Spectres of Pan-Islam: Methodological Nationalism and British Imperial Policy after the First World War

In the aftermath of the First World War, British officials were forced to contend with a threat that seemed to undermine their empire from India to Egypt. The anti-colonial revolts that spread across the world in this moment were caused by many factors from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to far more local concerns. However, many British officials imagined these contemporaneous revolts to be caused by a pan-Islamic conspiracy. The threat of pan-Islam was inflated in the minds of these officials in large part because it fundamentally contradicted their conception of how politics should be ordered on a global scale. This article suggests that the spectre of pan-Islam helped to crystallise a methodological nationalism in imperial policies over Muslim populations. The amorphous spatiality of pan-Islam redoubled a growing commitment to bounded national spaces as a natural unit of political activity. To those officials obsessed with pan-Islam, it was so frightening precisely because it questioned the spatial paradigm through which they understood the world. Other officials saw pan-Islam as a minor nuisance, because they believe that such transnational politics could not possibly survive in a world inherently ordered into contiguous nations. The threat of pan-Islam helped to push both sets of officials into a methodological nationalism, but some saw nationalism as inevitable while others feared that Islam was a compelling threat to a European-dominated inter-national order.     

Zionism and Irish Nationalism: Ideology and Identity on the Borders of Europe

This paper is a comparative cultural history of Zionism and Irish nationalism, focusing on themes of race, gender and identity. It seeks to highlight the strong similarities of both nationalist projects: to show how Zionists and Irish nationalists were both heavily invested in state-building projects that would disprove European racist stereotypes about their respective nations and yet, paradoxically, were also part of the general history of European nationalism. Both Zionism and Irish nationalism sought to create idealised images of the past and claimed to be rebuilding a glorious ancient society in the future as a means of escaping a degraded present. Both movements saw language revival as a key means of carrying out this ‘return to history’. And both emphasised martyrdom as a way to build up prideful ideals of devotion to the nation and used sport, militaries and agriculture as forms of nationalist social engineering. Despite their claims to the contrary, neither national movement was truly unique.     

Everyday nationalism and international hockey: contesting Canadian national identity

This paper examines how hockey is used to construct and demarcate the Canadian national community from external others, namely, the USA, Europe and Russia/USSR. The paper suggests popular nationalist narratives around the sport of hockey construct difference from external others in ways that place them in tension with state and corporate interests. Drawing on the concept of everyday nationalism, this article explores how the interplay between international competition, national identity and commercial sport has made hockey an ambiguous and contested national symbol in Canada.     

Influences of nationalisms on citizenship education: revealing a ‘dark side’ in Lebanon

The development of education policies is in many aspects driven by nationalist aims, especially when demonstrating postcolonial autonomy. In the case of Lebanon, Arab and Lebanese forms of nationalism have framed education policy development when transitioning out of the French mandate to an independent republic and during pan‐Arab movements against colonialism. Following 15 years of armed conflict (1975–1990), the reformed national curriculum for citizenship drew on a negotiated compromise between advocates of Lebanese and Arab nationalism to foster a unifying national identity. The practices and outcomes of citizenship education, however, reveal degrees of social exclusion, barriers to learning active citizenship, infringement on intellectual freedoms and denial of thinking historically. Evidence is drawn from empirical studies, the state of affairs of history education and student registration figures in Lebanese and non‐Lebanese systems. The findings raise debates on the role of language in citizenship education and suggest a need to reconceptualise the implementation of nationalist aims in education policies, especially by incorporating elements of cosmopolitanism.     

‘United by blood’: race and transnationalism during the Belle Époque

The Belle Époque, often thought to be a period defined by nationalism, also saw the remarkable global proliferation of transnational affinities – especially those centred on race. Across Europe and its settler territories, notions of pan‐racial affinity spread alongside imperial nationalism, in the context of technological advancement that permitted novel imaginative possibilities. Meanwhile, texts of political imagination in Africa and Asia during this period – particularly those of pan‐Africanism and pan‐Islamism – demonstrate not only an awareness of the significance of racial thinking for Europe but a theorisation of the connections between Europe's racial imagination and its policies in the colonised world. The same advances in the fields of communication and travel that opened the door for new imaginative possibilities in Europe also enabled disparate communities in the colonised world to conceive of themselves, often for the first time, as collectively racialised subjects of a European world order.     

How proactive? How pacifist? Charting Japan’s evolving defence posture

After 60 years maintaining Self-Defense Forces rather than a normal military, Japan is moving towards exercising collective self-defence, long restricted by interpretations of its 1945 Peace Constitution. The merits of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's ‘proactive pacifism’ are intensely debated by those welcoming greater international contributions from Japan and others suspicious of Japanese ‘remilitarisation’. A nation’s defence posture can theoretically be hijacked by aggressive nationalists, shift to pacifist isolationism, or rely on non-military internationalism or multilateral security cooperation. This article assesses competing explanations about the post-war trajectory of Japan’s defence posture by charting variation in military doctrine and capabilities. The analysis finds that Tokyo has made incremental policy adjustments under domestic and international constraints, and is not aggressively remilitarising.     

Reconstructed nationalism in Taiwan: a politicised and economically driven identity

Since the late 1980s, Taiwan has been engulfed in waves of both democratisation and integration with mainland China. These two waves have pulled identity reconstruction in Taiwan in two different directions. In the process of democratisation, a shift to a majoritarian system encouraged a Taiwanese renaissance on the political platform and consequently led to the deconstruction of Chinese identity. On the other hand, in the 1990s, with the high mobility of capital and people across the Taiwan Strait, close economic ties could have put the brakes on Taiwan independence movements. Hence, this paper uses random coefficient models to explore how the democratic transition and increasing cross‐strait relations brought about psychological and structural mechanisms that motivated people to opt for identity change in Taiwan. It also attempts to investigate how people dealt with the dissonance between rising Taiwanese nationalism and the economic interests that deterred a radical Taiwanese identity.     

英国新社会史思潮的兴起及其整体社会史研究的国际反响

“新社会史研究”作为一种史学新思潮,与西方史学的整体化趋势,几乎同时出现于现代国际史学舞台。英国新社会史思潮具有广泛和深刻的国内外史学渊源。英国新社会史学派宣扬的核心问题是坚持“自下而上”史学观念,它彰显了由此观念指导下的整体社会史取向和研究实践。从较广泛的分析角度看,在国际史学发展格局重新调整的现时背景下,英国马克思主义新社会史学派引起国内外史学界的广泛注意和效仿。它对国际史学发展的推动性作用是不可忽视的,这集中体现了该学派及其整体史学研究的国际反响。     

《明清以来苏州社会史碑刻集》校点献疑

本文重点从韵文的角度,讨论《明清以来苏州社会史碑刻集》的若干校点问题。     

Going It Alone: Belarus as the Non-European European State

In the second paper of a symposium devoted to the contemporary status of Belarus, a noted American specialist on the electoral geography of the states of the former Soviet Union challenges assertions in the preceding article (Ioffe and Yarashevich, 2011) that only Russia and Ukraine are valid comparators against which to gauge the success of the Lukashenka model. Expanding the scope of comparison to include the three other countries neighboring Belarus (Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland), he demonstrates that a broader range of policy changes can be considered by its leadership in efforts to limit damage from the economic crisis in Belarus and position the country for renewed growth within a global economic frame-work. Examination of a wide range of social and economic indicators and government policies reveals, however, that in many ways an unreformed Belarus is poorly positioned for competition in an increasingly interconnected world, in which the elements for successful development are quite different from those providing economic stability in the past. A closing section of the paper revisits the debate on whether most Belarusian citizens actually aspire to a more "European" way of life or instead prefer the "Eastern" alignment and reliance on a Russian benefactor whose own economic future looks increasingly uncertain.