The Macedonian–Albanian political frontier: the re‐articulation of post‐Yugoslav political identities

Abstract. The article examines the re‐articulation of national identity in Macedonia since its independence in 1992. Both ethnic Macedonian and ethnic Albanian political identities have been engaged in a complex process of redefinition. Two ethnic groups had previously been strongly influenced by the Marxist paradigm and its Yugoslav official interpretation. During the 1990s, the elements of the old paradigm were combined with elements of the new – liberal democratic – concepts of nationhood. While some of the concepts developed within the old Yugoslav framework are still in use, the new liberal‐democratic political paradigm finds it difficult to include them into an official discourse on nationhood. At the same time, introduction of the concepts inherent to the liberal‐democratic paradigm has disturbed the fragile balance achieved through the old Yugoslav narrative. In new circumstances, the ethnic Macedonians transformed themselves from the ‘constitutive nation’ to ‘majority’. However, the ethnic Albanians found it more difficult to accept the status of ‘minority’, which was once (in Yugoslav Marxist narrative) considered to be politically incorrect. Thus, they insist on being recognised as a ‘nation’, equal to ethnic Macedonians. In its essence, the conflict in Macedonia is – to a large extent – a conflict between two different concepts of what is Macedonia and who are Macedonians. The questions posed are: is the minority (ethnic Albanians) part of the nation? Could two nations exist peacefully within one state? The article maps out differences between two different discourses on the identity of the new Macedonian state.     

From revolutionary heroism to cultural heritage: museums,memory and representation in Laos

ABSTRACT. Museum exhibitions in Laos represent two main strands of Lao national identity discourse. First, they glorify the ‘liberation struggle’ of the so‐called ‘Lao multiethnic people’ under the leadership of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party, and therefore serve as important ideological tools for the current regime's self‐legitimisation. Second, they display the history and cultural heritage of the Lao nation, providing the postcolonial state with a narrative of historical continuity and civilisation that is focused mostly on the dominant ethnic Lao culture. This article explores the contradictions within official images of the Lao nation‐state and how these opposing strands of national identity compete or interact. Museums as key arenas of ideological tensions constitute illuminating fields of research on discourses of national identity in Laos.     

The historical dynamics of ethnic conflicts: confrontational nationalisms,democracy and the Basques in contemporary Spain*

ABSTRACT. All the historical moments in which the Basque debate reached political protagonism in contemporary Spain coincided with political contexts of institutional democratisation. The debate on patriotism in the Basque Country is connected with a uniform narrative regarding the Basques and their moral distance from the Spanish nation: the ‘Basque problem’. This narrative has fostered a confrontational discourse between Spanish and Basque nationalism. It has also promoted recourse to specific stereotypical images of the Basques, which bind ethnicity to collective identity. Such representations reveal that the invention of the Basque country as a uniform ethnic collective had much more to do with the internal contradictions of Spanish national identity – and later of Basque identity – than with the existence of a secular conflict between Basques and Spaniards. The Basque case shows that every ‘ethnic conflict’ requires adequate contextualisation in order to avoid simplifying its origins and past pathways to make it conform to present uses.     

What can and cannot be willed: how politicians talk about national identity and immigrants

The ethnic‐civic framework remains widely used in nationalism research. However, in the context of European immigrant integration politics, where almost all ‘nation talk’ is occurring in civic and liberal registers, the framework has a hard time identifying how conceptions of national identity brought forth in political debate differ in their exclusionary potential. This leads some to the conclusion that national identity is losing explanatory power. Building on the insights of Oliver Zimmer, I argue that we may find a different picture if we treat cultural content and logic of boundary construction – two parameters conflated in the ethnic‐civic framework – as two distinct analytical levels. The framework I propose focuses on an individual and collective dimension of logic of boundary construction that together constitute the inclusionary/exclusionary core of national identity. The framework is tested on the political debate on immigrant integration in Denmark and Norway in selected years. Indeed, the framework enables us to move beyond the widespread idea that Danish politicians subscribe to an ethnic conception of the nation, while Norwegian political thought is somewhere in between an ethnic and civic conception. The true difference is that Danish politicians, unlike their Norwegian counterparts, do not acknowledge the collective self‐understanding as an object of political action.     

The Thai Lao – Thailand's largest unrecognized transboundary national ethnicity

In 1900, the Lao ethnonym, and thus the Lao, ‘officially’ disappeared from Siam. However, Lao culture and identity persisted at local, regional, and national levels. As Keyes (1967) discovered, ‘a Northeast Thailand‐based ethno‐regionalism’ emerged post‐World War II. This regionalism, which we re‐term ‘Thai Lao’ and specify to the majority ethnic community, exists in a contested relationship with both ‘Thai’ and ‘Lao’ identity. The survival of the Lao ethnic community's cultural identity occurred despite the best efforts of the Royal Thai Government (RTG) to eradicate aspects of Lao culture. These aspects included Lao language, religion, and history, using the school system, the Lao Buddhist Sangha, and the bureaucracy. Beginning in the 1990s, buoyed by a multitude of factors, the Lao ethnic community reappeared as the ‘Thai Lao’ or ‘Lao Isan’. This reappearance was noted in the RTG's Thailand 2011 Country Report (RTG 2011) to the UN Committee responsible for the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. For nearly four decades now, ‘Laoism’ has recurred in Thai academia, the media, the public sphere, popular traditions, and even Lao apocalyptic millenarianism. Following Smith (1986, 1991, 1999), this article utilizes a historical ethno‐symbolist approach to analyse this recurrence.     

Elements of a theory of Ukrainian ethno‐national identities

Despite winning independence in 1991, Ukraine remains an amorphous society with a weak sense of national identity. One possible explanation is ‘late’ nation‐creation, but in this article emphasis is laid on a continuing plurality of identity projects and the legacy of the ‘failed’ identity‐building projects of the past. Ukraine’s most important distinguishing feature – the existence of a substantial middle ground between Ukrainian and Russian identities – has considerable capacity to resist the logic of consolidating statehood.     

The Little Nyonya and Singapore’s national self: reflections on aesthetics,ethnicity and postcolonial state formation

Singapore’s postcolonial state formation process has combined the appeal/distress of a multiracial society with the nationalistic pride of economic development. In recent years, the city-state has witnessed a revival of Peranakan culture and history, referring to the descendants of early Chinese immigrants who integrated into Indigenous societies before becoming prized mediators for British colonisers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We question how these references are strategically deployed as part of the process of postcolonial state formation and how their aesthetic representations support public discussions and debates about what defines contemporary (Chinese) Singaporean identity. By examining Peranakan representations in the television series The Little Nyonya from a Deleuzian perspective, it will be argued that Peranakan history and culture are mobilised to de-territorialise previous meanings of national ethnic markers, specifically Chineseness, and to re-territorialise a local sense of Indigeneity. In reaction to concerns over Mainlander identity, representations of Peranakan culture and history in The Little Nyonya support the indigenisation of a specific Chinese identity that is accessible to all Singaporeans, offering an aesthetic framework in which the ongoing process of negotiating between Singapore’s national self and other unfolds.     

(RE)MAPPING INDIGENOUS ‘RACE’/PLACE IN POSTCOLONIAL PENINSULAR MALAYSIA1

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on how indigeneity has been constructed, deployed and ruptured in postcolonial Malay(si)a. Prior to the independence of Malaya in 1957, British colonial administrators designated certain groups of inhabitants as being ‘indigenous’ to the land through European imaginings of ‘race’. The majority, politically dominant Malays were deemed the definitive peoples of this geographical territory, and the terrain was naturalized as ‘the Malay Peninsula’. Under the postcolonial government, British conceptions of the peninsula were retained; the Malays were given political power and recognition of their ‘special (indigenous) position’ in ways that Orang Asli minorities—also considered indigenous ‐ were not. This uneven recognition is evident in current postcolonial political, economic, administrative and legal arrangements for Malays and Orang Asli. In recent years, Orang Asli advocates have been articulating their struggles over land rights by drawing upon transnational discourses concerning indigenous peoples. Recent judicial decisions concerning native title for the Orang Asli potentially disrupt ethno‐nationalist assertions of the peninsula as belonging to the ‘native’ Malays. These contemporary contests in postcolonial identity formations unsettle hegemonic geopolitical ‘race’/place narratives of Peninsular Malaysia.     

Denied ethnicism: on the Walloon movement in Belgium

The Walloon movement is the lesser‐known counterpart to the Flemish movement in Belgium. In contemporary political debate it presents itself, and is usually perceived, as a civic and voluntaristic movement predicated on the values of democracy, freedom, openness and anti‐nationalism. As such it is contrasted against its Flemish counterpart, which accordingly is characterised as tending towards an ethnic exclusivist form of nationalism hinging on descent, culture and language. However, the historical record behind these representations shows that the Walloon movement is rooted in ethno‐cultural as much as social politics, and that it has always contained both civic and ethnic elements to varying degrees. This article highlights the Walloon movement in order to analyse the language and national stereotypes in which national movements are characterised both in political rhetoric and in scholarly analysis. The case is particularly relevant for the problematic usage of the ‘civic–ethnic’ opposition, slipping between the discourses of antagonism and analysis; one type of such slippage is here identified as ‘denied ethnicism’.     

Tolerant majorities,loyal minorities and ‘ethnic reversals’: constructing minority rights at Versailles 1919*

ABSTRACT. The 1919 Versailles Peace Conference created new states in East Central Europe (ECE), but the imperfect implementation of the ‘one nation, one state’ formula resulted in more than twenty‐five million ‘unassimilable’ minorities. With the introduction of majoritarian democracy, this gave rise to what we term ‘ethnic reversals’: ‘formally dominant majorities’ suffered status decline, while previously ‘minoritised majorities’ found new political powers. Accordingly, the 1919 Minorities Treaties sought to manage these ‘ethnic reversals’ by instituting a liberal minority rights regime that tried to create both ‘tolerant majorities’ and ‘loyal minorities’. While the Treaties reflected the influences of Anglo‐American and Anglo‐American Jewish elites – the most notable voices of liberalism in an age of ethnic homogenisation – we suggest that in contexts of historical diversity with little institutionalised liberalism, ‘ethnic reversals’ raise issues that cannot be resolved within liberal conceptions of minority rights that rely solely or primarily on cultural protections.     

‘Anti–Mini Militants Meet Modern Misses’: Urban Style,Gender and the Politics of ‘National Culture’ in 1960s Dar es Salaam,Tanzania

This essay examines a 1968–9 campaign by Tanzania’s ruling party Youth League to outlaw mini–skirts and other ‘indecent’ fashions as ‘decadent’ affronts to Tanzanian ‘national culture’. It situates the intense, public debate on the campaign both in terms of the state’s contested national cultural project, and in relation to intersecting anxieties about shifts in women’s work and mobility in urban space, and the politics of sex in postcolonial Dar es Salaam. Arguing that ‘the city’ ndash; both as an imagined space and as the site of particular, gendered social struggles – is central to understanding the campaign, the essay charts attempts by the ban’s opponents to fashion viable personas and notes the limits of these attempts.     

Tourist,local, or other?: Greek Canadian women and the heritage fling in Greece

This article examines the romantic and sexual encounters between Greek men and Greek Canadian women vacationing in Greece and addresses how constructions of Greek Canadian female sexuality are related to foreign and local Greek conceptions of femininity during these ‘holiday flings’. Because of their Greek ancestry, Mediterranean ‘looks’, and familiarity with language and culture, Greek Canadian women exhibit ambiguous identities that uphold and cross boundaries between outsiders and insiders. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, I explore the conceptualizations of ancestral and national identity underpinning Greek women's erotic desires for Greek man who embody ethnic authenticity to them. Yet, Greek men thwart these desires when they subvert Canadian women's economic power through challenging their cultural literacy (such as a lack in language skills, etiquette, or sexual knowledge). This article addresses the question of how diasporic women's heterosexuality subjectivities – bound up with hybrid ethnic and national affiliations – take on different meanings across locales and times where transnational sex and romance are everyday occurrences.     

Identifying Scotland and Wales: types of Scottish and Welsh national identities

Abstract. How are national identities and the ‘imagined communities’ ( Anderson 1991 ) upon which they are based linked? This article demonstrates that Q‐methodology, which allows each participant to express his or her own ‘personal nationalism’ ( Cohen 1996 ) while simultaneously highlighting how these individual assessments aggregate into coherent, shared types of national identity, provides a means of empirically assessing the linkage between the micro‐ and macro‐components of national identity. When applied to the cases of Scotland and Wales, the six types of national identity – three each in Scotland and Wales – highlight distinctions that reflect, as well as challenge, the ubiquitous academic division between civic and ethnic national identities. They also illuminate the differing natures of contemporary Scotland and Wales, with particular emphasis on the observation that the Welsh imagined community appears to be fundamentally more contested than the more easily forged Scottish imagined community.     

Operationalising national identity: the cases of the Scottish National Party and Frisian National Party

The article sets out to examine the complexity of national identity and to provide a more nuanced understanding of how inclusive and exclusive characteristics of national identity, which appear theoretically contradictory but show empirically considerable compatibility, relate to each other. In order to empirically investigate the nature of national identity, the article develops a multidimensional model – consisting of an ethnic, cultural, territorial and civic dimension. The article explores the understanding of national identity in two specific groups: members of the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the United Kingdom and members of the Frisian National Party (FNP) in the Netherlands. The evidence presented is based on data from two full membership studies, and the model is operationalised using a confirmatory factor analyses. The conclusion is that national identity can be conceptualised as consisting of one, or several, base layer(s) that can be ‘topped‐up’ with secondary layers.     

Nationalism and the Internet*

ABSTRACT. The territorial integrity of nations is often taken as the premise for a functioning, unifying national identity. Yet, the economic and technological developments of recent decades have made it necessary to question this assumption. It can no longer be taken for granted that the people who identify with a given nation inhabit the same space, nor can it be assumed that cultural homogenisation takes place at the level of the nation through mass media. When the Internet appeared, many social scientists and commentators predicted that it would threaten the cultural integrity of nations; that the non‐territorial character of the Internet would lead to fragmentation and unprecedented cultural differentiation, making it difficult, eventually impossible, to uphold a collective sense of national identity based on shared images, representations, myths and so on. Although it is too early to draw any conclusions regarding the long‐term effects of the Internet, experiences so far suggest that such predictions were mistaken. In fact, nations thrive in cyberspace, and the Internet has in the space of only a few years become a key technology for keeping nations (and other abstract communities) together. Nations which have lost their territory (such as Afrikaner‐led South Africa), nations which are for political reasons dispersed (such as Tamil Sri Lanka or Kurdistan), nations with large temporary overseas diasporas (such as Scandinavian countries, with their large communities in Spain during winter), or nations where many citizens work abroad temporarily or permanently (such as India or Caribbean island‐states), appear in many sites on the Internet – from online newspapers and magazines to semi‐official information sites and ‘virtual community’ homepages. In a ‘global era’ of movement and deterritorialisation, the Internet is used to strengthen, rather than weaken, national identities.     

‘What makes one an Israeli?’ Negotiating identities in everyday representations of ‘Israeliness’*

Abstract. This paper examines the construction of a sense of Israeli identity which is not deducible from the public political discourse. It analyses common verbal representations of ‘being an Israeli person’, namely, what people in contemporary Israeli culture repeatedly say about Israelis, and how they position themselves vis‐à‐vis the commonsensical agreements they exchange, assuming that the massive use of such clichés in certain contexts creates a discursive routine that has ‘a life of its own’, through which people constantly negotiate their self‐images and their sense of belonging. It investigates the ways these representations create solidarity or demarcation and how such current popular representations relate to canonical veteran images of Israeli identity, notably that of the pre‐state ‘Native Israeli’ (Sabra) archetype. The analysis is based on 295 anonymous open responses to the question ‘What makes one an Israeli?’ published weekly in the Weekend Supplement of Maariv, the second largest newspaper in Israel, between 1996 and 1998. The analysis has led to the following observations: (1) Instead of the most expected grand ideological (ethnic, national, religious, etc.) issues of conflict, the responses reveal a ‘pursuit of culturedness’, using an implied scale of mastering good manners and possessing a ‘genuine culture’ which form the dominant parameter of judging the ‘Israeli person’. (2) A tension between mainstream and marginalised groups is shaped by a ‘chase and flight’ dynamic of embracing and rejecting the mythological Sabra image (in asymmetry with these groups' assumed political stances), which image is believed to be a symbol of the once hegemonic veteran elite. (3) This tension paradoxically contributes to the persistence of the canonical image of the Sabra that is currently delegitimised by much intellectual discourse.     

‘Beer and Britannia’: public‐house culture and the construction of nineteenth‐century British‐Welsh industrial identity

Prior to industrialisation, there was a nebulous and fragmented Welsh national character or mass collective identity. Industrialisation engendered significant sociocultural upheaval and change, and for this ‘new’ society to function effectively a cohesive Welsh identity had to emerge. Because the impetus behind industrialisation had occurred primarily in a British context, any newly formed Welsh identity would ultimately have to be reconciled to the nation's industrial import within a ‘United Kingdom’. Mass cultural commonalities and the role played by leisure in this procedure is a core element in the establishment of industrial modernist nation‐states. Therefore, this article argues that public‐house culture played a central role in the construction of a new industrial Welsh national ideology that was ultimately allied to, and a constituent of, a British imperial agenda designed to exploit both the natural resources and workforce of the area to its maximum extent.     

Independence and Corporations in Pre‐Reform Freeman Boroughs: A Case Study – Newcastle‐under‐Lyme in the 1810s

This article draws on a wide range of evidence – corporation records, pollbooks, newspapers, squibs and broadsides, and private correspondence and accounts – to put forward some significant revisions to the electoral history of the borough of Newcastle‐under‐Lyme in the early 19th century. In the process, the article contributes to our understanding of the conflict between ‘oligarchy’ and ‘independence’ which characterised politics in this and other freeman boroughs. The independent party in the town emerges as a powerful force in its own right, one which came to monopolise access to the ‘rhetoric of independence’, rather than being a mere vehicle for ambitious candidates. The ability of the corporation to influence events by manipulation of the voting roll is also reassessed, and is seen to have been less significant than has been supposed.     

In Search of the Authentic Nation: Landscape and National Identity in Canada and Switzerland

Abstract. While the study of nationalism and national identity has flourished in the last decade, little attention has been devoted to the conditions under which natural environments acquire significance in definitions of nationhood. This article examines the identity-forming role of landscape depictions in two polyethnic nation-states: Canada and Switzerland. Two types of geographical national identity are identified. The first – what we call the ‘nationalisation of nature’– portrays zarticular landscapes as expressions of national authenticity. The second pattern – what we refer to as the ‘naturalisation of the nation’– rests upon a notion of geographical determinism that depicts specific landscapes as forces capable of determining national identity. The authors offer two reasons why the second pattern came to prevail in the cases under consideration: (1) the affinity between wild landscape and the Romantic ideal of pure, rugged nature, and (2) a divergence between the nationalist ideal of ethnic homogeneity and the polyethnic composition of the two societies under consideration.     

Heritage-making ‘from below’: the politics of exhibiting architectural heritage on the Internet – a case study

The ‘digital revolution’ created new opportunities for private persons to participate in the public discourse on architecture and architectural heritage. But has this new ‘participatory culture’ also triggered democratic polyphony and a questioning of dominant (expert) values and knowledge? And when considering official Internet representations – is there a proactive policy involving citizens? Taking the ‘virtual life’ of the Vienna Werkbund estate (1932), a modernist icon listed as a national monument in 1978, as a case study, the present examination tempers exaggerated hopes. The analysis of private and official websites shows that new information and communication technologies foster the expression of different viewpoints only to a limited extent. Although residents use the Internet to voice criticism, actors situated outside expert culture primarily reaffirm the estate’s cultural value and act as co-producers of the dominant discourse. Focusing on official heritage, this paper not only provides evidence for the perpetuating function of new digital tools but also reveals the power relations that underpin paternalistic cultural mediation. Given the technological possibilities of involvement, it criticises official web representations for the exclusion of ‘the public’ and raises the fundamental question of what the digital mediation of cultural heritage in democratic societies should look like.