The politics of recognition: symbols,nation building and rival nationalisms

ABSTRACT. Ceremonial initiatives linked to nation‐building projects are highly visible in multiethnic states, where governments seem to have adopted a Durkheimian approach in which ceremonies contribute to the strengthening of communities. However, national ceremonies are not invented or exported to other nations easily, as seen when outlining the pattern of a successful national day. A unifying narrative (sometimes the historical genesis) is significant in the establishment of successful national days, as is the nature of the national day design. The celebrations of the constitution in Norway – and the 77 year struggle to get the Norwegian flag officially recognised – became part of resisting the enforced union with Sweden (1814–1905). Therefore, the growth of Norwegian nationalism must be understood in the context of rival nationalisms in Scandinavia. However, Constitution Day (17 May) has remained a powerful component of Norwegian nationalism long since the constitution ceased to be threatened because of its incorporation in primary and secondary school curricula and, more recently, within the debate on multiculturalism.     

The Norwegian 9/11: In the Church Without a Bible

The article identifies roles and conditions for the Bible within modern politics in the West. By comparing the official Norwegian response to the terror attack in Oslo July 22, 2011, with the similar response in the US on September 11, 2001, it is explained why the Bible is nearly absent in the official discourse of Norwegian Prime Ministers. While religion resurfaced in the process of national recuperation with the Cathedral of Oslo as a center for mass ritualization and national grief, the biblical legacy played no part in the Prime Minister's speech. The primary political leader of the Norwegian state has rarely bolstered his argument with the Bible, although this state has officially adhered to a Protestant confession from its Constitution in 1814. The Liberal Bible that appears to be operative in US presidential discourse is not playing a major role on a comparable political level in Norway.     

Legislating love: Norwegian family reunification law as a racial project

Love is often portrayed as helping us overcome racism and other forms of prejudice, yet this article argues that imperatives towards love and romance-based marriage in Norwegian family reunification law constitute a racial project. Through a detailed reading of the 2004 Green Paper on a new Immigration Act, and a particular focus on the use of immigration law to combat forced marriages evident there, the centrality of romantic love in constructions of national subjects is considered. These constructions are seen to render some groups of Norwegian citizens simultaneously invisible as national subjects and hyper-visible as objects of national management.     

Norwegian national day oratory: constructing and reconstructing a national we

National day speeches play an explicit part in defining national identities. In this article, we examine how mayors in Norwegian municipalities reflect on Norway's increased diversity in their 17 May speeches. National day speeches in Norway are supposed to focus on unity, not conflict. Yet, what have they become in the context of diversity? In applying theoretical perspectives on nations, rituals and language to data consisting of a selection of speeches, our analysis identifies themes that structure a typical 17 May speech. We explore the use of plural pronouns in the speeches and how they make Norwegian national identity more or less accessible for people with minority backgrounds. By including ethnic minorities in national day rhetoric, the speakers negotiate who belongs in the Norwegian community in a less directly political way than in everyday life. Yet, whilst the genre is celebratory, the national day speeches also echo different political attitudes towards diversity and integration.     

CONTESTED GROWTH: THE DEVELOPMENT OF NORWAY'S TEMPORARY STAFFING INDUSTRY

In this article we mobilize a variegated capitalism approach to understand the development of the Norwegian temporary staffing industry. From this perspective, national temporary staffing industries are understood as contested multi‐actor and multi‐scalar institutional fields. The analysis explores the key actors and regulatory conditions that have interactively produced this field in the Norwegian context since initial deregulation in 2000, paying particular attention to the active role played by agencies and their collective organizations. In our account, the tight regulatory conditions for temporary staffing in Norway emerge as the main mobilizing issue for the agencies, as well as other political actors such as trade unions. It is argued that the nature of national labour laws, and struggles thereon, are defining characteristics which set the Norwegian market apart from the neighbouring Swedish staffing market. The Norwegian case enables us to contribute to the wider economic geography literature on temporary staffing markets by demonstrating the fundamental importance of national regulatory processes and the contested political processes that underlie regulatory change. It also demonstrates how national distinctiveness is actively produced in relation to extra‐national dynamics in terms of both regulatory imperatives (e.g. via the EU's Temporary Workers Directive) and processes of migration. Overall, we demonstrate how national staffing markets are highly dynamic, multi‐scalar institutional configurations whose particularities and complexities defy attempts to generalize across groups of seemingly “similar” national economies.     

The Riksdag,the state bureaucracy and the administration of hospitals in eighteenth‐century Sweden

Traditionally, the Norwegian modernization process has been presented as a success story that focuses on how social movements and democratized political institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries laid the foundations for a society and culture with an emphasis on social equality. The paper offers an alternative analysis of this process, based not on the issue of material equality and inequality, but on the concepts of normality and deviance. A comparison of the development of the Norwegian national education policy since the middle of the 19th century with the Danish and Swedish experiences involves the exclusion of the dissimilar as a distinct feature of the Norwegian policy. ‘Disability’ was constructed as a category of deviance by public policies and administrative and professional practice. The professions – particularly teachers and doctors – were important actors who offered alternative conceptions of normality and disability. However, the constructions that they selected were those that were in closest dialogue with the particular challenges confronted by the Norwegian modernisation process: first the liberal, then the social democratic construction. Because the national conditions confronting the Scandinavian modernization processes differed from each other, so did the related constructions of disability.     

Ambivalent patriotism: Jacob Aall and Dano‐Norwegian identity before 1814

Abstract. Like many Norwegian elite, Jacob Aall (1773–1844) lived between two national identities – Norwegian and Danish. On the one hand, he was a subject of the Danish crown, educated in Denmark in the refinements of European knowledge and high culture; on the other he was a loyal provincial son of Norway, engaged in building the political and economic autonomy of his homeland. This article examines the two sides of national identity in Jacob Aall's life and work by focusing on the evolution in his understanding of the concept of the Norwegian nation. It argues that the patriotism central to Aall's understanding of modernity and the coming‐to‐age of Norway contains two disparate, but equally necessary sides. The one is characterised by an abiding sentiment of national romantic cultural belonging, the other is a learned commitment to the Enlightenment utilitarian principles that gave force to the Norwegian national movement.     

Drones: disembodied aerial warfare and the unarticulated threat

The Obama administration's controversial use of drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen has made the subject a hot topic of political and academic discourse. While most of this debate has focused so far on the legal, ethical and prudential use of large armed aerial vehicles, this article seeks to address the potential wider impact of this new technological innovation. The article argues that drones constitute a new and disruptive technology not just in the way that they have been used to enable a new form of counterterrorism. Instead, it argues that drones pose a new form of terrorist threat against the West which is at present under‐analysed, unarticulated and underestimated. Part of the reason for this underestimation is the failure to appreciate the scale and scope of drone use for commercial purposes which is about to unfold. Technological innovation now means that drones will be capable of many jobs currently performed by small planes and helicopters, but more cheaply and easily—in addition to many other new applications. The proliferation of this cheap and easily available technology will make its application for terrorist use easy to achieve and difficult to counter. The ability of drones to penetrate traditional defences and established conceptions of what constitutes a plausible threat is a challenge which so far has gone unheeded. This article seeks to challenge that complacency.     

Heart of darkness reinvented? A tale of ex‐soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article presents the contemporary case of two Norwegian ex‐soldiers sentenced to death for murder, espionage and mercenary activity in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It analyses the wider context of the historical roots of Norwegian engagement in the Congo (now DRC) as well as the mass‐mediated discourses centring around the tropes of a Conradian ‘Heart of darkness’. Further, using the insights of Johannes Fabian's seminal work on exploration, ethnography and representation (2000), it argues that contemporary Norwegian discourses on the Congo are steeped in the tradition of travelogues. Secondly, also drawing on Fabian, it argues that by representing the DRC as a topos ‐ a space without a place ‐ these discourses uncritically reproduce notions of decontextualised radical alterity.     

The roots of the global economic crisis (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The world economic crisis should be seen as an episode in the history of money. “National capitalism” was the main way of organizing money in the twentieth century and its symbol was national monopoly currency. This system has been unravelling since the US dollar de‐pegged from gold in 1971. The result is a disconnect between politics which are still largely national and the money circuit which is decentralized and global. The work of Georg Simmel and Karl Polanyi is enrolled to explain this development which entails the loss of money's physical substance, a shift in the social institutions supporting it and a break‐up of the forms and functions of “all‐purpose money”. The euro crisis reveals the historical mistake of treating market economy as a driver of society and politics. Good intentions at this stage will not reverse what has become a Greek tragedy in more senses than one.     

Cadence,war and security

An increased incidence of attack has been identified as a major characteristic of the new threat posed by terrorist groups such as al Qaeda. This article considers what such a change means for Western national security systems by examining how different parts of the system change over time. It becomes evident that Western national security systems are structured on an assumption of comparatively slow state-based threats. In contrast, terrorist franchises operate at a faster pace, are more 'lightweight' and can adapt within the operational and capability cycles of Western governments. Neither network-centric warfare nor an improved assessment of the threat, called for by some, offers a panacea in this regard. Rather, it is clear that not only do Western governments need to adjust their operational and capability cycles, but that they also need a greater diversity of responses to increase overall national security resilience and offer more tools for policy-makers.     

The causes and consequences of Beslan: A commentary on Gerard Toal's placing blame: Making sense of Beslan

Gerard Toal has written a very important work placing the terrorist attack in Beslan into a geopolitical context. Toal's analysis emphasizes two themes, the need to place Beslan in a political context and the parallels between the Russian government's reaction to the attack and the Bush administration's reaction to the September 11 attacks. In this response, I seek to make these two themes more explicit and also to focus on one area that is somewhat neglected in Toal's analysis: namely, the factors that made the terrorist attack in Beslan possible. In doing so, I turn away from focusing exclusively on geopolitics by bringing in some of the socio-economic and ideological factors that made the North Caucasus ripe for the explosion of terrorist attacks that occurred in the first half of this decade. I also show how changes in government policies eventually brought about the decline of large-scale terrorist attacks in the region. In doing so, I hope to make the point that any analysis of a spectacular terrorist attack such as Beslan has to take into account not just geopolitics, but also the socio-economic conditions that made it possible and the government policies that allowed it to happen.     

‘To Women in the Year 2000’: Norwegian Historians of Women,c.1900–c.1960

The lives and writings of three women who during the first half of the twentieth century wrote books on women's history are the subject of this article. Ragna Nielsen, a teacher and an amateur historian, in 1904 published her account of women's lives during the first part of the nineteenth century, stressing the sad consequences of patriarchal attitudes, but also the importance of women's contribution to the maintenance of a national identity. Anna Caspari Agerholt and Mimi Sverdrup Lunden, both with masters' degrees in history, belonged to the next generation. Agerholt is mainly remembered for her impressive book of 1927 on the Norwegian women's movement, while Lunden's books of 1942 and 1948 on women's work were important contributions to social history. The writings of these three women's historians are related to dominant positions within Norwegian historiography of their times, highlighting how they helped change central concepts by adding gender to class analysis and to the process of constructing a national identity, stressing the importance of voluntary organisations to the formation of politics and widening the concept of work.     

‘The enemy is at the gate’:1 Russia after Beslan

This article examines the changes that have taken place in Russian domestic and foreign policy after the Beslan hostage crisis of early September 2004. The terrorist attack has had two immediate effects in Moscow: it shook new convictions about the apparent consolidation of Russia and it reinforced old beliefs in the need to strengthen the Russian state. In order to analyse recent changes, the article discusses the policy framework put in place during Putin's first term to strengthen the state and to build a more favourable external environment. Putin's response since the Beslan attack is founded on the premise that the only effective response to the terrorist threat is to reinforce the 'organism' of the state to withstand further attacks and to manage their consequences. The article examines the limits of the policy framework in place since 2000, where a circular logic is at work, in which terrorist attacks produce greater efforts by the government to strengthen the state but with measures that do little to prevent further attack, which, in turn, stimulate a further securitization of policy. The terrorist attack at Beslan has accelerated this logic, which sits uneasily with Putin's twin vision since 2000 of domestic modernization to revitalize the country and external engagement to create a predictable external setting.     

‘The disappeared’: Power over the dead in the aftermath of 9/11 (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article tells the story of how the remains of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center have been mistreated and misused over the past 10 years. The article focuses on the experiences of some of the victims' families as they have sought to recover human remains dumped in the Fresh Kills landfill and to engage with officials about plans to house unidentified remains in a museum complex. The story reveals the institutional violence of a process in which human remains are devalued and subject to continual control by both state authorities and a private museum, a process that has turned victims into victims yet again. This second victimization lies in the gap between the shared heritage of that tragic September day and the individual rights of American citizens to care for their kin.     

The morality police are coming! Muslims in Norway's media discourses (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In early 2010, a series of reports appeared in the influential liberal‐conservative Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten drawing attention to what appeared to reporters to be a self‐appointed, de facto Muslim ‘morality police’ attempting to use harassment to exert social control over non‐hijab‐wearing women of immigrant background and gay men in the district of Grønland in the inner city of Oslo. What came to be known in Norway as the ‘morality‐police debate’ demonstrated the extent to which the figure of the Muslim male as an embodied threat to Norway's presumed relative gender equality and lack of homophobia had come to be embedded in the country's media and political discourse. This article suggests that the debate can tell us much about why certain tropes central to Norway's anti‐Muslim discourses have gained such currency across the Norwegian political board in recent years.     

The Anansi position (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

At least since the left‐wing critique of positivism and the radical student movement some decades ago, it has been a fairly widespread view that anthropology and the other social sciences should be engaged. Habermas even wrote, in 1968, that the social sciences have an intrinsic ‘emancipatory knowledge interest’. This article is sympathetic to this view, but argues that an engaged anthropology is at its most efficacious when it refuses to take part in a polarized discourse with fixed positions. Instead, anthropological interventions in the broader public sphere should take on the role of Anansi, the trickster of West African folklore, whose unpredictable and surprising moves enable him to confound and defeat far more powerful adversaries. Using examples largely from the Norwegian public sphere, where anthropologists are visible and active, it is shown how anthropology can simultaneously be both destabilizing, subversive, critical and liberating, precisely when the anthropologist takes on the liminal trickster role; neither fully inside nor fully outside.     

Identifying heritage values in local communities

Preservation of cultural heritage is often carried out by voluntary workers in local communities, especially when the objects are not of major national interest, not listed, and not preserved by heritage authorities. The motivation for local preservation, and for spending time and money on objects belonging to the community, is not primarily to preserve cultural heritage objects for the future, but to establish and maintain common social institutions in the local society, institutions of vital importance to the local identity. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the local understanding of heritage relates to its official understanding in a Norwegian context. The paper will also examine to what degree the Norwegian heritage authorities have managed to implement the emphasis on local participation and the social dimensions of heritage, given strong articulation in later international conventions. Criteria for value assessment, as defined by national heritage authorities, do not seem to play a vital role in the local heritage field. The central authorities’ focus on professionalism, qualified management, and predefined criteria appears to meet limited resonance in local communities.     

Grassroot responses to the Tohoku earthquake of 11 March 2011: Overcoming the dichotomy between victim and helper (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article examines the response of a large Buddhist organization, Soka Gakkai, to the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of March 2011. While this response was significant, it has not been reported in Japanese national news. An important question that is emerging for development agencies and academics as they look back over the response to the crisis, is how people possibly survived for the first few days and months, given that government aid did not reach some people for up to two months. This article highlights one significant early response and points to the problem of how to overcome the victim/helper dualism which is rooted in much failing NGO aid and development projects.     

Kinned to be Norwegian: transnational adoptees' positioning in relation to whiteness and the negotiation of nationhood

Embedded in ongoing discussions on everyday nationhood in the context of migration‐related diversity, this article explores how Norwegian transnational adoptees, as border subjects, negotiate their national belonging and identities by positioning themselves in relation to whiteness. By doing so, it further explores the relationship between race and nation. The analysis demonstrates that transnational adoptees position themselves as white when encountering the norm of whiteness, which the author argues in favour of understanding as continued process of doing race. While phenotypic differences trigger a process of racialisation through which transnational adoptees can easily be placed in a minoritised position, adoption provides them with unique access to whiteness, mostly along the negotiable and intertwined dimensions of kinship and the notion of ‘origin’, referred to as the place where they grew up. The article argues that individuals' positioning along majoritisation/minoritisation processes is another important dimension to understand one's multiple and fluid national identity and belonging in migration‐related diversity. The analysis also furthers the discussions on hierarchy of belonging by highlighting the relevance of kinship in intersection with race.