, the analysis differs from many works on water in the Middle East, contributes to studies of state and nation building as contested processes, and avoids the assumption of state or national scales as ontological pre-givens.     

The Threefold Logic of Papua‐Melanesia: Constitution‐writing in the Margins of the Indonesian Nation‐State

Clashes over the status of West Papua and the political future of the territory proliferated markedly following the end of Indonesia's New Order regime in 1998. Amid a wide variety of demands for justice and independence, and a series of demonstrations, mass gatherings and prayers, only a few Papuans mused on how Papua could become a state and what would constitute its nature as being distinctly Papuan and/or Melanesian. One exception is the work put into the Constitution for West Papua entitled Basic Guidelines, State of West Papua, a document edited by Don A.L. Flassy, a bureaucrat, writer and thinker, with a preface by late Theys H. Eluay, then chairman of the Papuan Council. In this article I analyse this Constitution to show how a combination of Christianity and local customs, and a mimicry of elements of Indonesian nation building and symbols of the Indonesian nation‐state are reshaped to oppose Indonesian nation‐building agendas. The Constitution shows that when Papuans imagine an independent state, forms of vernacular legality play a central role. ‘The state’ has journeyed to Papua and encouraged faith in ‘the law,’ and Basic Guidelines is partly the effect of this growing vernacular legality. My analysis shows that it is essential to see how legal mobilisations and imaginations of the state articulate with other normative systems and practices – in particular Christianity and custom (adat) – and how they mutually allow for and invite strategies.     

The Corporeal Empire: Physical Education and Politicising Children's Bodies in Late Colonial Bengal

This article deploys children's bodies as an analytical lens to examine the political significance of knowledge production and childhood in British colonial projects in late colonial India. Scholars have theorised the ‘body as method’ of history to argue that bodies are imbued with meanings, become stakes in power struggles and are sites of knowledge and power. I examine this theme by investigating a key locus of knowledge production for children – the colonial school and its curriculum, specifically physical education. To underline the multi‐stranded processes and loci of colonial knowledge production, I examine nationalist pedagogies of two Bengali children's magazines (Amaar Desh and Mouchak) as a form of informal schooling. I argue that the colonial state's engagement with physical education in schools stemmed from anxieties to both discipline native children's bodies, and to discourage students’ ‘seditious’ political activism. Second, I demonstrate that for Bengali educated elites, children embodied a political space for contestation and undertaking their projects of re‐masculinising the youth. These nation‐building projects placed a premium on masculinity, influenced boy cultures to imitate adult male cultures, and inscribed gender roles on the bodies of Bengali boys and girls. By doing so, these colonial encounters restructured and redefined childhood in crucial ways.     

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

ABSTRACT. Discussions of globalisation and identity have focused on the renewed relevance of various post‐national frameworks of belonging, including the Muslim umma. This article argues against the idea that the umma has come to constitute a primary referent in contemporary Muslim debates about identity or a form of globalised political consciousness. Furthermore, the advent of ‘post‐Islamism’ means that Islamic political mobilisation rarely seeks to establish alternative political orders within the container of the nation‐state. However, this does not mean that we are seeing a reaffirmation of the nation in Muslim contexts today. Rather, transnational Muslim solidarities represent an intermediate space of affiliation and socio‐political mobilisation that exists alongside and in an ambivalent relationship with the nation‐state. I point to two different socio‐religious movements that, without positing the primacy or exclusivity of the umma/Islamic identity, express discrepant visions of the relationship between Islam and the nation: (1) the Fethullah Gülen movement, which serves simultaneously as the vehicle for a particular vision of neo‐Ottoman Turkish nationalism and a critique of the Kemalist national order; and (2) the neo‐Salafist movement, read here as an effort to embed conceptions of public morality and accountability within the discursive tradition of orthodox Islam rather than the institutional framework of modern polity.     

Nationalism,diaspora and ‘civilisational mission’: the case of Syrian nationalism in Latin America between World War I and World War II

Abstract. The notion of ‘civilisational mission’ (risala hadariyya) is a core concept of nationalism, particularly of Arab and Syrian nationalism. Its importance lies in the ability to bring three aspects of nationalist thought into one pattern of meaning: the projected modernisation of the nation, the nation's quest for recognition and equal participation in the international arena, and the claim to political leadership of the rising educated middle class. In the Syrian diaspora during the interwar period, the notion was additionally shaped by the refutation of the neo‐colonial aspirations of the mandate powers (mission civilisatrice) as well as by the interaction between the diaspora community and the host society. This article analyses this concept in its discursive context focusing on Dr Khalil and Antun Sa‘adeh, who were both eminent intellectuals, party founders and editors of several diasporic newspapers and magazines in Argentina and Brazil.     

The wartime Slovak state: a case study in the relationship between ethnic nationalism and authoritarian patterns of governance

This is a case study of the clerical‐nationalist Slovak state established under Nazi protection during World War II. As the only example of Slovak political independence prior to the break‐up of Czechoslovakia in 1993, nationalist interpretations of its legacy have helped shape the Slovak discourse on post‐communist state‐ and nation‐building. To explore the impact of the Slovak state on the development of Slovak nationalism, this article examines how the ideology of the Slovak state structured the relationship between the individual, state and nation; the roots of the regime's ideology; and the ramifications of this ideology for governance during the period of statehood. Through this exploration, I hope both to contribute to a fuller understanding of the relationship between ethnic nationalism and authoritarian patterns of governance and to lay the groundwork for further study of the sources of post‐communist Slovak political culture.     

Between nation and state: `fractured' regionalism among Palestinian-Arabs in Israel

Theories of nationalism have often overlooked variations in ethnic spatial settings, and have too easily subsumed nation and state. But nationalism surfaces in a variety of dynamic forms, such as among homeland ethnic minorities `trapped' within states controlled by others. In such cases `ethnoregional' identities often emerge, combining ethnonational and civic bases of identity with attachment and confinement to specific places or territories. Ethnoregional movements denote spatial and political entities which mobilise for rights, resources and political restructuring within their states. This is the case in the Israeli Jewish `ethnocracy', where an oppressed Palestinian-Arab minority resides in stable but confined enclaves which make up an Arab `fractured' region. The spatial, socioeconomic and political characteristics of the Arab struggle in Israel provide early signs for the emergence of an ethnoregional movement. This movement is creating a new collective identity, situated between Palestinian nation and Jewish nation-state. The ethnoregional interpretation challenges existing accounts which perceive the minority as either politicising or radicalising, and points to a likely Arab struggle for autonomy, equality and the de-Zionisation of Israel. Arab mobilisation also resembles other ethno-regional movements, whose persistent struggles expose embedded contradictions in the global `nation-state' order.     

The 2010 independence jubilees: the politics and aesthetics of national commemoration in Africa

In 2010, as many as seventeen African states celebrated their independence jubilees. The debates surrounding the organisation of these celebrations, and the imagery and performances they employed, reflect the fault lines with which African nation‐building has to contend, such as competing political orientations as well as religious, regional and ethnic diversity. The celebrations represented constitutive and cathartic moments of nation‐building, aiming to enhance citizens' emotional attachments to the country and inviting to remember, re‐enact and re‐redefine national history. They became a forum of debate about what should constitute the norms and values that make‐up national identity and, in the interstices of official ceremonies, provided space for the articulation of new demands for public recognition. A study of the independence celebrations thus allows us to explore contested processes of nation‐building and images of nationhood and to study the role of ritual and performance in the (re)production of nations.     

Coping with deviance: Swiss nationhood in the long nineteenth century

ABSTRACT. This article highlights two processes that shaped Swiss nationhood in the long nineteenth century. The first concerns the competition between different nation‐states and the nationalist visions these contests engendered. In a Europe dominated by the norm of the culturally and ethnically homogenous nation, the Swiss authorities, public intellectuals and various political representatives were desperate to display an image of national authenticity to the outside world. The result was a nationalism that combined voluntaristic and organic elements. In the second and main part of this article, the focus turns on citizenship; it is conceived not only as a social and legal institution, but also as a cognitive prism through which people defined their membership in the national community. Remarkably, the authority in granting national citizenship to foreign nationals remained firmly in the hands of the cantons and, above all, the Swiss municipalities. In practical terms, this meant that the Gemeinde provided the institutional and cognitive frame through which nationhood was primarily experienced, imagined and defined. While Switzerland represents a particularly strong case of a communalist polity, it should not be treated as unique. Instead, it should alert us to a potentially fertile yet little‐explored area of research: what might be called the communal embededdness of the national(ist) imagination.     

A Swiss anomaly? A relational account of national boundary‐making

ABSTRACT. This article reviews how major theorists of nationalism – from Ernest Renan to Benedict Anderson – have tried to come to grips with the puzzle that Swiss nationalism and the Swiss state present in view of the monoethnic states that surround it. I will argue that this puzzle disappears when assuming a political sociology perspective that highlights the networks of political alliances underlying nationalist movements and the power structure of recently formed nation‐states. Studying an ‘outlier’ case such as Switzerland helps us to gain insight into the general processes and mechanisms at work in the rise of nationalism and the nation‐state.     

Liminal condition as constant situation,the Israeli Jerusalem municipality, 1948-1955

The capital city is the place where political entities are represented in national space. This space acts as a mediating force between society, the nation, and the outside world, and it is very important for the development of a system of visual national symbols. The political leaders, national and local, are those who shape the capital city. Therefore, examining the relationship between municipal and national political systems in Jerusalem sheds light not only on local history but on national developments and the perception of Jerusalem as the capital in the national psyche. The years 1948-1955 were a very chaotic time in the annals of Jerusalem, Jerusalem became a city divided between Israel and Jordan in a semi-state of war that turned permanent despite the armistice agreements. Israel’s national leaders remained ambivalent about Jerusalem as capital city despite the rhetoric of figures from across the political spectrum. Their ambivalent attitude influenced the relationship with the Jerusalem Municipality. The article addresses the subject of the relations between the national government and the municipal political coalition in Jerusalem from 1948 to 1955.     

Exhibiting Cultures: Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum

Museums occupy many roles which are influenced by wider circumstances and changing conditions. This study deals with the case of Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and the manner in which it is used to promote nation building in a multi‐ethnic and relatively newly independent state. In addition, it serves a political purpose and acts as an economic resource. The Asian Civilisations Museum illustrates some of the recent trends affecting the museum sector as a whole and also the particular challenges facing such institutions in a country like Singapore with its many distinctive qualities.