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History Notes Disciplines of History - Comparative History Notes

New Nationalism Notes

Updated New Nationalism Notes

Disciplines of History - Comparative History Notes

Disciplines of History - Comparative History

Approximately 63 pages

Notes catering for the Comparative History section of the Disciplines paper - focusing on masculinity, sexuality and nationalism....

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Disciplines of History - Comparative History Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

Nationalism/Identities

  • Not reducible to any one development, but reliant on a convergence of several, which implies that a purer understanding of nationalism is indeed a modern phenomenon.

  • Requires a sense of the state, mobilisiation of citizens, mass politics and communication. To an extent a question of heuristics. 'Beneath the decline of sacred communities, languages and lineages, a fundamental change was taking place in modes of apprehending the world, which, more than anything else, made it possible to "think" the nation. (Anderson)

  • Nationalism, then, could be best described as modern without being new. A cumulative process, requiring certain strands of development to come together.

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Calhoun, Nationalism

  • Review: Calhoun perceives Nationalism essentially as a discursive formation, a form of rhetoric that has become so universal and implicated in a wide variety of beliefs across the world. It is also boundary making and essentialist. In his eyes ethnicities contribute to the development of a national self -consciousness, but doesn’t provide the socio-cultural groups ready to become nations.

  • Nations are constituted by the will of the people, and the political legitimacy ascended from the people .

  • Nations have to exist within the context of nationalism, each nation represents a particular way of thinking about what it means to be a people, and how they fit into a broader world system.-> system is one of capitalist nation states, and the pressure these put upon others to reproduce nationalist discourse.

  • Calhoun possesses a state centred modernist approach, by which nationalism is primary and the nation secondary. A modern development.

  • Chatterjee’s argument: in each case of nationalism, though imported from the west, has to be reinvented in indigenous cultural terms in Africa and Asia. (Which suggests the centrality of ethnicity - but still centred on Western notions? State organisation, etc?)

  • Rhetoric of the nation consists of: boundaries, indivisibility, sovereignty, ascending notion of legitimacy, popular participation, direct membership, culture, temporal depth, common descent and ethnicity

  • Nationalism has three dimensions: 1)nationalism as a discourse: the production of a cultural understanding and a rhetoric. 2) nationalism as a project: social movements and state policies by which people attempt to advance the interests of collectivities.3) nationalism as evaluation: political and cultural ideologies that claim superiority for particular nations (which gives the status of an ethical imperative).

  • The modernity and diversity of nationalisms: cultural content of nations is important but it cannot fully explain them. ‘State formation was the single most important factor in changing the form and significance of cultural variations.’

  • ‘Nationalism is a way of constructing identity that it does not address such variation so much as it simply posits temporal depth and internal integration.’ 11 eg, Kedourie: ‘the doctrine holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government.’

  • ‘although nationalism, ethnicity and kinship represent three distinct forms of social solidarity, they may overlap, or articulate with one another’. 29

  • Constructionists: emphasize the historical ad sociological processes by which nations are created, instrumentalists stress this invention as a self-conscious and manipulative project carried out by elites to secure their own power. Primordialists: argue nationalism and ethnicity are older than it appears, eg, most powerful attraction in Africa of the Middle East was formerly to tribes not states.

    • Kinship, descent, ethnicity and nationality: modern nations have roots in old ethnic identities, but this is only one aspect of a larger picture. Modern claim to nationhood is evoked through the language of kinship and descent.

    • ‘nationality, thus becomes one large categorical identity that encompasses many smaller categories…rhetoric posits whole categories of people without reference to their internal differentiation, or claims priority over all internal differences.’

    • ‘Nationalism thus draws on previous identities and traditions, and national identities reflect those traditions. But nationalism fundamentally transforms the pre-existing ethnic identities and gives new significance to cultural inheritances’. Ethnic roots and cultural distinctiveness are only aspects- and not even necessarily universal aspects- of the creation of modern invention.’

    • Nations and Nationalism: ‘Nationhood, thus, cannot be defined objectively, prior to political processes, o either cultural or structural grounds. This is so, crucially, because nations are in part made by nationalism’.

    • ‘nation, is a particular way of thinking about what it means to be a people, and how the people thus defined might fit into a broader world system’.

    • ‘nationalism moves people emotionally, not least because it provides a sense f location in a large and complex world and an enormous reach of history. It is crucial to grasp that nationalism is a positive source of meaning- and even sometimes inspiration- and of mutual commitment among very large groups of people’.

J Hutchinson and A. Smith: Nationalism

Part II:

Kedourie(nationalism and self-determination): nationalism is a form of secular millenarianism that has arisen from Kantian conceptions of human beings as autonomous, led to politics replacing religion as the key to salvation. Nationalist=powerful and destructive force-> appeal explained by th breakdown of traditional values, and the rise of the restless secular educated generation, ambitious for power but excluded from its proper estate. Power of ideas a s a homogenising force. Eg: Young Italy, Young...

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