Dog in the Night: The Limits of European Nationalism, 1789–1895

Abstract. The article questions the widely held view that nationalism was a significant feature of modem civilisation and particularly of nineteenth-century Europe. Two groups of events are chosen for examination: reputedly classic instances of nationalism (the French Revolution, German responses to Napoleon, the Italian and German revolutions of 1848, Italian and German unification and the Eastern crisis of 1875-8), and important international events which in an age of nationalism should reflect it (the Crimean War, Bismarck's alliances and the Franco-Russian alliance). Defined as the effort of nation/peoples to defend/extend their power, nationalism is evaluated specifically for its breadth of support and its influence on decision-makers which prove to be limited. This conclusion has implications not only for these events but also brings into question the established system of historical periodisation which presumes the distinctiveness of the nineteenth century and modem civilisation precisely because of their distinguishing features such as nationalism.     

Language and Nationalism: Comparing Flanders and Tanzania

Abstract. Language is often a central issue in nationalist ideologies. It is seen as a crucial element in the definition of people's identities, and it is often a battlefield for nationalist activities. An analysis of how language is conceptualised and made part of a particular nationalist struggle may yield insights into the ideological structure of this particular nationalism, and thus lead to more refined ways of distinguishing between various types of nationalisms. In this article, a comparison is made between language in Flemish nationalism and in Tanzanian post-Ujamaa nationalism. In both cases, great emphasis is placed by the nation-builders on the central role of language in attaining the nationalist goals. However, a comparison of both cases also yields significant differences. The Flemish view of language is predominantly ethnic. Dutch is seen as an inalienable marker of identity, shared with the Dutch people, and creating a fundamental difference with the Walloon Belgians. Also, language is closely associated with the territory on which it is being spoken, which yields a homogeneistic and assimilationist attitude towards speakers of other languages on Flemish temtory. In Tanzania, Swahili is seen as an instrument for attaining a socialist political- ideological hegemonisation of the state. Swahili is chosen not for cultural reasons, but because it allows for egalitarian, socialist connotations. Underlying both language ideologies are basic differences in the structure of nationalism in Flanders and Tanzania, Flanders being an example of ethnic nationalism and Tanzania an example of socialist state nationalism.     

Domestic events,ideological changes and the post-cold war US–South Korea alliance

How can we account for the weakening of the US–South Korea alliance after the cold war? After the cold war, the US–South Korea alliance was expected to remain strong due to North Korea's threats of weapons of mass destruction. For the past decade and a half, this realist projection has not fully come to pass: rather, it has changed inversely. How can we account for this puzzle? In explaining this counter-intuitive development, the author employs the critical juncture approach. The author argues that in South Korea, certain domestic critical events readjusted domestic ideologies that affected its alliance policy towards the USA. With the initiation of Nordpolitik after the end of the cold war (the first critical juncture), conservative anti-communism and progressive nationalism became coexistent in South Korea, thus causing frictional policy towards the USA. The 2000 North–South Korean Summit (the second critical juncture) made the progressive nationalistic move more dominant in Korea, and this ideological change made its alliance policy towards the USA less friendly.     

A portrait of the chief as a general paralytic: rhetorics of sexual pathology in the Parnell split*

The O’Shea trial and the ensuing fall of Charles Stewart Parnell occupy an epochal position in accounts of the sexual politics of Victorian Britain and the development of Irish nationalism. This article examines how the “Parnell myth” came to serve (and was constructed from the outset) as a symbolic edifice within which anxieties concerning the relationship between Irishness and sexuality could be foregrounded and negotiated. In particular, it will analyse Timothy Healy’s influential post-split denunciations of Parnell, and the rhetoric of sexual contagion through which they were conducted, a campaign which set the discursive terms of twentieth-century mainstream Irish nationalism. Through an analysis of Healy’s post-split journalism, contemporary political memoirs by T.P. O’Connor, and a range of nineteenth-century medical and psychiatric texts, this article will highlight the ways in which discourses of sexual health were used to reshape Parnell’s public persona at the level of gender and ethno-national affiliation. In doing so, it will illustrate how a sensitivity to the history of medicine can enrich critical understandings of a crucial moment in the political and cultural history of Ireland, and shed fresh light on the vexed collocation of Irish identity and sexual purity which the Parnell split reinforced.     

Philhellenism in Italy: political friendship and the Italian volunteers in the Mediterranean in the nineteenth century

Italy offers a particularly important vantage point for understanding the force of philhellenism in nineteenth-century Europe. Tracing the contribution of Italians to the struggles for Greek independence from the war of 1820?-?21 to the war between Greece and Turkey in 1897, this article shows how Italian support for the philhellenist cause illustrates the internationalist context of Risorgimento nationalism. After Unification the philhellenist cause offered the opportunity to continue the tradition of volunteers enlisting to fight against tyranny and oppression abroad. This culminated in the volunteer expedition to fight with the Greeks against the Turks in 1897 led by Ricciotti Garibaldi - son of the hero of Italian Unification. But that expedition also marked the end of the nineteenth-century international volunteer movement. In Italy many socialists and nationalists were opposed to it, in part because it was seen as a diversion from political struggles that needed to be fought at home and in part because the project of the nation in arms was less and less realistic in the context of late nineteenth-century geopolitics. But at its height, the international volunteer movement - to which Italy made a major contribution - was an act of political idealism that drew on appeals to the unity of Greco-Latin civilization.     

Picturing the homeland: geography and national identity in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iran

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in geography as an ideologically loaded discourse about the world and its inhabitants which has operated both within and beyond educational institutions. Particular attention has been paid to the complex relationships between geography and imperialism, militarism and nationalism. For the most part, these studies have focused on the development of a western geographical imagination in Europe and North America. This article considers the development of geography in Iran during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and charts some of the connections between this new spatial sensibility and an emerging Iranian nationalism. Based on rare and hitherto unexplored nineteenth-century Persian sources, including several newspaper images, this article examines the importance which Iranian statesmen and diplomats in the service of the Qajar dynasty attached to geography and to geographical reasoning in their attempts to protect their authority from external threats. The forms of Iranian geography which developed in this period sustained various myths and legends about Persia's historic importance and reflected both external, western ideas and concepts as well as indigenous, Persian traditions. Forged in a context of acute vulnerability to «Great Power» incursions, Iranian nationalism and Iranian geography both represented an intermingling of external, western and internal, non-western ideas.     

Nationalism without a nation: the rise and fall of Zulu nationalism in South Africa’s transition to democracy, 1975–99

During South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy the most virulent opposition to change came from Zulu nationalism. Post‐apartheid, however, Zulu nationalism has largely waned. This is because Zulu nationalism was instrumentally invoked and jettisoned by the Inkatha Freedom Party. Beginning in 1975, Inkatha embraced a ‘third way’ resistance politics between ‘acquiescence’ in apartheid and ‘impossible’ militant resistance. It was only later that Inkatha turned to Zuluness when it was out‐competed by the ANC and allies, first over the leadership of resistance politics and secondly during the transition. After 1994 the inclusion of the IFP in democratic government made old strategies redundant and thus it abandoned Zulu nationalism. Moreover, while a widespread sense of Zuluness exists, the meanings attached to it vary to the extent that the Zulu nation cannot exist. Thus the Zulu nationalism of the transition was an elite‐driven political nationalism prosecuted without a popularly imagined Zulu nation.     

Anarchism,Modernism, and Nationalism: Futurism’s French Connections, 1876–1915

This article examines two of the most significant Italian political movements at the turn of the twentieth century—anarchism and Futurism. Although these movements shared a common vocabulary and rhetoric, they contrasted sharply in their aims and objectives. I address three interrelated questions: How were these movements and their ideologies related to, and perceived by, the ruling elites? What were their mutual influences and inspirational centre? Did both movements share a broader core ideology? To answer these questions, I explore the links, parallels and dissimilarities between anarchism and Futurism in the context of the nationalist mass mobilizations preceding World War I. In line with Emilio Gentile’s landmark analysis, I identify the core ideology of Futurism as a potent blend of nationalism and modernism. Futurism’s double matrix is thus contrasted with the theory and practice of anarchism, the two displaying sharply differing relationships with political power. I also consider the links between Italian Futurism and French ultra-nationalism as championed by prominent intellectuals, beyond Paris’ artistic epicentre, where art and politics intermixed. I conclude that the fusion of modernism and nationalism was central to twentieth-century ideological radicalization to which Futurism fully belonged, but from which anarchism eventually dissociated itself.     

‘A universal,uniform humanity’: the German newspaper Der Kosmopolit and entangled nation-building in nineteenth-century Australia

The focus in this article, through a reading of the German-Australian newspaper Der Kosmopolit, is on the legacies of entangled imperial identities in the period of the nineteenth-century German Enlightenment. Attention is drawn to members of the liberal nationalist generation of 1848 who emigrated to the Australian colonies and became involved in intellectual activities there. The idea of entanglement is applied to the philosophical orientation of the German-language newspaper that this group formed, Der Kosmopolit, which was published between 1856 and 1957. Against simplistic notions that would view cosmopolitanism as the opposite of nationalism, it is argued that individuals like Gustav Droege and Carl Muecke deployed an entangled ‘cosmo-nationalism’ in ways that both advanced German nationalism and facilitated their own engagement with and investment in Australian colonial society.     

‘They have to abide by our laws … and stuff’: ethnonationalism masquerading as civic nationalism

The long established distinction between civic nationalism and ethnonationalism is useful heuristically to understand different dimensions of nationalism and perhaps track a movement from ethnic forms to civic allegiances, though some have challenged its empirical veracity and others question the normative implications of such a distinction. This paper demonstrates the ways in which the two are elided in everyday discourses about migrants in Australia. We argue suspicion of cultural difference, identified more than three decades ago as the new racism, has given way to talk of the need for migrants to ‘follow the law’. This serves rhetorically to reinforce the notion that migrants, often implied to overlap with the category ‘Muslims’, are insisting on breaking the law and/or changing it and are therefore culturally incompatible with a modern liberal democracy. We argue that since ethnic nationalism, like racism, is out of favour normatively, ethnic nationalist arguments are now superficially concealed beneath the acceptable language of civic nationalism. The manner in which this occurs is mapped discursively using data from a corpus of twenty seven focus groups conducted around Australia.     

Nationalism and Sexuality,What are the Issues?

Abstract. This article attempts to clarify in a systematic fashion the relationship between nationalism and sexuality. Whilst a relationship is now generally recognised between the two phenomena, it has been neglected relative to other issues. There are genuine reasons for this, the relationship being fraught with conceptual and empirical problems. Such problems are evident in the writings to date directly on nationalism and sexuality. This discussion attempts to initially disentangle racism and gender from nationalism and sexuality, respectively, before outlining what I consider to be the three major intersections: national sexual stereotypes, sexuality in national conflict and sexuality in nation-building. Each of the intersections are indicated by an assessment of their conceptual relationship, and illustrated by various historical instances.     

Giuseppe Mazzini and the democratic logic of nationalism

ABSTRACT. This article brings the thought of Giuseppe Mazzini back into the field of nationalism studies, from which it has been largely missing for a half century. It suggests the following: that Mazzini is much more modern and secular than he is usually portrayed; and that his commitment to liberal policies while rejecting liberal principles suggests that the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism has been misconceived. Nationalism, to Mazzini, was not an end in itself but a means to an end – government of, by and for the people. The demand for such a government was manifested in three popular demands in nineteenth‐century Europe: in the West as democracy, in the East as national sovereignty (the precondition for democracy) and in both East and West as social democracy. Thus nationalism may be instrumental rather than an end in itself, and it may be attributable not to ethnic groups' natural striving for autonomy but to the pursuit of democracy.     

Negotiating the Nation: Ethnicity,Nationalism and Nation-Building in Independent Namibia

Abstract. Employing recent anthropological perspectives on ethnicity and nationalism which have not yet been applied to any extent in research on cultural differentiation in Namibia, the article investigates problems and challenges in the process of nation-building in the recently independent state. Ethnicity and nationalism are here seen as socially constructed and ideologically practised phenomena, and the relationship between these ideologies is studied as one of ideological conflict. More particularly, the article investigates the formation, relevance and uses of ethnic identities; the relationship between ethnicity, class and the politics of ethnic nationalism; as well as some techniques, rhetorics and symbols employed in the social construction of nationalism in Namibia. In conclusion, the article argues the importance of making the nation-building project relevant to people not only through the creation of ever more effective and inclusive national symbols, but also through real economic and political reforms.     

The political economy of socialism: A Marxist social theory

Talmon's treatment of nationalism varies in his different writings. This study will try to characterize his views as expressed in his final work, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution. Through most of the book Talmon's preference for dealing with the vision of revolution, its prophets and bearers is very conspicuous. Their total devotion to restructuring and refashioning the whole world in accordance with the socialist ideology fascinated Talmon before it provoked him into analyzing it to death. Nationalism, on the other hand, appears at best as a natural feeling of loyalty and at worst as a hateful, aggressive, and racist obsession. One of his outstanding interests in that book is in the internal debate among socialists about nationalism as a value and as a strategy, and in the tremendous prominence of Jews in this process. It is only towards the end of the book that Talmon presents his main thesis, the confrontation between the two totalitarian ideologies, Bolshevism and Fascism as deriving from socialism and nationalism, and embodying two kinds of determinism, economic and biological. Nationalism appears as an irrational phantasy, which had developed throughout the nineteenth century to its pivotal culmination in Nazism. This highly problematic thesis, though brilliantly expressed by captivating metaphors, should I think be explained and revised.     

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.     

The rise of the ethical state in Italy. Neapolitan Hegelians and Risorgimento political thought (1848–1871)

ABSTRACT

The article examines the idea of the Ethical State in Italy within the context of the Risorgimento and of Neapolitan Hegelianism. The article first analyses the Neapolitan Hegelians’ idea of nationality and its relationship to the concept of “national character”. Then it focuses on the differences between Hegel’s and Spaventa’s concepts of the State. Finally, it places Silvio and Bertrando Spaventa’s liberalism within Risorgimento debates after 1848, pointing to differences with moderate liberals such as Cesare Balbo or Vincenzo Gioberti. By delineating the context of ideas such as nationality, national character, ethics, and the state, the article sheds new light on the relationship between liberalism and nationalism in nineteenth-century European political thought.     

Searching for the perfect nation: the itinerary of Hans Kohn (1891–1971)

ABSTRACT. The ‘Hans Kohn Dichotomy’, i.e. the distinction between ‘Western’ and ‘Non‐Western’ nationalism, remains one of the most persistent paradigms in the study of nationalism. This article deals briefly with the terms of Kohn's Dichotomy and with the discussion about it. The main purpose of the article, however, is to problematise the dichotomy in terms of Kohn's personal itinerary which took him from Prague to Russia, and from Britain and Palestine to the United States. Kohn came late to the view that there were two types of nationalism. He adopted this position in the wake of a series of political and personal disappointments, and in response to dramatic historical challenges. In the final analysis, Kohn's Dichotomy was a rhetorical construct, designed to make sense of a world in conflict and to allow Kohn and others, then and later, to come to terms with the hopes and fears raised by nationalism.     

The Partisan Nature of Race and Imperialism: Dadabhai Naoroji,M. M. Bhownaggree and the Late Nineteenth-Century British Politics of Indian Nationalism

This article examines Dadabhai Naoroji's and Mancherjee Merwanjee Bhownaggree's contribution to politically partisan ideologies on Indian empire as London MPs and reform advocates late in the nineteenth century. Exploring politically nuanced, cultural definitions of racial difference, this article reveals how their participation in British parliamentary and press debate on Indian nationalism adhered to distinct liberal and conservative imperial political conceptions of race and governance during this period. Beyond an analysis of Naoroji and the Indian National Congress's relationship with British liberalism, this essay explores Bhownaggree's contribution to a sustained conservative imperial tradition. This article postulates that Edmund Burke's separation from a liberal imperial rationality and a British Tory critique of liberalism informed a nineteenth-century conservative governing justification in India predicated on conciliating organic national racial difference. As Naoroji's devotion, as a Liberal MP for Central Finsbury (1892–95), to a liberal civilising mission informed an advocacy of political self-governance in Britain and India, Bhownaggree's pursuit of female and technical education reform while Conservative MP for Bethnal Green N.E. (1895–1905) represented a conservative espousal of racial difference.     

Phantasmagorias of the Interior: Furniture,Modernity, and Early Bengali Fiction

The novel in nineteenth-century Bengal was formed under European influence, adopting its techniques of representation from bourgeois realist fiction. Both witness to and participant in the making of colonial modernity, it placed particular emphasis upon the social substantiation of persons through the depiction of domestic interiors. The furniture of the bourgeois house became an important ingredient in that representational process. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's examination of the way in which furnished interiors came to compose the universe of private man in the nineteenth century, I argue that in the Bengali novel, there is a constant tension between that mode of self-construction and the suspicion and distrust of European furnishings exhibited in representative novelists of the period. Ultimately, in the fiction of Rabindranath Tagore, this distrust manifests itself in a rejection of the bourgeois interior, as well as a questioning of the very tools of realist representation.     

National indifferences during everyday nationalism: Experiencing the nation in Finland in the aftermath of the Second World War

Our article discusses the adaptability of the concept of national indifference to the context of post-war Finnish society and everyday nationalism. This period witnessed a transformation of previously exclusive and aggressive nationalism into a tempered and relatively inclusive version. Within this historical context, national indifference became an entangled category that could not be clearly attributed to a specific group of people but which carried with it a gradual change in subjective attitudes and consciousness. The case of post-war Finland demonstrates that just as nationalism changed its shape over time, becoming subtly embedded in everyday life, so too did national indifference. The article thus argues that an increase in the level of national indifference could actually make space for national integration and, furthermore, that any given expressions of nationalism, as well as the lack of them, must be studied against the background of people's experiences, which lend historically conditioned meaning to national sentiment and indifference alike.