Reconstructing the history of nationalist cognition and everyday nationhood from personal accounts

New approaches to nationalism have focused on the role of human agency within nation‐building structures (nationhood from below, everyday nationalism, experiences of nation, personal nationalism, etc.). However, the development of specific methodologies is still scarce. This paper proposes the use of personal accounts (mostly journals and autobiographies, but not only) as sources for qualitative historical research in nations and nationalism. Departing from the concepts of ‘identity’, ‘experience’ and ‘memory’, it is argued that, although very problematic, these sources are a valid path to the study of nations as they are: social phenomena of discursive nature and political frame, whose real agents are individuals. When these agents narrate their lives employing the nation as a meaningful category, they are not producing mere second‐hand reflections of superior and prior realms, but are performing microhistorical acts of nation‐making that are significant for understanding any case of nation‐building. The paper includes an empirical example using British personal accounts from the Age of Revolutions (c.1780–1840).     

Reconsidering nationalism and feminism: the Kurdish political movement in Turkey

Feminist scholars have documented with reference to multiple empirical contexts that feminist claims within nationalist movements are often side‐lined, constructed as ‘inauthentic’ and frequently discredited for imitating supposedly western notions of gender‐based equality. Despite these historical precedents, some feminist scholars have pointed to the positive aspects of nationalist movements, which frequently open up spaces for gender‐based claims. Our research is based on the recognition that we cannot discuss and evaluate the fraught relationship in the abstract but that we need to look at the specific historical and empirical contexts and articulations of nationalism and feminism. The specific case study we draw from is the relationship between the Kurdish women's movement and the wider Kurdish political movement in Turkey. We are exploring the ways that the Kurdish movement in Turkey has politicised Kurdish women's rights activists and examine how Kurdish women activists have reacted to patriarchal tendencies within the Kurdish movement.     

The antiquity of the nation? Critical reflections from the ancient Near East

Debates over the antiquity/modernity of the nation have often made use of evidence from the ancient Near East. In doing so, these debates employ the distant past principally as a ‘mirror’ of the present, using contrast or similitude to argue for a particular understanding of nations and nationalism since the eighteenth century. In this manner, both ‘Modernist’ and ‘Perennialist’ approaches incorporate pre‐modern contexts into the categories and priorities of modernity. This article critically reviews several influential studies on nations and nationalism in light of ancient Near Eastern evidence in order to highlight the narrowing of possibilities that this practice involves. I argue that the cost of this narrowing is not so much a misunderstood past as a mystified present.     

Switzerland as a ‘fractured nation’

ABSTRACT. This article deals with Swiss nationalism and Swiss nation‐building. Its main thesis is that Switzerland cannot accurately be described as either a nation or a non‐nation but is something in between, and could thus best be characterised as a ‘fractured’ nation. Switzerland has experienced some powerful nationalist moments, from the creation of the Swiss state in 1848 to the last few decades. Yet this recurrent nationalism among the Swiss, considered alongside their more traditional reluctance to consider themselves a nation, make Switzerland a peculiar object: a ‘fractured’ nation. This flawed process of nation‐building in turn reveals some basic characteristics of all nations – inherent artificiality, and the tremendous efforts undertaken to hide it. Switzerland could be considered an unfinished, incomplete nation, and this is precisely why its study can be interesting for scholars of nations and nationalism.     

Kurdish nationalists and non‐nationalist Kurdists: rethinking minority nationalism and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1909

ABSTRACT. Recent scholarship has begun to nuance the idea of Ottoman decline, but few works have attempted to see nationalism outside of the dominant decline paradigm. By addressing the emergence of Kurdish nationalism in the late Ottoman period, this paper questions the idea that imperial disintegration and nationalism were inherently intertwined; and challenges not only the mutually causal relationship that has been emphasised in literature to date, but also the shape that the ‘nationalist movement’ took. Using archival sources, the Kurdish‐Ottoman press, travel literature and secondary sources in various languages, the present paper will illustrate how the so‐called Kurdish nationalist movement' was actually several different movements, each with a differing vision of the political entity its participants hoped to create or protect through their activities. The idea of Kurdish nationalism, or Kurdism, may have been present in the minds of these activists, but the notion of what it meant was by no means uniform. Different groups imbued the concept with their own meanings and agendas. This study demonstrates that most ‘nationalists’ among the Kurds continued to envision themselves as members of the multi‐national Ottoman state, the temptingly powerful rise of nationalism in their day notwithstanding. The suggestion has important implications for students and scholars of nationalist movements among other non‐dominant groups, not only in the Ottoman Empire but in contemporaneous empires such as the Habsburg, and in later states like Iraq, Rwanda and Sudan. The present study further questions the received wisdom that multi‐ethnic entities are a recipe for disaster. It proposes that a joint effort to rethink what we know about minority nationalism may involve not only a reconceptualisation of the very terms we use, but perhaps an accompanying shift in approach too.     

Re-tribalization in the 21st century,part 1

This exploratory study presents ‘re-tribalization’ as a framework for comprehending contemporary global patterns and phenomena. It posits a link between the erosion of modernity's traits and a resurgence of tribal behaviour – the more elements that we associate with modernity diminish, the more we see the emergence of group formations akin to anthropological notions of tribes. This trend manifests not only in societies where tribal and lineage affiliations remain central to identity but also – perhaps more notably, considering modernity's promises – in developed nations, including global powerhouses like the USA, India and China. ‘Re-tribalization’ signifies a modern-day recourse to a so-called tribal past, fortifying intra-group cohesion and creating a distinction from other groups, thus delineating ‘us’ and ‘them’. This process highlights the drawing of boundaries between communities, positing that such delineations were more apparent in the past and need to be re-established to navigate today's challenges and crises. The study traces the historical lineage of re-tribalization appeals and their ties to nationalism, citing instances from Johann Gottfried Herder's works. This argument leverages the authors’ nearly two decades of ethnographic fieldwork, a collection of four studies and initial insights from their soon-to-be-published book.     

Nationalism and National Movements: Comparing the Past and the Present of Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract. This article compares the ‘new nationalism’ in post-communist countries since the 1980s with the ‘classical’ national movements o the nineteenth century. Looking for analogies and differences between these two processes, it seeks to achieve a better understanding and more profound interpretation of contemporary ‘nationalism’. Most important analogies are: both national movements emerged as a result of (and as an answer to) the crisis and disintegration of an old regime and its value system; in both cases we observe a low level of political experience among the population, the stereotype of a personalised nation, and of a defensive position. Similarly both movements define their national border by both ethnic and historical borders: in both cases, the nationally relevant conflict of interests plays a decisive role. Among the differences are: the extremely high level of social communication in the twentieth-century movements, combined with a ‘vacuum at the top’ (the need for new elites) and with deep economic depression. The ‘contemporary’ national movements fought for the political rights of undoubtedly pre-existing nations (above all, for full independence), while the ‘classical’ ones fought for the concept of a nation-to-be, whose existence was not generally accepted. Nevertheless, in both cases, similar specifics of the nation-forming process under conditions of a ‘small nation’ can be observed. The author does not view nationalism as a ‘disease’ or external force: but rather as an answer given by some members of the nation to new challenges and unexpected conflicts of interests, which could be interpreted as national ones.     

Is ‘white nationalism’, nationalism?

Are ‘white nationalists’ really nationalists? This label is one that right-wing, white activists themselves have chosen, and as such, compels rigorous investigation to avoid simply adopting the preferred nomenclature of these activists and their ambitions. The nation and nationalism are concepts with rich scholarly histories, and this paper seeks to examine the discussion, activities and statements of so-called white nationalists in light of this literature. We argue through a three-fold concept of the nation—based on territoriality, population and symbolic and/or cultural content—that the vision of the political community and ambitions of these activists falls short of the standard of a nation and that their aspirations do not conform to what the literature lays out as nationalism. We argue, therefore, that using the language of ‘white nationalism’ to describe these groups obfuscates and sanitises their motives and lends undue legitimacy to their standing in public discourse.     

Fear,feminist geopolitics and the hot and banal

In this paper we bring together Billig’s notion of banal nationalism and recent feminist geopolitical examinations of fear in order to analyze two cases studies of fear among U.S. college students and U.S. soldiers experiencing sexual violence. Putting banal nationalism and feminist geopolitics into conversation, we argue, reveals both their compatibilities and important pathways for political geography and critical geopolitics to build on Billig’s work. In this regard, the paper makes three key contributions. First, we demonstrate how the insights and imperatives of banal nationalism intertwine in critical ways with the work of feminist geographers, as the banal is often rendered feminine and apolitical and as gender itself is often treated as banal despite its role in the reproduction of the nation. Second, we argue that the multi-scalar analytic of feminist geopolitics offers a valuable intervention into banal nationalism, as relational feminist approaches to binaries like intimate/global provide a useful model to account for hot and banal nationalism as a single, intertwining complex. Finally, through an analysis of fear in relation to sexual violence, the paper illustrates both the inseparability of banal and hot nationalism and how they are deeply gendered, as certain forms of deeply hot violence and fear are depoliticized through their banalization (e.g. sexual assault on college campuses), and as violence that is recognized as hot (e.g. war) is maintained through processes that are deemed banal (e.g. gender).     

Rehoboth Baster,Namibian or Namibian Baster? An analysis of national discourses in Rehoboth,Namibia*

Abstract. The point of departure of this article is a conception of nations as discursive constructions of ‘us’/‘here’ in relation to ‘them’/‘there’. The empirical analysis examines three national discourses in Rehoboth, Namibia: (1) a discourse on the ethnic Baster nation; (2) a discourse on the Namibian nation‐state and (3) a discourse on the nation‐state containing a variety of ethnic nations (‘the rainbow nation’). The first discourse is characterised by a primordial belief about Rehoboth Basters, their homeland and their ties to this homeland. This conception is challenged by the discourse on the Namibian nation‐state. Here, it is argued that ‘ethnic nations’ are the creation of colonialism; with Namibia's new independence, it is seen as necessary to tear down previous ‘ethnic nations’ and build up a new, united nation‐state. The rainbow discourse attempts to integrate the other two discourses through ideas about overlapping nations, where the boundaries that separate ‘us’/‘here’ from ‘them’/‘there’ overlap and are inclusive rather than exclusive.     

Empire‐nation: national and imperial discourses in England

When the states of England and Scotland combined in 1707, conditions were created whereby English nationalism could merge into British nationalism. With the expansion of empire, English nationalism was expressed through imperial‐national discourses allowing English nationalists to claim non‐English space when articulating what might be best understood as an Anglo‐British nationalism. Accordingly, such discourses largely ‘hid’ what one might now understand as ‘English nationalism’ within a ‘British’ discourse of empire. The case of England illustrates that imperial discourses can become intimately bound up with the ‘national’ discourse of the nations at the core of the imperial structures. Accordingly, it is here argued that imperial and national discourse are not necessarily opposed to each other, but are able to feed into each other, affecting the manner in which ideas of the nation and empire are conceived and articulated.     

‘Is imperialist nationalism an oxymoron?’*

According to Ernest Gellner's celebrated definition, nationalism is a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent. Based on this definition, Alexander Motyl has declared that ‘nationalism and imperialism are polar types’. Even so, dozens of books and articles have used the concept of ‘imperialist nationalism’ without any qualms. Is this just a matter of terminological confusion, or does it reflect a deeper disagreement on what the phenomenon of nationalism actually is? In the lecture, I discuss the concept of ‘imperialist nationalism’ as used in the standard literature and find that numerous historical actors take pride in being both nationalists and imperialists. I distinguish between overseas colonial empires and contiguous land‐based empires and demonstrate that in both cases, ‘imperialist nationalism’ can be found. In the latter case, nationalism can take the shape of either ‘nation‐building imperialism’, in which nationalists strive for cultural homogenisation throughout the state, or ‘ethnocratic imperialism’, in which the distinction between ‘the imperial nation’ and other national groups is retained. In overseas colonial empires, I find only ethnocratic imperialism. As a case study, I analyse how Russian nationalists have related to the fact that Russia has historically been an Empire.     

Post–national Spain? Post–Spanish Spain?

The term ‘post–nationalism’ has been proposed to designate the emergence of political bodies in the wake of economic globalisation. However, not only is the ‘post–national landscape’ strongly redolent of nationalism, but nations themselves continue to correlate with the political subject in ways that cannot be dismissed. In Spanish political debates the notion of ‘post–nationalism’ has been deployed along with the concept of ‘patriotism of the constitution’, vulgarising their original philosophical use. In this context both terms do ideological duty against the peripheral nationalities in an effort to relegitimise the centralised control of the state. In this article I ‘deconstruct’ the self–serving duality between ‘constitutionalists’ and ‘nationalists’ by showing that traditional state nationalism overlaps with the ‘constitutionalist’ position. Subsequently, I consider whether some form of Habermasian detachment of nation from state can be contemplated for Spain.     

Green,red, yellow and purple: gendering the Kurdish Question in south-east Turkey

This article discusses the role of women in the contemporary ethno-territorial struggle of Kurdish Question in Turkey. I argue that gendered development has become the primary terrain where Turkish and pro-Kurdish political groups articulate their nationalist interests. The Kürt Sorunu (Kurdish Question) – the enduring debate over the political status and rights of Turkey's Kurdish population – is Turkey's largest geopolitical challenge to date. In the last decade, Turkish government policy towards the predominantly Kurdish south-east region has shifted from military intervention to gendered and socio-economic development. Simultaneously, the popularity and growth of a formal pro-Kurdish political movement has given the campaign for Kurdish rights an institutionalized voice and stronger role in regional affairs. The primary work of both the Turkish national government and local pro-Kurdish municipality of late has focused on women. Drawing on historical analysis and participant observation of development activities, I describe the symbolic and physical role women play in the contemporary Kurdish Question. Geographically, this pointed focus on women marks a territorialization of political power upon gendered spaces of the home and neighbourhood. I describe this process of territorialization through an examination of education curriculum, neighbourhood mapping and nationalist landscapes.     

Borders and banknotes: the national perspective

Replacing a banknotes series is meaningful for politicians and the general public even today, while most transactions are executed through virtual means. The choice of images carried on banknotes represents the limits of the State's sovereign border and becomes a means of banal nationalism. Moreover, by utilising scopic regimes, the hegemony portrays the cultural and political borders: historical figures from the country's past on one side, and an imagined or physical border, expressed through the illustrations on the back. This paper addresses the latter and examines the case of the State of Israel. The analysis of sites and landscapes that appear on national banknotes can decipher the construction process of a ‘territorial identity’ which, along with struggles for maintaining identity, provides the basis of the nation‐state. Using Williams's typology of selective tradition, we argue that Israeli banknotes demonstrate a mixture of residual and new cultural content.     

When is a Nation not a Nation? The Crisis of American Nationality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract. The United States of America is conspicuous by its absence from most studies of nations and nationalism. The reasons for this omission are essentially twofold: America is a ‘nation of immigrants’, and therefore clearly lacks the ethnic homogeneity that sustains many modern European nations; more importantly, the focus, the core of the American nation has, since the late-nineteenth century, become obscured as American society has continued to diversify and expand. In those studies which do examine the American case, an over-concentration on the colonial and revolutionary periods has led both scholars of nationalism and historians of the United States to miss the most crucial period in the development of the American nation, the early to mid-nineteenth century. Evidence is offered here that this period witnessed an identifiable process of ‘nation building’. In order to demonstrate this, the period 1854 through 1856 has been isolated for particular attention, since those years witnessed the emergence of a new political party, the Republicans, whose ideology and rhetoric were aggressively national, yet whose appeal was essentially sectional.     

The Outbreak of Nationalism on Former Yugoslav Territory: A Historical Perspective on the Problem of Supranational Identity

Abstract. In the text some questions about the genesis of radical nationalism on the former Yugoslav territory are discussed. The author's main thesis is that what happened during the outburst of nationalism was an alteration in the status of national identification, particularly in its relation to ‘supranational’ Yugoslav identification; that is, the eruption of radical nationalism was the result of reorganisation within an identification matrix. This thesis is first clarified by a short historical survey of the status of national identification before the outburst of nationalism, and secondly by an analysis of the main changes in the identification matrix during the outbreak of nationalism. Additionally, some of the main characteristics of political socialisation in the Yugoslav socialist state (especially the function of the value ‘brotherhood and unity’), as well as the possibility for future non-conflictual relations between the nations of former socialist Yugoslavia are discussed.     

What is new and what is nationalist about Europe's new nationalism? Explaining the rise of the far right in Europe

Far‐right parties are on the rise across Europe. Their shared populist rhetoric, emphasis on sovereignty and policies that promote a ‘national preference’ has facilitated the term ‘the new nationalism’. According to an emerging consensus, this new nationalism is primarily a demand‐side phenomenon triggered by cultural grievances, i.e. a cultural backlash, driven by those on the wrong end of a new transnational cleavage. This explanation we argue tends to overlook important variations across countries and across time. As such, in this article, we contest the view that the ‘new nationalism’ is a linear and coherent phenomenon best understood as a cultural backlash. Specifically, our argument is threefold: (1) it is important to conceptually distinguish between populism, nationalism and the far right in order to draw meaningful conclusions about the extent to which this phenomenon is linear, coherent and comparable across cases; (2) voters' economic concerns remain pivotal within the context of the transnational cleavage, entailing that voting behaviour is structured by two dimensions of contestation; (3) the explanatory power of nationalism is in the supply, i.e. the ways in which parties use nationalism strategically in an attempt to broaden their appeal.     

Biblical beliefs in the shaping of modern nations

The ideology and culture of modern nations and nationalism have been profoundly influenced by two traditions that reach back into the ancient world, the biblical and the classical. Here, the focus is on the particular contribution of the Hebrew Bible to the political ideals of modern nationhood. Modern Western nations, unlike non‐Western and ancient nations, are distinguished by their quest for territorial integrity and sovereignty, citizenship, legal standardisation, cultural homogeneity and secular education, while modern nationalism is a pro‐active, ideological movement that seeks to ‘build’ autonomous, unified, distinctive and ‘authentic’ nations out of ethnic populations deemed by some members to constitute actual or potential ‘nations’. While modern European nations emerged out of the matrix of Christianity, as Adrian Hastings argued, it was the political model and ideals of community found in the Hebrew Bible, which Christianity adopted (while rejecting the Jews) and which the New Testament lacked, that so often provided the dynamic of modern nationalism and the values of modern Western nations. Chief among these were the Pentateuchal and prophetic narratives of Exodus, Covenant, Community of Law (Torah), the holiness of a ‘chosen people’, the messianic role of sacred kingship and the dream of fulfilment in the Promised Land. These ideals did not fully come into their own until the Reformation. In this period, state elites expressed growing national sentiments and biblical texts were being rendered into the vernacular, while a more rigorous biblical form of ‘covenantal nationalism’ emerged in early modern Netherlands, Scotland and England, taking the narrative of the deliverance of the Israelites as its starting point. In the eighteenth‐century Enlightenment, the novel cults of ‘Nature’, ‘Authenticity’ and ‘Human Perfectibility’ secured an opening for neo‐classical political ideas in the formation of nations. But it was the biblical ideals of liberation, Covenant, election and promised land that provided the basic model of the modern nation and nationalism in Europe, from the French Revolution, and German and East European nationalisms to the Hebraic Protestant nationalism of Victorian Britain. To a large extent, the modern age owes to the Jewish Bible its fundamental vision of a world divided into distinctive and sovereign territorial nations.     

How to gauge banal nationalism and national indifference in the past: proletarian tweets in Belgium's belle époque

Michael Billig's theory of banal nationalism involves the assumption that the absence of an explicit discourse on the nation should be interpreted as the unmindful presence of nationalism and that the mass media faithfully represent or reflect the discourses of ‘ordinary people’. Recent historical research of ‘national indifference’ in imperial Austria has inverted the correlation between the ubiquity of nationalist discourses and their impact in society. This article assesses these conflicting frameworks and refutes AD Smith's critique of everyday nationalism research as necessarily ahistorical and presentist. This case study of the rank‐and‐file of the social‐democratic Belgian Workers' Party at the close of the nineteenth century uses a unique source of working‐class voices: the so‐called ‘propaganda pence’ or ‘proletarian tweets’ from the Flemish‐speaking city of Ghent. Hot, explicit nationalism was absent from these sources, which begs the question: is this proof of banal nationalism or national indifference? A historically contextualized analysis of the absences shows that workers expressed national indifference towards Belgian, but not towards Flemish ethnicity. In Rogers Brubaker's terms: Flemish ethnicity was a relevant social category, but only in a very restricted number of social contexts could it become a basis for ‘groupness’ or political mobilisation in daily life.