Liberalism and nationalism in Russia. Boris Chicherin as a modernist nationalist

This article investigates the link between nationalism and liberalism in Russia by looking at the way the leading spokesman of early Russian liberalism, Boris Chicherin, combined liberal ideas with notions of nation‐building and the idea of the nation as a modernising phenomenon. The article argues that the young Chicherin, at least in the formative years of the 1850s, had an instrumental approach to liberalism. Liberalism served a specific purpose – to integrate the people and shape a community of active citizens so that Russia could modernise. Chicherin was concerned with the formation of a modern nation‐state rather than the establishment of popular rule or political rights. In this sense, his thinking fits well into what, in the context of the Ottoman Empire, has been called modernist nationalism.     

Intellectuals,nationalism, and the arts

In this article we argue that the role of intellectuals was essential (1) in the formation of Finnish cultural policy and (2) for the development of national cultural administration and public arts subsidy system in the country in the period leading up to the Second World War. The actions of the intellectuals can be considered as political choices in a contingent socio‐political realm, and arts as an essential part of the signifying system. In Finland, intellectuals remained active in the intertwining areas between the state and civil society. We highlight the impact of their actions especially through a study of archival materials obtained from the State Arts Boards. At these Boards, the intellectuals served as representatives of their own fields of arts in general, and of certain professional and civic associations and societies in particular. These intellectuals acted in various roles depending on the subject matter at hand, and as a result the decisions made by the boards reflected predominantly the interests of some groups over those of others.     

Security,ethnicity, nationalism

Using Slavic examples, the article looks at the nationalism/security nexus present today between the birth of ethnicities (early middle ages) and the birth of nationalism (eighteenth century). I discuss how Slavic ethnicity emerged in Greek and Roman security thinking. Others were classified in terms of ethnoi and were then interpellated into this self‐understanding. If ethnicity is an identity for the Other, then nationalism is an identity for the Self. It becomes a security concern not to order the Other polity's identity, as did the Byzantines, but to see to it that groups that may threaten your own nationalism – minorities, imperial subjects – cannot embrace nationalism. The policy of denying nationhood to minorities must be understood amongst other things as security policy. The organic understanding of the nation as young and vital demonstrates a third interstice between security and nationalism. If the young and vital nation is to grow and expand at the expense of the old and tired, then the polity that represents itself as a young and vital nation is by dint of that representation alone a security threat against those that they represent as old and tired. Finally, I discuss how this theme is played out in today's Russia     

Romanticism,music, nationalism

In manifold ways, the stylistic and performative features and evolving genre conventions of nineteenth‐century ‘classical’ music reflect the increasing grip of nationalism on cultural attitudes in Europe. Conversely, music could become an important medium for the expression and dissemination of nationalist ideals. A cross‐national, European‐wide survey of this interpenetration between musical and ideological developments is applied towards a tentative typological outline of ‘musical nationalism’.     

Hobbes,Liberalism, and Political Technique

Hobbes is commonly treated as a foundational figure for liberalism. This familiar view relies on emphasizing his account of the relationship between rights bearing individuals and state power. By contrast, this essay centers the practical question of how to govern, and develops this perspective to both question Hobbes's supposed liberalism and to demonstrate the utility of construing liberalism as more than a set of philosophical arguments regarding subject-state relations. In particular, understanding liberalism in terms of political technique offers a new perspective on the relationship between liberalism and republicanism.     

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,the state and nationalism in Britain

The paper discusses the relationship between the state, historic buildings preservation and nationalism in Britain from the nineteenth century to the present. It argues against the idea that, because of comparatively continuous nation and state formation, state preservation in Britain until the mid twentieth was exceptionally weak. By suggesting a broader understanding of ‘the state’, the paper shows the variety of ways in which institutions within the state were, and remain, involved. Through spotlights on major turning points in the administrative framework, it further argues that nationalism has been more often mobilized to foster state preservation than the other way round and suggests to place nationalism alongside other motive forces to understand the rise and transformation of state involvement in preservation.     

Complexity and nationalism

Classic theories of nationalism, whether modernist or ethnosymbolist, emphasise the role of elites and spread of a common imagined community from centre to periphery. Recent work across a range of disciplines challenges this account by stressing the role of horizontal, peer-to-peer, dynamics alongside top-down flows. Complexity theory, which has recently been applied to the social sciences, expands our understanding of horizontal national dynamics. It draws together contemporary critiques, suggesting that researchers focus on the network properties of nations and nationalism. It stresses that order may emerge from chaos; hence, ‘national’ behaviour may appear without an imagined community. Treating nations like complex systems whose form emerges from below should focus research on four central aspects of complexity: emergence, feedback loops, tipping points and distributed knowledge, or ‘the wisdom of crowds’. This illuminates how national identity can be reproduced by popular activities rather than the state; why nationalist ideas may gestate in small circles for long periods, then suddenly spread; why secession is often contagious; and why wide local variation in the content of national identity strengthens rather than weakens the nation's power to mobilise.     

Liberalism,sociability, and object relations theory

This article argues that the notions developed by post-Kleinian object relations psychoanalysis are continuous with a certain British political tradition. British object relations authors think that the healthy personality necessitates a social-democratic political environment. Their ideas follow both historically and logically upon a set of notions about human development that resemble those held by advanced liberals and social democrats since the nineteenth century. Social democracy and advanced liberalism perceive sociability and community as goods that complement traditional liberals’ respect for autonomy and individual difference. Much of this outlook evolved from an earlier preoccupation with the exclusive discretion of already-existing individuals over portions of their lives. This concern has been gradually transformed into an interest in enhancing the conditions under which the autonomous personality may form.     

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.     

Constitution‐writing,nationalism and the Turkish experience

Until recently there has been relatively little attention paid to the question of how the relationship between the state, its citizens and the nation is articulated in constitutional texts. This paper seeks to address this gap through an examination of how the rules of belonging to the nation are discussed by the political elite and how these discussions find their final formulation in the constitutional texts. The analysis focuses on the Turkish case at two constitution‐writing moments (1924 and 1961). While such moments have conventionally been assumed to be ‘revolutionary’, the data on Turkey highlights continuities rather than radical changes over time. More particularly, it underscores the resilience and salience of the principle of nationalism over time.     

Populism and nationalism

Few social science categories have been more heatedly contested in recent years than ‘populism’. One focus of debate concerns the relation between populism and nationalism. Criticising the tendency to conflate populism and nationalism, De Cleen and Stavrakakis argue for a sharp conceptual distinction between the two. They situate populist discourse on a vertical, and nationalist discourse on a horizontal axis. I argue that this strict conceptual separation cannot capture the productive ambiguity of populist appeals to ‘the people’, evoking at once plebs, sovereign demos and bounded community. The frame of reference for populist discourse is most fruitfully understood as a two‐dimensional space, at once a space of inequality and a space of difference. Vertical opposition to those on top (and often those on the bottom) and horizontal opposition to those outside are tightly interwoven, generally in such a way that economic, political and cultural elites are represented as being ‘outside’ as well as ‘on top’. The ambiguity and two‐dimensionality of appeals to ‘the people’ do not result from the conflation of populism and nationalism; they are a constitutive feature of populism itself, a practical resource that can be exploited in constructing political identities and defining lines of political opposition and conflict.     

Captain Canuck,audience response,and the project of Canadian nationalism

This paper addresses the role of comic books in interpellating national identities, locating the process of national identity formation in the interplay between popular culture producers and their audiences as described by Althusser (1977 Althusser, L. 1977. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, London: New Left Books.  [Google Scholar]) and McGee (1975 McGee, M. 1975. In search of ‘the people’: a rhetorical alternative. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 61: 235–249. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). The empirical section of this paper focuses on Captain Canuck, a Canadian-produced comic book originating in the 1970s and sporadically published through the present day. The authors engaged in a qualitative content analysis of the Captain Canuck comic books, searching for themes and markers of Canadian-ness and looking for audience identifications with those themes and markers in the ‘letter to the editor’ columns published within the comic books themselves. The study finds that through the many incarnations of Captain Canuck various versions of Canadian identity have been projected, with varying degrees of support by the readership. The role of the USA in Canadian identity formation looms large, especially in the positioning of Canadian quality and multiculturalism against the tacitly American lack thereof. Another finding of this research is that there has been a fundamental change in the way Canadian identity is structured as a new, commercially driven Canadiana culture industry has arisen since the 1970s.     

Theorising the anti-nation: George Woodcock,anarchism, and Canadian nationalism

George Woodcock was anarchism's most influential historian and an important public intellectual in Canada. This article focuses on his engagement with Canadian nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that a ‘philosophical anarchism’ was at the heart of his intellectual project, and this informed his reading of Canadian cultural development and subsequent political challenge to Pierre Elliott Trudeau's civic nationalism. Woodcock decoupled the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ in order to develop a radically different model for Canada—the ‘anti-nation’—defined by regionalism, federalism and direct democracy. His reading of Canada's cultural history supporting this position was therefore part of a strategy to repurpose nationalist rhetoric towards anti-state ends.     

辛亥革命与民族主义

辛亥革命的民族主义,是认同血缘的种族主义,不是一致对外的民族独立建国,而是排斥国内已经溶合了的少数民族.清朝的满汉矛盾,经二百多年的溶合,在文化上已成一体.鸦片战争以后,已形成中西对立,"满洲人"三字只表示一个特权阶层的存在.但在戊戌变法失败后,革命党人以"驱除鞑虏"为政纲,把政治革命变成种族革命,实是一种倒退,应重新评估其价值.