Fred Halliday: high modernism and a social science of the Middle East

This article examines Fred Halliday's research and writing on the politics of the Middle East. It classifies Halliday as a ‘high modernist’, who organized his work around a constant commitment to a universal rationality, historical progress and an opposition to relativism and a particularist reading of the Middle East. The article identifies the two dominant units of analysis that shaped Halliday's work on the region throughout his life. These were the transformative capacity of capitalism and the role of a comparatively autonomous state. The article then examines how the content of each unit was transformed as Halliday moved from an overt Marxism to a more diffuse liberalism. It then goes on to argue that Halliday's ideological affinities and his deployment of these units marginalized the role and importance of ideology, specifically both nationalism and Islamism. Finally, it traces the influence of this approach and the deployment of these units in Halliday's work on Iran, Iraq and the Arab–Israeli conflict.     

Gellner redux?

The work of Ernest Gellner continues to be an influential part of nationalism studies. A recent appraisal has raised questions about the argument that Gellner offered in his central text on nationalism, Nations and Nationalism. This article takes up other issues in Gellner's work on nationalism. The article examines Gellner's influential definition of nationalism and the interpretation that he placed on that definition, as well as his treatment of ‘political cohabitation’. It also pays more attention to Gellner's later work, namely, Gellner's discussion of ‘the time zones of nationalism’. The paper draws on secondary literature but its primary purpose is to assess the coherence of Gellner's arguments.     

Hans Kohn: the idea of secularized nationalism

More than seventy years after its publication, Hans Kohn's 1944 The Idea of Nationalism is still regarded as a ground‐breaking contribution to the study of nationalism. This essay is aimed to highlight a significant theme in this work which has largely gone unnoticed, namely, the pivotal role of religion and secularism in Kohn's account of nationalism, and especially, in his persistent struggle for a ‘perfect’ nationalism. Kohn's conception – and personal experience – of the relationship of nationalism and religion will be examined through several stages of his turbulent life. First, as a young Zionist in Prague, when he parlayed Martin Buber's Zionist creed into an ethnic concept of nationalism. Then, in Kohn's journalistic writing in the 1920s and in his first theoretical works on nationalism in the years 1929–1942. Finally, Kohn's more mature and crystallized account of nationalism in his 1944 book will be revisited from the perspective of the nationalism–religion relationship.     

Social conflict and the global Cold War

This article offers a critical assessment of Fred Halliday's theorization of the Cold War and, in particular, his attempt to offer a more global perspective on it through a greater focus on the role of developments emanating from the Third World as constitutive of the Cold War. The author argues that although Halliday's theorization of the Cold War as ‘inter‐systemic conflict’ is a major advance in our understanding of the Cold War—through the attention it pays to the causal linkages between capitalist development and imperialism, revolutionary transformations and superpower geopolitical confrontations—it fails, ultimately, to fulfil its potential as a theory of global Cold War. Halliday's temporalization of the Cold War and his insistence on the autonomy of the superpower arms race and strategic competition end up detaching developments in the Third World from the axis of superpower conflict and, consequently, suggests a residual Eurocentrism within his theory. The article begins by contextualizing the wider theorization of the Cold War and the (absence) place of the Third World in it. It then proceeds to assess critically Halliday's conceptualization of the Third World in the Cold War. The final section outlines an alternative theoretical framework for a theory of global Cold War that builds on elements of inter‐systemic conflict focused on how geopolitical confrontations involving the superpowers derived from the revolutionary consequences of uneven capitalist development.     

Taking sides: cosmopolitanism,internationalism and ‘complex solidarity’ in the work of Fred Halliday

Fred Halliday's life and work were intimately associated with the theory and practice of internationalism. In his later writings, the notion of ‘complex solidarity’ emerges as a key component of Halliday's worldview. This article explores the conceptual interconnections between different historical expressions of internationalism, cosmopolitanism and solidarity. It considers the intricate relationship between these categories and their place in our understanding of international affairs, emphasizing the divergence between liberal and revolutionary conceptions of internationalism and cosmopolitanism. The article discusses diverse understandings of ‘solidarity’ in International Relations, arguing that beyond the cosmopolitan and communitarian approaches, there exist other ‘Grotian’ and ‘republican’ ideas of solidarity. Halliday drew on these to present his own defence of universal human rights and solidarity, arguably developing a distinctive brand of republican internationalism. The latter part of the article gives content to ‘complex solidarity’ by suggesting it is built on three inter‐related components: a methodological internationalism, an egalitarian reciprocity and a critique of global capitalism. Overall, these guiding features of complex solidarity deliver a unique rendition of internationalism which reflect Halliday's eclectic combination of radical liberalism with a residual historical materialism.     

Halliday's revenge: revolutions and International Relations

Fred Halliday saw revolution and war as the dual motors of modern international order. However, while war occupies a prominent place in International Relations (IR), revolutions inhabit a more residual location. For Halliday, this is out of keeping with their impact—in particular, revolutions offer a systemic challenge to existing patterns of international order in their capacity to generate alternative orders founded on novel forms of political rule, economic organization and symbolic authority. In this way, dynamics of revolution and counter‐revolution are closely associated with processes of international conflict, intervention and war. It may be that one of the reasons for Halliday's failure to make apparent the importance of revolutions to IR audiences was that, for all his empirical illustrations of how revolutions affected the international realm, he did not formulate a coherent theoretical schema which spoke systematically to the discipline. This article assesses Halliday's contribution to the study of revolutions, and sets out an approach which both recognizes and extends his work. By formulating ideal‐typical ‘anatomies of revolution’, it is possible to generate insights that clarify the ways in which revolutions shape international order.     

Countering the hegemony of the Irish national canon: the modernist rhetoric of Seán O'Faoláin (1938–50)1

ABSTRACT. The telling and re‐telling of national history has long been recognised in studies of nationalism as one of its key legitimising and mobilising strategies. In this article I illustrate how a rhetorical approach can effectively explore this dynamic and emotive dimension of nationalist ideology by examining the rhetorical strategies in the Irish liberal intellectual, Seán O'Faoláin's, attempts to reconstitute the popular canon of Irish history in the 1930s and 1940s. More specifically, I show that contrary to depictions of O'Faoláin as a European liberal who employed rational argument to undermine and encourage the rejection of Irish nationalism and its emphasis on rhetorical narratives of the past, O'Faoláin's challenge to the Irish national canon reveals that he himself mobilised historical narrative to promote his own modernist version of Irish liberal nationalism and demonstrated in the process that he was one of the most skilful rhetors of his day.     

Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1872–1905): A Pioneering Scholar of Modern Nationalism

Abstract. This essay attempts to place the contributions of the sociologist Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz (1872–1905) within the history of the scholarship of nationalism. Though absent from present scholarly literature on the question, Kelles-Krauz's contribution to the study of nationalism was outstanding. The article advances three arguments: that Kelles-Krauz was among the first to treat modem nationalism as an object of serious study, that his approach was more typical of our day than his, and that his arguments anticipated many of the major positions of today's scholars. In order to defend the first claim, the article briefly considers the contributions of scholars who preceded Kelles-Krauz. In order to defend the second and third claims, the article briefly characterises Kelles-Krauz's sociological method and presents his answers to some of the central questions of today's scholarly literature on nationalism.     

John Breuilly: ‘Eric Hobsbawm: nationalism and revolution’

This article considers how Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) connected the concepts of revolution and nationalism, analysing this in relation to his biography, his politics and his work as a professional historian. It traces major changes in Hobsbawm's understanding of revolution and nationalism as he, the political world and the ways of writing history all changed over the course of his long life.     

Paul Cohen-Portheim: questions of nationalism,messianism and nostalgia in a prison camp in England, 1914–1918

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the little-known Jewish writer Paul Cohen-Portheim (1880–1932) and his notions of nationalism and Zionism. Born in Berlin to Austrian parents of Sephardic origin, Cohen-Portheim was interned during the First World War in various English prison camps. This experience profoundly affected his intellectual outlook and he dedicated much of his effort to the fight against nationalism. It was in the English prison camps that he developed an eclectic theory of nationalism which combines a quasi-evolutionary progress towards global justice with a messianic notion of Zionism. The Jewish people play a crucial role in Cohen-Portheim’s vision of a world devoid of nationalism, whose absurdity is disclosed in the arrival of Zionism. Juxtaposing Europe’s crisis of culture and Asia’s spiritual vitality, Cohen-Portheim ascribes to Zionism a bridging of the gap that separates Europe and Asia, and fragments modern nationalistic man. This article follows Cohen-Portheim’s intellectual development and highlights shifts and continuities in his writing, arguing that he shows two different types of nostalgia, namely a longing for the East as developed in his early works and a longing for the past as displayed in his last major work.     

Advances and impasses in Fred Halliday's international historical sociology: a critical appraisal

How did Fred Halliday recast International Relations (IR) theory as international historical sociology? This article explores Halliday's intellectual trajectory across this terrain and suggests that the notion of ‘capitalist modernity’, derived from an amalgamation of neo‐Marxian and neo‐Weberian historical sociology, functioned as the strategic master‐category, which anchored his thought on International Relations throughout his work. This category was successively reconceived and complemented to generate four, partly contradictory, analytical frameworks at a lower level of abstraction: ‘global conjunctural analysis’; a neo‐Weberian ‘sociology of the inter‐state system’; ‘international society as homogeneity’ and ‘uneven and combined development’. The article identifies the advances and impasses in each intellectual move and exemplifies the limits of Halliday's approach in relation to his analysis of revolutions. It suggests that while Halliday was instrumental in reconnecting IR with historical sociology, providing crucial openings and correctives to mainstream IR theory, his theoretical emphases remained ultimately too syncretistic and additive to shift the debate on firmer ground. While this can be read as a failure, there is also evidence to understand this anti‐formalism as a deliberate intellectual choice. The article concludes by suggesting that the very term international historical sociology, predicated on a distinct modernist vocabulary, may itself preclude a full historicization of categories of analysis, restricting its use as a general framework for capturing the historicity and sociality of geopolitical practices across time and space.     

Focusing on Chinese nationalism: an inherently flawed perspective? A reply to Allen Carlson

My article replies to Allen Carlson's critique of the existing literature on Chinese nationalism (Carlson's article was published in Volume 15, issue 1 of Nations and Nationalism, 2009). I address Carlson's criticisms and proceed to evaluate his proposal to move away from an allegedly unhelpful focus on nationalism towards the allegedly more illuminating framework of national identity construction. My approach to the existing literature on Chinese nationalism acknowledges efforts made within it at grappling with issues of theory and definition and builds on this acknowledgement to operate a selective appraisal of its strengths and weaknesses. I argue that while some of the problems identified by Carlson do indeed plague the literature, his advocacy of abandoning nationalism as a focus of research is unwarranted. There is continuing validity in using nationalism as a lens for understanding how China sees its place in the world.     

‘Unfurling the banner of reform’: public opinion,nationalism, and Facts and Figures from Italy

This article reconsiders the neglected Italian correspondence of the Cork-born wit, essayist, and journalist, Francis Sylvester Mahony (‘Father Prout’). Re-assessing his traditional reputation as a Tory polemicist, it explores his movement away from the conservative, pro-Union politics of his contributions to Fraser's Magazine in the 1830s, and examines how, despite his continuing rejection of popular O'Connellite nationalism, he came to offer a broadly sympathetic portrait of Young Ireland in the articles he contributed to the London Daily News in the 1840s. It also traces the development of his political thinking at the beginning of the Famine era, focusing, in particular, on the influence of the resurgent nationalist movement in Italy on his reassessment of the Irish question.     

Alfred Marshall's economic nationalism

ABSTRACT. Alfred Marshall has been seen as an economic liberal and one of the founders of the neo‐classical school. However, this article challenges such conventional wisdom and argues that Marshall is best understood as an economic nationalist. Economic nationalism has been falsely associated with mercantilism, the zero‐sum view of international economies, and so on. However, a new approach for studying economic nationalism has recently been proposed to redefine its conception. The present article shows that Marshall's economic thought is compatible with this new conception of economic nationalism. Marshall emphasised the role of nationality in the economic process. The characteristics of his economic thought, such as the evolutionary view of economy, conform more closely to Friedrich List's economic nationalism than to economic liberalism. By portraying Marshall's theory as that of economic nationalism, the author concludes that economic nationalism can have a systematic theory.     

The importance of being Ernest: a Comment on Riga and Hall

Ernest Gellner's work on nationalism continues to draw a mix of both admiration and criticism. In a recent article, Riga and Hall find fault with a new line of criticism of Gellner's theory of nationalism that I introduced in a series of articles in this journal. They claim that I have merely repeated a well‐known criticism of Gellner – that his work is functionalist. This would be convenient for their arguments if it were true. While I would agree, and have explicitly acknowledged, that there is nothing new in the charge of functionalism, I do not take a functionalist line on Gellner. Functionalism is not the issue. My work shows that his theory of nationalism is plagued with problems that have little or nothing to do with functionalism.     

Defending the West in All Its Amplitude: The Liberal Conservative Vision of Roger Scruton

This article explores the mixture of conservatism and liberalism that informs Roger Scruton's political and philosophical reflection. It highlights his response to the “culture of repudiation,” his resistance to totalitarianism, his defense of national loyalty (as opposed to ideological nationalism), his conservative-minded environmentalism, and his defense of order—and government—against libertarian and leftist assaults on legitimate authority. In particular, it explores a fruitful tension in Scruton's thought between a robust acknowledgment of the Christian features of Western civilization (a civilization that is unthinkable without a Christian emphasis on confession and forgiveness) and Scruton's forthright defense of the secular state against Islamist fanaticism. The article also explores affinities and differences between Scruton's understanding of the West's conjugation of Christianity and secularism and Pierre Manent's critique of radical secularism. The article concludes with reflections on Scruton's judicious melding of truth and liberty, and philosophy and Christianity.     

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.     

民族主义内在的困境——陈独秀国家观从民族主义到自由主义的转变

在近代中国思想史上,陈独秀堪称思想历程最为曲折的人物之一.早年他服膺民族主义,后来转奉自由主义(民主主义),又转而信仰社会主义(共产主义),晚年他的思想走向社会主义、自由主义和民族主义的大综合.本文所考察的,是陈独秀从民族主义到自由主义的转变,以及这次转变所呈现的民族主义的内在困境.     

Civitatis Ghaniensis Conditor: Kwame Nkrumah,symbolic nationalism and the iconography of Ghanaian money 1957 – the Golden Jubilee

ABSTRACT. During his tenure as premier from independence in 1957 until he was ousted by a military and police coup in 1966, Kwame Nkrumah was the living personification of the Ghanaian nation‐state. As the self‐proclaimed Civitatis Ghaniensis Conditor– Founder of the State of Ghana – his image was minted on the new national money and printed on postage stamps. He erected a monument of himself in Accra, changed the national anthem to make references to himself, customised the national flag to match the colors of his CPP party, made his birthday a national day of celebration (National Founder's Day), named streets and universities after himself, and amended the constitution whereby he became Life President. Since the coup, many of the symbols of nationhood that Nkrumah constructed have been debated, demolished, reconsidered and reengineered by successive governments to rewrite the Ghanaian historical narrative. This article analyses the contentions of one of Nkrumah's first expressions of symbolic nationalism – that of the national coinage.