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.     

Religion and ethno‐nationalism: Turkey's Kurdish issue

One approach within the Islamic camp treats Islam, which emphasizes overarching notions such as the ‘Islamic brotherhood’ and ‘ummah’, as incompatible with ethno‐nationalist ideas and movements. It is, however, striking that in the last decades, several Islamic and conservative groups in Turkey have paid increasing attention to the Kurdish issue, supporting their ethnic demands and sentiments. Even more striking, the leftist, secular Kurdish ethno‐nationalists have adopted a more welcoming attitude toward Islam. How can we explain such intriguing developments and shifts? Using original data derived from several elite interviews and a public opinion survey, this study shows that the struggle for Kurdish popular support and legitimacy has encouraged political elites from both camps to enrich their ideological toolbox by borrowing ideas and discourses from each other. Further, Turkish and Kurdish nationalists alike utilize Islamic discourses and ideas to legitimize their competing nationalist claims. Exploring such issues, the study also provides theoretical and policy implications.     

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.     

Ivoirian identity constructions: ethnicity and nationalism in the prelude to civil war

ABSTRACT. The recent and unresolved conflict in Côte d'Ivoire has received little attention in the English‐speaking world. Where it is discussed, the instrumentalist view of ethnic conflict predominates. This is a linear and structural argument. It examines how pre‐given ethnic groups gained political voice in clashes over control of economic resources, and were subsequently manipulated by political elites with personal agendas. This paper questions the coherence of group identity and instead emphasises the agency of individuals. It argues that the meaning of ethnic identity was transformed as social and economic grievances led to conflict between political groupings. This approach accords individual Ivoirians more responsibility for determining the boundaries of ethnic and nationalist exclusion, and for participating in the ensuing violent conflict.     

Jewish conditions,theories of nationalism: cartographical notes

Thinkers with Jewish backgrounds contributed powerfully to our understanding of nationalism. We examine the different Jewish conditions in East Central Europe and Russia at the end of the nineteenth and at the start of the twentieth century so as to map the theories of nationalism that resulted. Four such theories are identified, each illustrated with reference to particular thinkers.     

Sociology,Religion, and Historians Revisited: Towards an Historical Sociology of Religion

Abstract

Two great movie directors were both born in 1930. One of them, Jean-Luc Godard, revolutionized filmmaking during his 30s and declined in creativity thereafter. In contrast, Clint Eastwood did not direct his first movie until he had passed the age of 40 and did not emerge as an important director until after he was 60. This dramatic difference in life cycles was not accidental, but was a characteristic example of a pattern that has been identified across the arts: Godard was a conceptual innovator who peaked early, whereas Eastwood was an experimental innovator who improved with experience. This article examines the goals, methods, and creative life cycles of Godard, Eastwood, and eight other directors who were the most important filmmakers of the second half of the twentieth century. Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen Spielberg, and François Truffaut join Godard in the category of conceptual young geniuses, while Woody Allen, Robert Altman, John Cassavetes, and Martin Scorsese are classed with Eastwood as experimental old masters. In an era in which conceptual innovators have dominated a number of artistic activities, the strong representation of experimental innovators among the greatest film directors is an interesting phenomenon.     

Explaining,and explaining with,economic nationalism

This article rejects the widely held view that economic nationalism is an anachronistic economic doctrine in the age of globalisation. Rather than being the opposite of economic liberalism, as the conventional view maintains, economic nationalism is better understood as a generic phenomenon that can accommodate almost any doctrinal content, including economic liberalism. Economic nationalism is not so much about the economy as it is about the nation, as illustrated by literature on economic nations and national economic cultures. Such a broader conception of economic nationalism is then placed in the context of a larger ‘nationalising mechanism’ that sheds new light on a variety of phenomena discussed in the globalisation debate, such as economic performance, state disintegration, or cultural conflict, and success or failure in post-communist systemic change.     

Historic preservation in Nazi Germany: place, memory, and nationalism

While numerous studies have examined the post-war contestation surrounding commemorative sites associated with the legacy of Nazi Germany, relatively little attention has been dedicated to the ways in which the Nazi regime itself sought to create places of memory congruent with the movement's political and cultural goals. Indeed, party leaders sponsored a variety of disparate, and at times contradictory, programs to re-orientate some of Germany's most prominent historic places to better serve the needs of the regime. To expand our understanding of this process, this article examines the practice and rhetoric of historic preservation in Bavaria during the Nazi period with a focus on the preservationist program sponsored by Bavarian President Ludwig Siebert. Nazi propaganda promised to rejuvenate and protect Germany's architectural heritage for the public good, but the regime's actual priorities and policies led to widespread confiscation, damage, and eventually destruction.     

Civil society,radicalism and the rediscovery of mythic nationalism

The article argues that contrary to the widely held view that traces the recent rise of illiberalism in Hungary and Eastern Europe to a weak civil society, the past decade has witnessed a surge of civil society activism. But rather than working exclusively towards strengthening and complementing liberal political institutions, civil society has also provided fertile soil to the spread of right‐wing populism, radicalism and xenophobia. The analysis suggests that civil society organisations have in fact played an important role in the right‐wing radicalisation of contemporary Hungarian politics. Conservative civic groups have been instrumental in reinvigorating the symbolic vocabulary of a mythic nationalism that was widespread at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth century as well as in the 1930s. The resurrection of nationalist, irredentist and anti‐Semitic symbols and paraphernalia (e.g. greater Hungary car stickers) has been a major vehicle for increasing the public visibility and political impact of these groups. The article shows through case studies of specific organisations how this seemingly anachronistic symbolic repertoire has found new resonance in contemporary Hungarian public life.     

Argentine territorial nationalism revisited: The Malvinas/Falklands dispute and geographies of everyday nationalism

This paper is concerned with expressions of Argentine territorial nationalism with a specific focus on the Malvinas/Falklands dispute. Billig’s (1995) notion of banal nationalism has been widely applied as a means to understanding the ways in which national identities are learnt and reproduced by the populace, through a multitude of ‘mundane’ representations. More recently Billig’s (1995) thesis has been critiqued (Jones & Merriman, 2009) for its rigidity and inability to take account of the different ways these nationalisms are produced and received (Müller, 2008) within and outside of the nation-state. We build on these interventions by arguing that research into territorial nationalism should not ignore the wider temporal, spatial, political and everyday contexts in which such discourses emerge and are consumed. To illustrate this diversity we contend that territorial nationalism and, more specifically, the attention placed on the Malvinas dispute by the Argentine government has varied in its intensity, depending on wider political events and agendas in the South West Atlantic and Latin American regions. Secondly, through the use of interview extracts from a pilot study conducted with 20 young people in Buenos Aires, we suggest that Argentine territorial nationalism is not received uniformly across the nation-state and, rather, should be explored in its everyday contexts. These contexts take into consideration things like respondent’s geographical location, personal/familial relationships and generation, amongst other variables, in order to more sensitively appreciate Argentine territorial nationalism’s multifarious reception.